The ReadJack Interview: MJ’s Flu Game Pizza Delivery Guy

A new Flu Game theory from my fellow pizza deliverer, Craig Fite.

Scottie Pippen helps Michael Jordan to the sideline during The Flu Game. (illustration by the staff at now-defunct site 16 Wins a Ring.)

As a Bulls historian, I had my share of issues with The Last Dance.

As a pizza delivery veteran, I had one.

In Episode IX, Michael Jordan, Tim Grover and George Koehler explored the infamous Flu Game pizza delivery. Grover and Koehler claimed that five people delivered the pizza, all making shifty moves at the door, attempting to look into MJ’s room. Grover in particular insinuated that the drivers had maliciously tampered with the pizza.

“They’re all trying to look in. Everybody knew it was Michael,” Grover says in the doc. “I take the pizza, I pay them, and I put this pizza down and said, ‘I got a bad feeling about this.’”

Like, why? Why would you have a bad feeling about people delivering MJ a pie? They had been let in by hotel management. And if you had a bad feeling, why let Michael eat the pizza? Why not chuck it?

Grover’s and Koehler’s description of the claimed food poisoning incident before Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals set off my pizza delivery Spidey sense. That’s because I drove pies at four pizza places over eight years:

• 2001-2003: Domino’s, Bloomington, Indiana

• 2003-2004: Rockit’s, Bloomington, Indiana

• 2006-2008: Lou Malnati’s, Evanston, Illinois

• Summer 2008: Santullo’s, Wicker Park in Chicago

Thus as I watched the documentary, a host of questions and dubious scenarios jumped in my head. Most notably:

1. Five people plus a pizza would be a super tight fit in one car.

2. Even if they took separate cars, four extra people from the same pizza place going on a run would put a dent in operations.

3. Five people showing up to deliver one pizza would set off alarm bells on any delivery, much less one to the most famous man on Earth, where the hotel workers would have to let them in. The odds are incredibly low that hotel workers would let five people up to a Bulls’ player’s room.

4. Doing something to a pizza in a way that would not be seen by your co-workers and result in a pizza that the customer would still eat completely is a theory riddled with logistical holes.

The Last Dance re-ignited every 90s Bulls conversation possible, so I was not surprised when the Flu Game pizza driver, Park City Pizza Hut assistant manager Craig Fite, began getting interview requests. I was also not surprised to hear him completely refute the allegations from Grover and Koehler, down to basic facts. Fite said he was one of two drivers to bring the pie, not five, and of course he said he would never do anything to MJ’s pizza.

For one thing, that’s an insane crime. For another, Fite himself was a Bulls fan, which was why he wanted to deliver the pizza. He would later name his son after Michael Jordan.

“I was always seeing stuff on MJ and I was fascinated with him,” Fite told me this summer. He grew up a Georgetown Hoyas fan in Fairfax, Virginia, and first saw MJ in the 1982 NCAA championship game.

“I was always very interested in watching good, honorable guys that were fun to watch, that seemed like they had a good head on their shoulders and Michael always struck me that way — (someone who) always treated the reporters fairly and treated everybody fairly,” he said. “Back then I would’ve been 12, 13 years old. I just gravitated to him. Really enjoyed watching him. Thought he was fantastic and neat. That’s how I became a Jordan fan.”

So no, for both professional and personal reasons, the idea of POISONING Michael Jordan never entered Craig Fite’s mind, and it’s a wild accusation to make in a documentary.

But my pizza delivery brain was activated in another way when I heard Fite tell his story in the spring of 2020. He was a manager who told his store that he wanted to make the pizza personally because, he said jokingly, they were Jazz fans. And he told his driver that he wanted to go on the run, which itself could potentially cut into a driver’s tips. 

In my eight years, whether at a corporate spot or an independent spot, I made about half my money on tips. I think at Domino’s I started at $8/hour and made another $8/hour on tips. Often more, rarely less. Risking a manager cutting into my take-home would have been a non-starter.

Maybe if I never delivered pizzas this stuff would not have stood out to me while watching the film. But I did, and it did. So I reached out to my fellow pizza man Craig Fite and teed him up to set the record straight, once and for all.

