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Ring In Michael Jordan’s Birthday Weekend With Fake Michael Jordan’s Best Tweet Ever

“Parody” accounts are the scourge of Twitter. Every three seconds a new one pops up ostensibly inspired by a famous person… and then shamelessly barfs out a bunch of pseudo-”inspirational” claptrap that is not “parody” in a way I, or anyone else I’ve ever known, would understand the term. Still, some of these accounts have managed to rack up nauseatingly high numbers of followers, thanks to either gullibility, fake-follower-buying, or people actually liking this crap.

There are, though, some exceptions to the “parody accounts are the worst” rule. And Michael Jordan has managed to inspire two such exceptions (you might call him the Michael Jordan of inspiring good Twitter accounts… except some of the fake Jordan ones are awful garbage, too). The first was eventually suspended, but then it came back, more clearly labeled as a parody… and it’s even better.

In it, Jordan is re-imagined as an incredibly naive, lovably dumb overgrown man-child who constantly misinterprets both language and aspects of his own legacy, gives terrible advice, and rarely tweets about his basketball career except tangentially. But it just so happens that one of those tangential basketball tweets was, in my opinion, his best ever. He tweeted it on January 29, I’ve looked at it countless times since, and I still can’t look at it without laughing. If I were Michael Jordan, I’d be honored that I in some way inspired a tweet like this. Without further ado…

Put a fish sticker on the car because that was my nickname in the nba. Micheal The Fish Jordan.

— Mike (@__MICHAELJ0RDAN) January 29, 2013

Micheal The Fish Jordan. MICHEAL THE FISH JORDAN. michealthefishjordanmichealthefishjordanmichealthefishjordanmichealthefishjordanmichealthefishjordan

Sorry, that tweet just reaches me in a way I can’t even explain. (And yes, the misspelled name is, without question, intentional.) It reaches me in such a way, in fact, that recently a friend wondered if I was the one behind the account. To which I replied: if I came up with “Micheal The Fish Jordan,” I’d tell you. And I’d probably never stop. I love this account so much that I tried to rope “Mike” into an in-character Q&A (sadly, haven’t heard back).

Yes, this this (very good) profile of the actual man exists now, but for Michael Jordan appreciation, I still prefer a fake Twitter account. I’m not sure if that says more about me or the brilliance of @__MICHAELJ0RDAN, but as “Mike” might say: really makes you think. Micheal The Fish Jordan. (It’ll just never get old for me.)

Getty photo, by Andy Lyons