Air Sick: Michael Jordan was a champion. The District was a basketball hellhole. Something had to give. - Washington City Paper
Spank isn't a place for extended courtships. On the dance floor, there aren't many obstacles between your desires and grabbing hold of them. There are no rules. No decorum: wear jeans, wear nothing, wear the liquor you just bought. Hedonist kids roll around on the white-sheeted beds or never even make it there. Into this Clubland Caligula glided Jordan like chilled Grey Goose over the tongue, an elder gentleman of the world, cordial, courteous, chivalrous. A man with a specialized taste and a gentle touch.
"He was always with weird-ass-looking girls," recalls Ahmed, another Spank bouncer, disgust in his voice. "I would not even look at them."
Ahmed and another Spank source agree that Jordan especially had a soft spot for "chubby blond girls." ("They do look a little plain-janey, homely-looking," concurs a frequent clubgoer named Tiffany, describing Jordan's hangers-on at the V.I.P. room of the VIP Club one night this spring.)
Jordan didn't go for the Benetton Girls Gone Wild: the fake tans, the anorexic birds with enormous breasts, the ones grinding with every son-of-an-attachÈ. When the daughter of a local hairdressing magnate showed up, Jordan was quick to recognize her and offer his sincerest "What's up?"
But it wasn't the "celebrities" who fill Spank that he was interested in. "He got it bad, bad," Ahmed says of Jordan's taste in Lane Bryant models. "I've seen him with girls I would never look at....Not just chunky blondes. I seen him leave with a dark-skinned Indian girl." More disgust.
But one time, perhaps the last time, Jordan tried to teach Ahmed a lesson in how to treat the ladies, all ladies.
Ahmed remembers how one Wednesday an enterprising female he "would never look at" kept trying to breach Jordan's bouncer wall. Jordan had told the club's security team he didn't want to be disturbed. But the woman kept tossing her cell phone at his feet, behind Ahmed.
The woman did it once. Then twice. Then a third time.
"I told her not to do it again," Ahmed remembers. "I kicked the phone very far. [Jordan] went and walked over and picked up her phone and gave it to her." Jordan apologized to the woman.
"I felt like an a$$hole," Ahmed says. CP