First, Craig confirmed for me what the newspaper reporting showed: everyone in Park City knew where the Bulls were staying. Games 1 and 2 had been in Chicago on June 2 and 4. Game 3 was June 6, and rather than stay in Salt Lake City near the Delta Center, the Bulls chose more solitude about 40 minutes away in Park City¹. As reported by the Park Record, at 5:59 a.m. on June 6, the morning of Game 3, a marching band woke up the Bulls at the Marriott Summit Watch.

“We all knew,” Craig said about Park City residents and the Bulls.

The next day, a Park Record columnist complained about anyone who was treating Bulls players well.

“The Bulls should receive the welcome they deserve,” Dave Fields wrote. “An enemy’s.”

So I can see why Grover and Koehler might have been on high alert, but the facts of the case undercut the possibility of a conspiracy, as you’ll see.

Utah won Games 3 and 4 to tie the series. The rubber match Game 5 was Wednesday, June 11, at 7 p.m. local time. The night before, on June 10, Craig Fite was working his shift at Pizza Hut. His life was about to become part of history.

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This interview, from July 2023, has been lightly edited.

JACK SILVERSTEIN: Let’s paint the scene. You’ve said that there were only a few pizza places. I’m picturing Michael and his team, they’re talking about, “We couldn’t find any pizza places.”

Where is the pizza at Park City in June 1997 at 10:00 PM?

CRAIG FITE: Park City’s changed so much now. Even that Pizza Hut is no longer there. You had us, you had Domino’s … there were one or two other pizza shops probably, but they were local pizza shops. There weren’t any other national chains. At that timeframe, I suspect during the summertime, and again, this is pure speculation, they were closed probably by ten o’clock. 

We stayed open until 11:00. We were always open a little bit later than everybody because you never know. (The Bulls) were at the Marriott’s Summit Watch. Their restaurant probably did close down before the evening time. If you wanted to get anything delivered to you back then, pizza was probably the thing. That’s why I knew there was us and Domino’s that were open at that time, eating late.

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As I told Craig, I was in the corporate pizza delivery game just four years after the Flu Game. As such, I saw some holes in The Last Dance that maybe someone who didn’t deliver pizzas might not see.

Taking the concept that it was a pizza, I see four possibilities:

1. You or someone else at the store poisoned the pizza.

2. You say you made the pizza, so your either undercooked it or overcooked it.

3. There was just a bad strain of pizzas from Pizza Hut going out all throughout Park City, causing mass illness, of which Michael Jordan was an unfortunate victim.

4. Michael Jordan ate a perfectly fine pizza and had some reaction to it.

Let’s start with the first theory and work our way through it.

Jordan Flu Game Debunked Theory #1: POISONED PIZZA

JACK: This is what really bugged me about what Grover and Koehler said, who I’ve never met. In this worldwide global phenomenon of a documentary, they insinuate that someone did something to the pizza. You were at Pizza Hut in 1997. I was at Domino’s in 2001. I know that at Domino’s in 2001, everything was regimented, so unless you're carrying around pizza poison, I don’t even know how this would happen.

Let’s say someone were to poison a pizza, how would they even do it?

CRAIG: No idea.

JACK: It’s not even possible, right?

CRAIG: I’m sure obviously with chemicals and everything, there’s ways to poison something, but I have no answer for you on that. I have no idea.

JACK: At Domino’s, we had these trays of dough. They were like discs, and you would pull them out, you would fist them up, toss it, spread it, and then you’ve got your toppings all in a certain place. You’ve said that the pizza he ordered was a pepperoni pizza. I’m picturing all the pepperonis are in one specific place in some freeze-dry bag.

CRAIG: Yes. You’re in a refrigerator, you put them inside a refrigerated table, and you keep them at temperature. You have to constantly check the temperature to make sure that your table is keeping the meats and the vegetables and stuff that you have in there at the correct temperature so you don't get a food-borne illness of any kind.

JACK: Now, you said that you personally made the pizza. You also said that you had just recently started, about three to four weeks that you'd been there. You were an assistant manager.

I was a driver and drivers drive and managers manage, and some people at Domino's, some people cook. Everybody folds boxes. Oh, the cardboard fingers at the end of the night, holding those boxes.

CRAIG: (Laughs.) The cuts you can get from those.

JACK: What are your duties as an assistant manager?

