Now, another sport is learning the same lesson: Nascar.
This weekend in Phoenix, a racing team owned by the NBA legend will be gunning for a Nascar Cup Series championship, which would give Jordan yet another major title. But that’s just the start of his pursuit to shake up this insular sport, which has been run by the same family since 1948. While his driver chases a title on the track, Jordan is also suing Nascar and its chairman Jim France in a bid to topple what he views as an unfair, anticompetitive business model.
“The France family and Nascar are monopolistic bullies,” Jordan’s team, 23XI Racing, alleged in an antitrust lawsuit filed alongside another team in federal court last month. “And bullies will continue to impose their will to hurt others until their targets stand up and refuse to be victims.”
The lawsuit escalates a bitter dispute with the series over revenue-sharing. Jordan’s team says Nascar has abused its position as the country’s leading stock-car racing series to impose terms that make it economically impossible for some teams to operate. Jordan’s outfit, co-owned by driver Denny Hamlin, is joined in the suit by another Nascar team, Front Row Motorsports.
In a court filing, Nascar’s lawyers called the suit “meritless.”
“Everyone knows that I have always been a fierce competitor, and that will to win is what drives me and the entire 23XI team each and every week out on the track,” Jordan said. “I love the sport of racing and the passion of our fans, but the way NASCAR is run today is unfair to teams, drivers, sponsors and fans.”
The racing teams’ lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler, has a long track record of upending professional and college sports through litigation. He says that every one of those cases has come down to having someone willing to stand up and challenge the established order.
And Jordan, 61, has the celebrity and still-burning competitive fire to do just that.
As an athlete, Jordan was unwilling to give an inch, and his multi-billion-dollar fortune built largely from his empire of basketball shoes and apparel has given him the financial standing to go head-to-head with an entire league.
Jordan comes by his passion for motorsports honestly. Growing up in racing-mad North Carolina, he attended events as a child. While his 13 years as an owner of Charlotte’s NBA franchise were marked by disappointingly poor results, he has quickly realized a level of success as a Nascar owner.
After his driver Tyler Reddick won a playoff race in Miami last month to qualify for the championship, Jordan heaped praise on him in a way he was rarely able to do with his NBA employees.
“Little kid drove his ass off,” Jordan said of the 28-year-old in the No. 45 car. “I’m proud of him.”
But over his short tenure as a Nascar owner, Jordan quickly identified what he viewed as unfairness baked into Nascar’s business model. His complaint against Nascar says that at least four teams who signed the league’s charter agreement did so under duress, but are too afraid of retribution from Nascar to speak openly about the situation.
The suit casts Jordan, once the most famous and celebrated athlete in all of American sports, in a strange new role: the bombastic and feather-ruffling antagonist to the league itself. In many ways, he is taking on a role similar to the one that Al Davis, the late owner of the NFL’s Raiders, played in rattling pro football.
In 1980, Davis sued the NFL after it blocked his attempt to move the Raiders to Los Angeles from Oakland and eventually beat it in the courtroom. Then he beat the rest of the league on the field as his team won the Super Bowl after the 1983 season.
Jordan, too, is aiming to take down the competition on both fronts. As he left a hearing this week, Jordan left no doubt about his intentions.
“I’m looking forward to winning a championship this weekend,” he said.
Write to Robert O’Connell at robert.oconnell@wsj.com and Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com