Whether it was during his rookie season when his stall in the Bulls locker room was adjacent to Jordan’s locker, or at a dinner with the six-time NBA champion and Bryant about a quarter-century later, Armstrong often found himself with a front-row seat to witness the true cost of fame for arguably the world’s most recognizable athlete.
There were obvious perks to being teammates with Jordan. Plenty of his Chicago teammates own multiple championship rings, they appear in some of the most-replayed NBA highlight clips of all time and they’ve got a lifetime of stories to tell about one of the best to ever take the court.
Armstrong also learned to move quickly — off the court, that is.
“I remember as a young player I had this dream of playing in the NBA,” Armstrong, the longtime NBA guard and three-time NBA champion with the Bulls who is now a California-based sports agent, told The Associated Press. “And I vividly remember when I got to Chicago thinking, ‘You better be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.’ Michael was the first person to show me what it meant to be a star … but you cannot be that star and not accept all the things that came with it.”
The strain of Jordan’s practically unprecedented level of stardom was one of the dominant themes in the latest installments of the ESPN and Netflix documentary “The Last Dance,” a 10-part series that showed episodes five and six on Sunday night.