His red Lexus SC400, found destroyed in North Carolina some 60 miles from his body, was stolen along with money and personal effects that included a pair of NBA rings – gifts from Michael, of course. Jordan’s corpse was so badly decomposed the South Carolina coroner tagged him a John Doe and saved his hands and jaw for future identification. Jordan was believed to have been shot to death as he napped on the side of a North Carolina highway while driving home from a funeral in the small hours of 23 July.
The series starts in the summer of 1993, when James Jordan went missing for three weeks before his body was discovered in a South Carolina creek. The messy details are fully reckoned with on screen at last in Moment of Truth: the Killing of James Jordan, a five-part docuseries that premieres on Amazon’s IMDb TV on Friday. But the unabridged version of that story is nowhere near as neat or tidy.
The murder of his father, James – if it even manages a passing mention in the legend – is couched as little more than an unfortunate episode in the hero’s inexorable journey to the top. T he abridged version of the Michael Jordan story goes something like this: Carolina boy misses the cut for his high school team, seals an NCAA crown for North Carolina on a late bucket and lifts the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships on the way to becoming the greatest basketball player of all time, a world-class grudge holder and an icon many times over.