(RADIO.COM Sports) Michael Jordan offers no apologies to those who say his political activism is lacking.
On "The Last Dance" documentary Sunday night, the sports icon addressed a widely reported remark that he's said to have made in the early 1990s about a hotly contested U.S. Senate race in North Carolina.
"Republicans buy sneakers too," Jordan reportedly said in 1990 when he was asked to explain why he wouldn't publicly endorse Harvey Gantt, a Democratic candidate in North Carolina who was running against segregationist Senator Jesse Helms.
The context and veracity of the second-hand quote have been called into question over the decades, and while Jordan offered some context to put it into perspective, he didn't deny saying it.
"I don't think that statement needs to be corrected, because I said it in jest on a bus with Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen," Jordan said on the documentary Sunday.
Joking aside, Jordan simply wasn't destined for a life of activism like some of his fellow sporting greats, he explained.
"I do commend Muhammad Ali for standing up for what he believed in," Jordan said. "But I never thought of myself as an activist. I thought of myself as a basketball player.
"I wasn't a politician when I was playing my sport. I was focused on my craft. Was that selfish? Probably. But that was my energy. That's where my energy was."
Gantt eventually lost the race, though Jordan said he made a sizable donation to the campaign.
Even former President Barack Obama, who's featured throughout the documentary, admitted he was disappointed by Jordan's decision at the time. Obama added he has since come around to understanding his stance.
"I'll be honest," Obama said. "When it was reported that Michael said, 'Republicans buy sneakers, too' -- for somebody who was at that time preparing for a career in civil rights law and knowing what Jesse Helms stood for, you would've wanted to see Michael push harder on that. On the other hand, he was still trying to figure out, 'How am I managing this image that has been created around me, and how do I live up to it?'"
With untold wealth and fame, Jordan learned to understand that there will always be critics who believe he can better spend his money and time.
"It's never going to be enough for everybody, and I know that," said Jordan, who's worth more than $2 billion, according to Forbes. "I realize that. Because everybody has a preconceived idea for what I should do and what I shouldn't do."
In 2016, Jordan condemned both the killings of unarmed black men as well as violence directed at police officers in a first-person piece published by The Undefeated.
