Utah Jazz ballboy Alex Rodriguez wouldn’t take money from Michael Jordan, so MJ came up with another way to pay him for two tickets to a sold-out Jazz-Chicago Bulls game in 1993: His shoes.
“You don’t have an idea of what they’d be worth, you just knew that they were the meccas of game-worn shoes,” Rodriguez said. “The pinnacle, the best you could get.”
Before Jordan went off for 37 points that night, scoring 20 points in the fourth quarter to will the Bulls to a 96-92 win in front of a hostile Jazz crowd, Rodriguez had helped “his Airness” carry in some bags to the locker room hours before tipoff.