CRAIG: You're basically running the store. That Pizza Hut was a dine-in, so you're running not only the deliveries that are going in and out, you’re running the kitchen, you’re running the floor, you’re making sure the waiters or waitresses or everything's taken care of. In Park City at that timeframe, it’s not winter, so it’s not very busy there. You have time. You don’t have as many workers on staff because you’re not getting inundated or have a high volume of business. It wouldn’t have been odd if on an evening like that there would have been three or four of us working.

JACK: A driver or two working?

CRAIG: Yes. It’s not a skeleton crew, but it wasn’t very many, which is why I was able to go deliver the pizza.

JACK: There’s only two ways to purposefully do something to the pizza. We’ll get to the second one in a moment, but the first one would be poison or tampering, and I just can’t think as a pizza person how you would go about that. You would have to have some kind of pizza poison, and you would have to be poisoning the Bulls’ pizza throughout the course of the week. You didn’t know that this one was Michael.

Other players probably would’ve been just as likely to order pizzas. You’d have to be poisoning pizzas all week in order to hopefully get the one that Michael ordered. You’d have to be doing that proactively.

Were you proactively poisoning pizzas in the off-chance that one of them was being ordered by the man who you’d later named your son after?

Craig: No.

JACK: Of course not. That's ridiculous.

Jordan Flu Game Debunked Theory #2: THE INTENTIONAL UNDERCOOK

JACK: So that gets us to number two, the idea that maybe you accidentally or purposefully undercooked it or overcooked it. At Domino’s, we had this conveyor belt for pies. We used to cook steaks in them after hours. You put the pizza down and it just runs through.

My point being I don’t even think there’s a way to undercook or overcook a pizza because at a giant corporate national chain, you have to have consistent standards. The Park City, Utah Domino's has to taste the same as the Bloomington, Indiana Domino's and the Bloomington, Indiana Pizza Hut has to taste the same as the Park City Pizza Hut.

Would it even be possible to undercook a pizza that much?

CRAIG: To answer it, technically, yes, you could because you have doors on the sides of the pizza conveyor belt on these big ovens. In the old days, we hand-made all the dough. It wasn’t frozen. You would always pop to see that the toppings wouldn’t run all over the place or whatever.

But the best way to put it is, why would you do that? It’s just a nasty pizza. It looks bad, it tastes bad. Honestly, unless you have some sort of strange ulterior motive, but even then, undercooking it like that is clear as day, especially in this case: a thin and crispy pizza. The cheese gives it away completely if it was cooked properly.

Is it possible? Of course, technically yes, because there are many people, as you can imagine, that came after me and said, “Oh, you did all sorts of things to it.” Kiss my (pause) — but I wouldn’t. You’re right.

JACK: Furthermore, your story is that you told everybody you were going to cook the pizza because you were a Bulls fan and they weren't. While I have a question about that, if you were to mess with the pizza, all these people who you've just accused of being nefarious ne'er-do-wells, pizza poisoners, they would all have eyes on you making this pizza.

CRAIG: Sure, sure.

JACK: You wouldn’t be able to say, “I don’t trust any of you.” Then put it in and then pull it out early without them seeing.

CRAIG: No. The whole idea behind me saying that of course was joking. We had already made pizzas for the Bulls numerous times. I remember one of the guys telling me that Phil Jackson even ordered it and used his name. We were getting pizzas out to them beforehand. It just happened to be on the night that I was there, and that I could go since I’m an assistant manager.

And probably to be truthful, and I look back at it, I probably was an assistant manager in training because otherwise, I wouldn’t have left the store to go deliver the pizza.

JACK: Which was going to be another thing I was going to ask.

CRAIG: It has to be that way because obviously I would’ve never left the store. Somebody else was there. There probably was another assistant manager there. The whole idea was, “I’m the Bulls fan of the whole group. I better make the pizza. I don’t want you guys screwing with it or anything like that.” That kind of thing. 

It’s usual banter between fans, and I’m in Utah, so we have Jazz fans all over the place. Was there any nefarious point by anybody about doing anything? Good Lord, no. It was just neat to have something on such a big stage, and we had the chance to touch it, if that makes sense. We made pizza and great, I’ll go deliver and see what happens. Maybe I can meet somebody. We had no idea who it was.

