In 1997 Michael Jordan gave one of the most astonishing performances in sports history, helping his Chicago Bulls defeat the Utah Jazz in Game 5 of the NBA finals.
However, his trainer at the time, Tim Grover, said it was actually food poisoning that caused Jordan's sickness, not the flu.
"He was [food] poisoned for the 'flu game,'" Grover said on TrueHoop TV. "Everyone called it a flu game, but we sat there. We were in the room."
The illness can be directly correlated with one bad pizza that they were delivered the night before. They ordered the pizza because Jordan was hungry and couldn't find a place to eat.
"We had been there for a while," Grover said. "Everybody knew what hotel. Park City was not many hotels back then. So everyone knew where we were staying."
When five guys showed up to deliver the pizza, Grover had a "bad feeling" about the food. No one ate it besides Jordan.
"And then 2 o'clock in the morning I get a call to my room," Grover continued. "Come to the room. He's curled up in the fetal position. We're looking at him, finding the team physician at that time. Immediately I told him it's food poisoning. Not the flu."
"I was scared; I didn't know what was happening to me," Michael Jordan said according to ESPN. In the middle of the night, all of a sudden, he started profusely sweating, shaking and felt like he was going to die.
But with a 2-2 tie in the Finals, Jordan wasn't sitting out.
Battling nausea and fatigue, Jordan miraculously kept it together to play 44 out of the 48 minutes of the game and scored 38 points, including a key 3-pointer in the waning seconds of the game.
He also brought his team back, in the second and fourth quarter, when the Utah Jazz took a 16-point and 10-point lead respectively.
The Bulls eventually went on to win the series.
