Sam Smith wasn't sure if he would be interviewed for "The Last Dance" documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. Smith wrote "The Jordan Rules" which was a revealing look at Jordan in the early 1990s, depicting a side of him many didn't know existed.

“'The Jordan Rules' was bothersome to him at the time, and controversial," Smith told Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker. "I used to have a good relationship with him before the book came out. I wasn’t a close friend, but we would joke when I was around the team. We travelled commercial together, and all that sort of stuff."

Jordan and Smith have never talked about the book.

"Jordan has never said a word to me about 'The Jordan Rules,'" said Smith. "Never once, in thirty years. At the end of the [documentary] interview, I said, 'Hey, tell me something. Did you have to ask Michael permission to talk to me?' And the guy kind of stammered a little bit. And he said, “Well, we actually did ask him if it was O.K.” And I said, 'Well, what’d he say?' He said, 'I don’t give a [expletive] who you talk to.' The way I understood it is, he didn’t say whether they could or could not. They weren’t sure whether they should."

Smith was asked if director Jason Hehir was the one who said this to him.

"Yeah, I think so," Smith said. But I don’t know who I was talking to. There’s always a bunch of guys who come and do these things; it’s always, like, six people. And I didn’t know who they were. I’d never heard of them or talked to them before."