Jordan documentary is a relief for sports fans
Netflix series The Last Dance details Bulls’ last NBA title ... and is new content!
There are two ways to consider The Last Dance, the new documentary series that chronicles the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls through the bizarre, triumphant run to their final championship.
The first is as a piece of filmmaking. Does it tell an interesting story in a compelling way? Does it provide unexpected details to colour familiar events? It does, and we’ll get back to that shortly.
The other way of looking at the series, which debuts on Netflix in the wee hours of Monday morning, is that it is, finally, some ACTUAL NEW SPORTS CONTENT. Landing amid a pandemic that has shuttered our arenas and fields, it is blessed relief from the endless replays of old games and tournaments, video-game battles and frickin’ H-O-R-S-E contests in home gyms.
It deals with something old, but much of The Last Dance is unseen footage, and so it very much feels like something new.
Sports fans will drink this in like it is a precious gift, the first time in weeks they could sit down and watch something that might actually contain some surprises. You never knew Dennis Rodman could make you so happy.
Conveniently, The Last Dance also happens to be excellent. The narrative spine of the 10-episode series comes from footage shot by a crew that was embedded with the Bulls for the 1997-98 season. All that film, largely untouched for two decades, was supplemented by hundreds of new interviews as the filmmakers spent years putting together a documentary on an epic scale.
Each episode, which will be released two at a time over a period of five weeks, moves the story of that final season along by about a month, while detouring into the backstory of Jordan and his teammates.
MJ is naturally the central character; he sat down with director Jason Hehir multiple times over the course of the filming and is surprisingly forthcoming for a guy who hasn’t said much publicly in his post-basketball career, even though he owns an NBA franchise in Charlotte.
It is a little startling to cut from Jordan at the height of his athletic peak to Jordan at 57 years old, with a little paunch and sad eyes, but he is honest and blunt, the patter of generic athlete-speak long forgotten. But what is most striking about the series is the drama that the final year of the dynasty provided.
The denouement of the Bulls makes last year’s Golden State Warriors look like the Superfriends.
If you had asked me to list as much as I could remember about that last season before watching any of this, I would have given you Jordan’s Finals-winning shot against Utah, and that there was friction between general manager Jerry Krause and coach Phil Jackson. Oh, and that Rodman was a bit of a kook.
Friction, it turns out, would have been a tremendous understatement. As was kook.
As soon as the Bulls won their fifth championship in 1997, there was speculation that the dynasty was over. Jackson’s contract was up and Jordan insisted that he wouldn’t play for anyone else.
Scottie Pippen was entering the final year of a contract in which he had been remarkably underpaid, and Krause was at least entertaining the idea of moving on from the coach and from Jordan’s wingman.
Krause would grudgingly sign Jackson to a one-year deal — while announcing that it was to be his final season in Chicago — and say that he listened to trade offers for Pippen but didn’t find any to his liking. All of this was utterly bonkers, and you can’t help but think about the absolute meltdown that would have happened in today’s media — and social media — environment. Pippen was so aggrieved by his contract, which paid him US$18 million over seven years, that he waited until the eve of the season to have foot surgery, ensuring that he would miss significant time. He would eventually demand a trade and only returned to the team in January, when he realized he had no leverage. The player-empowerment era was still decades away.
Rodman, meanwhile, would take his own hiatus, telling Jackson in the middle of the season that he needed a break to clear his mind.
He was given a 48-hour hall pass and promptly went to Vegas to party for much longer than that. Today, such actions might cause the sports talking-head universe to collapse upon itself.
The Last Dance allows all the principal characters to reflect on the madness of those days, while bringing in a succession of voices to add perspective, everyone from Larry Bird and Magic Johnson to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. The one notable absence is Krause, which is a shame because he is the unquestioned villain of the piece (he died in 2017). How the GM managed to win a power struggle against the partnership of Jordan and Jackson remains one of sport’s great mysteries.
Ultimately, though, The Last Dance is the story of Jordan, the insanely competitive superstar whose accomplishments deserve a thorough retelling. Early on in the series, James Worthy talks about MJ coming to the University of North Carolina, where he was already a star. “I was better than him,” Worthy says. Then a beat. “For about two weeks.”
Later, there is an old clip of Steve Kerr in his days with the Bulls. He is asked what makes that team different from other dynasties.
“Well,” he starts out, “we have Michael,” and then he grins at the interviewer, as if to say, you need more?
There was so much more to say about those Bulls teams. But that also kind of said it all.
The Last Dance premières in Canada on Netflix on Monday. sstinson@postmedia.com