Love Last Dance, but hate sport? Me too
Iam absolutely loving The Last Dance, the ESPN documentary series about the Chicago Bulls’ 1997-98 season currently dropping two episodes a week on Netflix. There’s so much that’s utterly compelling about this story: The backstabbing! The heartbreak! The curly mullets!
There’s also a lot of basketball, but I don’t really care about that.
I actively dislike car racing, but Senna is one of my favourite documentaries. I find boxing sort of abhorrent, but I adore the Rocky movies. I don’t really understand baseball but loved Moneyball. I find American football confusing and boring but binge-watched several seasons of Friday Night Lights.
I’m not really into sport, but I’m very into stories about sport.
It’s so easy to get a great narrative out of a sports story. The drama is there for the taking: Winning and losing, friends and foes, triumph over adversity.
Take Chariots of Fire, for example. The classic historical drama is about anti-semitism in early 20thcentury Britain, perceptions of manhood and perceptions of Britishness. It’s about defeating the odds and having faith in yourself.
What it’s not really about is running, although it’s the sport of running (and it could be any sport) that is the vehicle for all of these themes.
Or, for something completely different, look at the brilliant documentary Murderball, about the Canadian and American wheelchair rugby teams as they prepare for the 2004 Paralympics. It’s full of suspense and emotion, and is both heartbreaking and life-affirming. There’s quite a lot of wheelchair rugby in it, but to go into the film with zero knowledge of that sport – as, let’s face it, even the most sports-mad of viewers likely do – doesn’t impede enjoyment of or engagement with Murderball one iota.
Sports movies or TV shows are very rarely actually about sport (if you wanted that, you could just watch the sport). They’re about how sport motivates people, brings them together, pushes them apart, heals them, or consumes them.
The Last Dance is all of that and more.
The 10-part series, six of which are currently available here, is based on more than 500 hours of previously unseen footage shot during the 1997-98 NBA season, when the Chicago Bulls, led by the indomitable Michael Jordan, were shooting for their second three-peat in a decade.
That’s enhanced with expansive interviews filmed last year, not only with the Bulls’ former players and management but with rival teams, journalists, commentators, former US President Bill Clinton and, as he’s referred to in the show, ‘‘Former Chicago resident Barack Obama’’.
The Last Dance is the story of what it takes to get to the point of being one of the most successful teams in basketball history – the passion, commitment and singleminded dedication. There are good guys and bad guys, dreams and despair.
The long format also allows for some enthralling asides. I’d happily watch a full feature-length documentary on why Adidas was so dysfunctional in the early 1990s that Jordan wound up cutting his sponsorship deal with Nike instead of his first choice sportswear brand.
But more than anything it’s about Michael Jordan himself. The Last Dance’s view into Jordan’s psyche is both fascinating and disturbing. He’s painted as a man who seeks only to win, at all costs, in every part of his life, but the pressure he puts on himself is matched by the pressure put on him by society. In 1997, Jordan was one of the most famous people in the world, and he was hounded by not only fans’ adorations but their expectations literally everywhere he went.
He’s a complex, riveting if repellent character. He’s a maniac, really, superhuman; all id, driven by nothing but competition, with others and with himself.
Sport attracts the most extreme characters and arouses all their greatest passions. That’s what The Last Dance is about – not who gets the ball through the basket the most times, but what the desire to do that provokes.
There’s also quite a lot of basketball in it. But I don’t really care about that.