A Utah man is claiming he’s the one who delivered Michael Jordan pizza the night before his famous “flu game” in the 1997 NBA Finals, but he says he has no idea why Jordan got sick from the food.
Craig Fite says he was working for Pizza Hut at the time and was a huge Chicago Bulls fan. In an interview with 1280 The Zone in Salt Lake City on Monday, Fite explained that someone from the Bulls called the store where he was working as an assistant manager and ordered “large, thin and crispy, extra pepperoni pizza,” without saying whom it was for. Fite, as the only Bulls fan working, says he took it upon himself to make the pizza and go with the driver on the delivery to make sure nothing happened to it.
“The pizza basically never left me,” he says.
Fite says he had to go through security to get into the Marriott hotel where the Bulls were staying and that Jordan didn’t answer the door, but did wave and say thanks to him from a chair in his hotel room. Fite then says he left and was surprised when he tuned in to watch Game 5 the next night to hear it announced that Jordan had food poisoning.
On Episode 9 of the ESPN documentary series “The Last Dance,” Jordan, his personal trainer Tim Grover and his longtime friend George Koehler explained that Jordan ate an entire pizza the night before Game 5 and woke up feeling sick. He almost didn’t dress for the game, but ultimately did and dropped 38 points to give the Bulls a 3-2 series lead.
While there’s no way to know what ultimately caused Jordan to get sick, Fite is adamant he did nothing wrong.
“That pizza was made well, I followed all the rules,” Fite says. “I’m 100 per cent certain it wasn’t food poisoning or it for sure as heck wasn’t that pizza.”