JACK: Had you seen an uptick in pizza orders that week that you can attribute to the Bulls?

Craig: Not that I can remember. I know we did have a big order, a 10-pizza or 12-pizza order. Whether they came from a practice I can't remember that. I do know that we all knew we had been delivering stuff over to Marriott because we knew that's where they were.

Just two pizza guys uncoiling a conspiracy.

Jordan Flu Game Debunked Theory #3: THE WIDESPREAD STRAIN OF BAD PIZZAS

JACK: I also don’t think it’s possible to poison a pizza without having vast collateral damage, and the reporting in the Park Record of June of 1997 shows no indication of mass illness, which brings us to number three, that there was a bad strain of pizzas going out from Pizza Hut.

You’ve said that you’ve talked to other people who ordered pizzas that night and everyone was fine.

CRAIG: Yes. You’re in a small town, we would go out and play softball together over in Park City in those years. Everyone’s like, “I had pizza that night, and I didn’t get sick.” In the small towns like that, if someone gets sick (from) one of the restaurants, everybody knew about it because all the workers knew each other.

I remember my district manager calling and giving me crap about the whole possible pizza-gate thing, and I remember asking him, “Hey, did we have any other reports of being sick?” That’s the first thing I thought of was, “Oh, crap, did we have something bad go out? A bad batch or something?” Nothing. Nothing ever came of it. 

Craig’s Flu Game Theory: MJ GOT SICK BECAUSE OF PARK CITY WEATHER

CRAIG: In fact, that’s the reminder that I like to tell everybody: Michael never went to a doctor. He never got diagnosed with pizza poisoning, with food poisoning, or whatever. It was all speculation. They happen to throw that out there because some guy saw him eat something late at night in a town that drops 30 degrees after 4 or 5 o’clock sometimes at night during June. I’d be very curious. He’s smoking cigars and has windows open.

He just got sick.

I had never heard this as a theory. Tell me the significance of what you just said: the sun in Park City.

CRAIG: Anybody that lives in Park City knows that the sun goes away behind the mountains as it sits here in Utah, four o'clock (or) whatever. The temperatures start to drop. It’s not abnormal during the summer months, you’ll wake up in the morning and be in a T-shirt and shorts, and by the evening time you're in a lightweight sweatshirt or something.

It cools off. A lot of times what happens is you get people that haven’t acclimated to the altitude or to the temperature in general, the change that happens from beginning to end. It's just it's normal everyday thing.

Could that be one of the things that got him sick? Sure. I would think. That floor was full of cigar smoke. You could smell it all over the place when you went in there. It wouldn’t surprise me if he left windows open and just slept on a cool night and got a bug. It’s always possible.

JACK: I don’t know, but this was probably the most time that Michael had spent in Utah. If they’re asleep on June 6th for a marching band to wake them up and they have to fly the night of the 5th, they’re there until the 11th or the 12th. Even when the All-Star Game was in Utah in ‘93, he wouldn’t have been there that long. Is it possible that by the end of that week, if he’s got his windows open, and the cigar is going and the sleep patterns that he took…

Is it possible that this was just something that would happen to someone who just wasn’t familiar with being in Utah or being in Park City for that amount of time?

CRAIG: My answer for that will be just based on experience. The wife and I used to own a property management company in Park City for many years. We took care of a lot of nightly rentals all the way through the Olympics². We dealt a lot with people coming in for ski season. They’d be there for a week. As you go and take care of these homes, you're taking care of the clients, the customers, you're bringing them stuff, you're making sure their stay is good.

In these homes, it was not abnormal to find a mom or dad or a kid wrapped up in a blanket, who had gone out and exerted themselves all over the place skiing and trying to have as much fun as possible. You hear the statement, “I feel like I got the flu. I’m sick. I got a stomach –” whatever. 

I’ve never really thought much about it. He's obviously one of the top athletes in the world. I have no idea if that is what happened with him. I’m not a doctor. But I guess the best way to put it is that I had enough experiences with that that, yes, probably got sick. Whatever happened to him, his body handled it a certain way. I’ve seen other people do it that way, non-athletes compared to athletes. That’s always been my assumption.

