Inside Michael Jordan’s Secret Pep Talk for a Title Run

Michael Jordan lifted his final NBA championship trophy in 1998, yet the relentless fire that defined his basketball career has hardly dimmed. Now, less than a year after an acrimonious legal battle with NASCAR, the Chicago Bulls icon is chasing another major prize — this time from the owner’s box.

After waiting almost 30 years to feel that championship rush again, Jordan is understandably determined to make this opportunity matter. With six NBA titles, six Finals MVP awards and a legendary reputation for delivering under pressure, few figures in sports are better equipped to guide athletes through the demands of a title run.

“He’s the best guy for it,” Tyler Reddick tells Our News Outlet. This weekend, Reddick opens his NASCAR Chase campaign as the Cup Series moves into its new 10-race postseason, a grueling stretch that will crown the NASCAR Cup Series champion on November 8.

Reddick begins the playoffs as the No. 3 seed, making him the strongest title contender in Jordan’s 23XI Racing stable. His teammate Bubba Wallace also reached the postseason field in 14th, but Reddick appears to be Jordan’s clearest path toward a long-awaited and deeply satisfying motorsports championship.

The moment comes after a turbulent chapter for Jordan and his NASCAR team. Less than a year ago, he was making regular trips from his lakefront home in North Carolina to Charlotte’s U.S. District Court, where he appeared throughout proceedings inside the Charles R. Jonas Federal Building. There, Jordan testified as 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports pursued an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR.

Following eight intense days in court, the dispute came to an end on December 11, when Jordan stood alongside NASCAR chairman Jim France after both sides reached a settlement and closed one of the sport’s most closely watched legal fights.

Last month, Jordan instead made the short trip to Airspeed, the state-of-the-art headquarters he built for his race team around 10 miles north of Charlotte in Huntersville, North Carolina.

Instead of needing to win over a jury, he simply had to win over his own employees and deliver some inspiration before their quest for supremacy begins, knowing he is 10 races away from becoming a NASCAR champion team owner. 

‘For me, anytime I get to spend that time with Michael, it leaves a huge impact on me,’ Reddick says. ‘I really do love it when he comes to 23XI, to Airspeed, because I have an opportunity to see the impact that he has on the men and women that work here.’

Jordan is far from a passive owner. He regularly attends races, less so when he’s vacationing in the summer months, but never misses tuning in wherever he is in the world. 

While he tends to keep a low profile at the track, granting the very occasional Fox interview to his trusted reporter, Jamie Little, he is a familiar face these days for the limited number of his employees who travel the country and attend each race.

For the drivers, he is always just a text message away, offering words of congratulations or encouragement after every single race, depending on the result. Sometimes, the text drops before they’ve even got out of the car.

But every so often, he’ll drop in to speak to everyone back at their base, just as he did last month. 

Sometimes he gives a heads up, meetings are booked in, the red carpet is rolled out. But often he just stops by, largely unannounced, surprising everyone with his unmissable, 6ft 6inch frame strolling through the front doors. 

‘When he came in here to address the company, he’s just a great speaker,’ Reddick says. ‘He knows how to get the point across, he knows how to get people excited, and he knows how to make it relatable. Just an amazing leader, a great speaker, and for us, it was great that he made the time to come see us, come talk to us.

‘Just anytime he makes time for us, it goes a long way.’

At one stage, it all seemed too good to be true for Jordan and Reddick. They won the Daytona 500 – the sport’s biggest and first race of the season – in February, then rattled off wins in the next two races. He became the first driver in Cup Series history to win the first three races, with some baseless suggestions even claiming it must be rigged for Jordan’s team.

By April 19, Jordan had seen his No.45 car in victory lane five times in the first nine races, the best start to a season since the legendary Dale Earnhardt in 1987. The regular season championship seemed a foregone conclusion, and the top seeding to go with it, bringing a points advantage to start The Chase.

Instead, things started to unfold. Reddick dropped to third in the standings, plagued by just as much bad luck as good luck he had in the first few weeks in a sport where circumstance and fortune are never far away.

It made the timing of Jordan’s visit perfect, and Reddick is confident it can help unlock another level of performance, insisting he feels ‘really good, honestly,’ about where they stand.

‘I guess you could look at it one way and say we didn’t have a great summer, we dropped from first in the standings to fourth, but the things that were happening in the races for us, like, as catastrophic as they were, for us to not lose more ground, for us to fight through it and still get some amount of points and finish out of those days… it’s a really good fight, you know?

‘I think everyone wants to go into this Chase and have 10 flawlessly executed races, no mistakes, but…there’s gonna be thousands of laps ran. Tens of thousands of decisions to make.

‘People are gonna have mistakes, people are gonna have bad days, and I feel like when they come our way, we’ve been through just about everything. We know how to handle it, we know how to get through it, we know how to reset for the next week.

‘On the other side of it, the majority of the racetracks in The Chase, we’ve had a lot of speed at, we’ve won at, we’ve led laps at, so got a lot of tracks that are strengths for us.

‘It’s been a really strange way for it to balance itself out, but I think you can look at it one way and say, man, the results really, really went off the edge, just bad, but, within those races, there was many good decisions made, there was a lot of fight, a lot of grit in the team, and trying to dig out of those holes.

‘On one hand, it’s no fun and not great to have days like that, but for us to push through those days and still make something out of them, was really, really good on our team’s part.

‘I think for us, yeah, we want to go into this and be as clean as possible, stay out of trouble, have good results, good stage finishes, but again, things are gonna happen.

‘It may happen. One driver may go through this whole thing flawlessly, but, it is so hard to do over the course of two and a half months, 10 races. Just being able to stay in it mentally this whole Chase is gonna be super important, and I feel like we had to stretch longer than 10 races where we had just crazy things happened to us, but no one fell out of the fight. We just kept resetting and showing back up the next week, so… in a lot of ways, I feel good about it.’

Reddick has 15 other drivers still hoping to lift the Cup Series Championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway on November 8. But the man to beat, who surpassed him to top the regular season points standings, is Denny Hamlin, Jordan’s business partner and co-owner of the team.

While Hamlin is integral to building Reddick’s team into a Championship contender, for the next 10 races, he is fully focused on winning his own long-awaited first title at Joe Gibbs Racing as his glittering driving career nears the end.

‘I think the battle that was on everyone’s mind much of this season is still there,’ Reddick admits. ‘I think the 11 (Hamlin) will be really strong.’

But it is clear some of Jordan’s mindset has rubbed off on Reddick and his team. They are ready to roll with the punches, focus on themselves and exhibit a mental strength and toughness in line with their boss during his Bulls dynasty.

‘I think in a Chase format, your biggest rival, your biggest challenger will be yourself,’ Reddick declares. ‘It’s gonna be really important to stay in it mentally this whole stretch. Again, there’s gonna be things that happen, things that don’t go according to plan, it’s just gonna be super important to stay in it the whole way, mentally.

‘We can look at other drivers that will have speed, performance, but, I think it’s gonna be important for us to focus on how we maximize each day, and not let the one standout car this week or that week just spin us out with how fast they are. Making the most of each day is gonna be so critical.’