The documentary cannonballs into the history of North Carolina’s Robeson county, the trial venue and a majority-minority county with deep divides along black and Native American lines a massive confederate monument stands sentinel on the county courthouse steps. What Perniciaro and his team do so artfully in Moment of Truth, thanks in large part to WRAL-TV’s trove of archival footage, is restore the sociopolitical context that was eclipsed by the starlight of the Jordan name. Larry Demery, left, and Daniel Green, are serving jail terms for the killing of James Jordan. By March 1996 both were convicted and given life sentences. Meanwhile, Green missed a shot to sell judge Gregory A Weeks on a mistrial after going the entire trial without testifying. His confessions under interrogation and on the witness stand not only pinned the whole scheme – killing included – on his accomplice, but painted him a sadistic reveler. Demery and Green were pitted against each other. On the books, the final legal decision reads like a blowout victory for the state. It’s probably the most well-known criminal case in North Carolina history.” And because of that, I had a huge awareness of the story for the majority of my life. The case, the murder of James Jordan, was reported on way more heavily here than it was on a national level. “The Jordan family is so beloved in North Carolina. But, unlike me, Perniciaro never lost sight of the real tragedy. “As a kid growing up in North Carolina at that time, there was this extra degree of pride because he was from the same place,” he says. Like me, he was a teenage Jordan fan in the 90s. Moment of Truth director Matthew Perniciaro, who reached out to the Jordan family in the early stages of his project and was respectfully turned down, can relate. Michael’s public reluctance to dwell on his father’s murder only made it easier for the rest of us to traffic in rumor and innuendo when we weren’t fiendishly tracking MJ’s minor-league batting average or foolishly pinning hopes of a four-peat on Scottie Pippen playing nice with Tony Kukoc – all storylines that have been unpacked in documentaries, by the by. When Michael further set his mind to playing professional baseball – something his dad had always wanted to see him try – well, that didn’t just quash local curiosity in James Jordan’s sad end it gave NBA fans permission to run wild with conspiracy theories about the killing and Michael’s retirement being gambling related. We took it personally.īut when MJ suddenly convened a world-stopping retirement news conference months after striking gold with the Dream Team in Barcelona, local despair over his father’s killing was quickly forgotten. Hell, we had just seen them toweling champagne off each other inside a jubilant Bulls locker room after sealing the first three-peat. We all knew what James meant to Michael because Michael meant so much to us. For the better part of that summer, it seemed, there was no more pressing news story in Chicagoland than the murder of James Jordan – even as fresh cases cropped up around town daily. (Bear in mind: this is a year before the OJ circus and more than three years before Bill Cosby’s only son met an eerily similar end.) It shook me: a 13-year-old Bulls-mad, Chicago native whose fierce loyalty to MJ traced to a father who had made sport of taking me trawling around the Near West Side blocks surrounding Chicago Stadium for second-hand tickets on school nights. Initially framed as a random carjacking gone horribly awry, the crime shocked the country. Jordan was believed to have been shot to death as he napped on the side of a North Carolina highway while driving home from a funeral in the small hours of 23 July. The series starts in the summer of 1993, when James Jordan went missing for three weeks before his body was discovered in a South Carolina creek. The messy details are fully reckoned with on screen at last in Moment of Truth: the Killing of James Jordan, a five-part docuseries that premieres on Amazon’s IMDb TV on Friday. But the unabridged version of that story is nowhere near as neat or tidy. The murder of his father, James – if it even manages a passing mention in the legend – is couched as little more than an unfortunate episode in the hero’s inexorable journey to the top. T he abridged version of the Michael Jordan story goes something like this: Carolina boy misses the cut for his high school team, seals an NCAA crown for North Carolina on a late bucket and lifts the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships on the way to becoming the greatest basketball player of all time, a world-class grudge holder and an icon many times over.
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