Michael Jordan bestowed the honor of driving his NASCAR team’s signature car, one that bears his own number 23, to Bubba Wallace for the last three years.
After joining Jordan in 2021, Wallace earned his first career win at Talladega Superspeedway and earned three top 5 and three top 10 finishes in just his first year as part of Jordan’s team 23XI Racing. He has gone on to become one of the sport’s most famous and polarizing figures and has carved a unique spot for himself in its history as the highest-finishing Black driver in the Daytona 500.
Now, he is also a new father. Wallace welcomed his son, Becks Hayden, with his wife Amanda on Sept. 29.
As a first time father, Wallace said Jordan is checking on him to make sure he is getting enough sleep.
“He just keeps asking if I’m getting enough sleep, and surprisingly enough, we are getting sleep. Becks sleeps pretty good, most nights,” Wallace told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview.
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Bubba Wallace, driver of the #23 Toyota Genuine Parts/Mobil 1 Toyota, waits on the grid during practice for the NASCAR Cup Series Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway on Sept. 20, 2024 in Bristol, Tennessee. (Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)
For Wallace, it is one of the more empathetic ways his NBA Hall of Famer NASCAR boss manages his top talent. On the other side, however, working for Jordan comes with a lot of verbal insults.
“He’s competitive,” Wallace said of Jordan as a boss. “He’s a lot of fun, he’s a guy that you can take jabs at, and he’ll dish it right back, so you have to have thick skin. That’s how I was brought up and raised, and trash talk is half the game, and he’s probably one of the best to do it.”
During his NBA career, Jordan developed a reputation as one of the most belligerent and unfiltered trash talkers in the entire game, and it did not stop with opponents. Jordan had a reputation of absolutely verbally obliterating his own teammates.
In the famous ESPN docuseries “The Last Dance,” the former Bulls star and his teammates recounted stories of Jordan bullying his own younger teammates.
Jordan justified his treatment of these younger teammates in the series as a means to win.
“When people see this, they might say ‘well he wasn’t really a nice guy, he might have been a tyrant!’ Well that’s you, because you never won anything,” Jordan said in the docuseries. “I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well.”
Michael Jordan, left, talks with teammate Isiah Thomas during the NBA All Star Game played on Feb. 9, 1992 at the Orlando Arena in Orlando, Florida. (Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images)
One of Jordan’s other drivers has even said the NBA legend told him he was “terrible” at his sport.
Fellow 23XI driver Tyler Reddick said in an interview on Fox Sports’ “Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour,” in September that Jordan berated him while the team was at the Dayton 500 in 2023.
“He [Jordan] turned to me and said, ‘Man, you don’t have any room to talk. You’re terrible at speedway racing.’ He just kind of took a shot at me, and I wasn’t expecting it,” Reddick said. “When MJ calls you out about not being very good at it, it’s easy to find motivation to get better.”
Wallace, as a part of Jordan’s team that is trying to compete to win in the competitive landscape of NASCAR, has bought into that method. Jordan, as a former transcendent athlete, has offered personal and professional advice to Wallace, and they go out of their way to compare their respective situations to each other for strategic means.
However, Wallace questions Jordan’s actual knowledge of NASCAR as a sport.
“What it was like for him coming through the league, and try to compare similarities to what it’s like here. And then I just got to school him on his racing knowledge, because he thinks he knows a lot, but there’s a lot to be learned in this sport for sure,” Wallace said.
For Wallace, this relationship has not extended too far outside the racetrack, yet. Wallace says he has not even golfed with Jordan in the three years since they started working together.
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Bubba Wallace, driver of the #23 23XI Racing McDonald’s Toyota, drives during the NASCAR Cup Series Grant Park 165 at the Chicago Street Circuit on July 7, 2024 in Chicago. (Ben Hsu/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
“We like to talk about racing,” Wallace said of his interactions with Jordan.
Wallace said he has not engaged in any competitive activity that includes stakes of any kind with the NBA legend.
Jordan had a reputation as a notorious gambler during and after his basketball career. It has even been reported through multiple accounts that Jordan would even bet with his teammates on the outcome of pre-recorded interactive races that were played on the jumbotron at the Bulls’ home arena during games.
Wallace does not seem to know anything about that side of his boss.
What Wallace does know is that Jordan is a great guy to talk about basketball with. When they are at the team facility, one NBA team gets priority in getting played on TV, that being Jordan’s Charlotte Hornets, a team he previously owned but sold in August 2023.
“With him being the owner for a while, the Hornets game was always playing at the racetrack,” Wallace said.
Jordan purchased the Charlotte-based franchise in 2010 for $275 million. Jordan made a healthy profit when he finally sold the team last year, in a $3 billion sale to a group led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall, and he even stayed on as a minority owner.
However, in 13 seasons under his leadership, the team went 423-600, made just three playoff appearances and did not win a single series. During the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season, the then-Bobcats went 7-59, which is the worst record in NBA history.
Now, 23XI racing is the biggest sports team Jordan owns in the U.S. The pressure is on Wallace to make sure it does not end up like the Hornets.
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