JACK: Got it. Let me ask you this: we ran in a rotation at Domino’s. You take your pie and then you wait, or you take two, three orders in a run, and then you come back and you wait. It’s all about taking as many as possible because you’ve got your hourly rate, but then you've got your tips. To give up your run to someone, because “I’m a Bulls fan, you guys are Jazz fans, I’m taking this over,” there’s a purely economic consideration here: why did the driver let you take the pie?

CRAIG: I can’t remember who the driver was but I’ll tell you this: when it comes to scenarios like that, unique events, you have a good relationship with people. You want to help buddies out. I remember the driver telling me, “Hey, I think it might be the Bulls.” I could have easily said, “Hey, can I hop along? I haven’t been on a delivery yet.”

Everybody that I worked with, from store manager all the way down: good people. Great to work with, all those guys. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they’re like, “Come on, let's go.” I would have given them the tip. It was just exciting. “Let’s go. Maybe I can meet Michael. Maybe I can meet Scottie. Maybe I can meet some of these guys.” That’s how that would have happened. “You’re the Bulls fan. You haven’t been yet. Let’s go.”

JACK: What bugged me also was that Grover and Koehler said five delivery drivers and you immediately said two. I can remember the few runs where there was more than one person in the car, and it gets very tight in the car. You’re talking about the era of two-door sedans. You put five people plus a pie. Now you guys have the warmer bags? I assume you’re using a warmer bag.

CRAIG: Yes. They’re using warmer bags. Still.

JACK: All right. You got a warmer bag. You have to keep that even. You put that on your front seat, or you put that in the trunk or in the backseat?

CRAIG: In this case — since again, I remember two of us — we probably set it in the backseat. Remember when you delivered on your own, you put it in the front seat beside you.

JACK: Exactly. So if you had five people in a car, you would remember that. The fact that they went onto this documentary that is now canon for the ‘90s Bulls, and they insinuate that someone did something to the pizza, as a pizza delivery guy and as a sports historian and a ‘90s Bulls historian, I took great exception to that.

CRAIG: You should have. That’s what I’ve been saying since I don’t know how long. I’ve called B.S. on him when he said that. You are never going to get into the Marriott’s Summit Watch, because you had to go through security. You’re telling me these security guards are idiots?

JACK: They wouldn’t let them through.

CRAIG: No, we would have never gotten through. Hell, you might have gotten five young ladies in there but you sure as hell wouldn't have gotten five shady-looking guys. I do remember being in a Pizza Hut hat, Pizza Hut shirt, all that stuff. I was definitely Pizza Hut when I went to do it. I remember the security guard checking us out. You had to go through him to get into the Marriott’s Summer Watch in order to even get to the elevator to get to the next floor to even get up to his room.

JACK: Yes. You obviously remember seeing him, there was obviously an interaction, you obviously brought the pizza, but I’m calling B.S. on the rest of that. Tim Grover and George Koehler, you guys are invited for an interview with me anytime you want.

As a pizza delivery guy, I immediately saw the holes in this. It’s ridiculous. As a historian, I like to get things right. It bothered me that they went on and said something that was so obviously faulty.

Here’s what I’m going to say, ladies and gentlemen: I’m going to say he wasn’t poisoned, it wasn’t undercooked, wasn’t overcooked, wasn’t part of a bad strain of pizzas going out throughout Park City.

If it was the pizza, I’m just going to say it was bad luck that Mike got sick, and them’s the breaks. It could be, Craig, exactly what you said about not being conditioned to the Park City weather, and the sun, and the altitude. You put that together with playing 40 minutes a game, and going the way he goes. Even though MJ is MJ, and we’ve got all of these incredible endurance stories, he’s still human. It was just bad luck.

Craig Fite, from one pizza delivery guy to another, thank you so much.

CRAIG: My pleasure. Glad I could clear some things up.

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Flu? Pizza? Hangover? I don’t care one lick. What I care about is Michael Jordan was quite obviously sick as a dog and delivered for his teammates, coaches and fans one of the greatest performances we’ve ever seen. The game was his 245th consecutive NBA game since returning from baseball.

1. The Bulls traveled by bus between Park City and Salt Lake City, long, slow drives that featured MJ razzing Jerry Krause in front of the whole team, per Roland Lazenby and his outstanding Blood On the Horns.

2. The 2002 winter Olympics were in Salt Lake City.