Michael Jordan doesn’t sleep. Right now that’s a poetic statement, but there was a time when it was very much literal.

In a recent podcast with ESPN’s Zach Lowe, Jack McCallum — author of Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever, the definitive text on 1992’s gold-winning and first all-pro iteration of Team USA — talked about this most telling of M.J. mythologies.

“Darn if he didn’t finish this card game,” McCallum says of Jordan’s night before the gold medal contest. Jordan apparently briefly washed his face after a long night of drinking and gambling before he went on a long day of press appearances, plus 18 holes of golf in Barcelona, before he went on to lead Team USA in a gold-medal winning victory over Croatia.

“This thing about Jordan never sleeping, usually you’re waiting for these types of legends to be deflated. But this was the one that almost everybody on the team mentioned before anything else, was this bionic nature of Jordan, how he never slept and how his energy level was beyond anything they could imagine. That’s one stereotype, one myth that definitely holds true.”

You heard it here first: don’t rest if you want to be great at basketball.

(via The Lowe Post)