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From Wondery, this is Sports Wars. I'm Dan Rubenstein.

For this series, we've ridden the roller coaster, the rivalry between Michael Jordan, young scoring sensation turned greatest ever,

versus Isaiah Thomas, the champion leader of Detroit's bruising bad boys. There's no debate about who came out on top, but how Michael Jordan went from

scorned rookie to basketball Zeus is a fascinating one. That's why it only makes sense to bring on Sam Smith, author of the Jordan Rules.

The quintessential behind-the-scenes look at Michael Jordan on his journey not only getting over the hump and beating Isaiah's pistons, but ascending to

rarified sports air. Sam has spent decades covering Chicago sports and has inside and stories you just can't get anywhere else.

Today, we're focusing on what makes this rivalry not just particularly great, but also uniquely personal.

Sam, thanks for coming on.

Glad to be with you. Thanks. My pleasure. I want to start early on just because everything with Michael Jordan and Isaiah Thomas goes back to early on.

And I guess let's start with Michael Jordan's character as a person when the bulls drafted Michael Jordan and in the early going of his career in Chicago.

Was it known how fanatically competitive he was?

It became known the legend didn't begin to grow for several years, although early on internally the coaches and the staff began to sense this.

I remember Ron Thorn at the draft in 84th, and he had drafted a number of shooting guards, Quentin Daly, who had been a college star and Ronnie Lester, a number of guards who were good and didn't have that nickname.

He said, well, well, can, you know, Jordan's a great talent, but you know, he averaged 17 points in college and he's not going to exactly turn around the franchise.

So then practice begins a training camp and basically the first day Jordan comes in and dominates all these lottery picks who had been there.

And it was before the lottery, but top 10 picks, Quentin Daly and Sydney Green and Orlando Woolridge, tremendous athletes in the top collegiate players at a time.

And I remember the run Thorn wasn't at the first practice and the Bill Blair, the assistant coach called him right afterwards and said, well, at least she didn't screw up the game.

And what they saw was this incredible level of competitiveness initially right away at the practices, everything was about a competition.

Whatever side Jordan was on playing to win. And so it began to occur to the staff that, wow, we've got something special here.

We haven't seen guys like this. And we've had, you know, the top 10 players in the draft almost every year in his all stars, or every G Theos have been on a team.

And so we haven't seen anything like this. So obviously he makes a mark on the league pretty early on. He makes the all star team in his rookie season.

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