Jordan sets brutal beat for mates in 10-part doc ‘Last Dance’
Just when we’re running out of things to watch, ESPN comes along with “The Last Dance,” a 10-part documentary about Michael Jordan and the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls.
The series begins tonight (6 p.m PDT) with two episodes, and the star of the show is concerned how you might view him.
“When people see this footage I’m not sure they’re going to be able to understand why I was so intense, why I did the things I did, why I acted the way I acted, and why I said the things I said,” Jordan said, via director Jason Hehir in an interview with Richard Deitsch of The Athletic.
“When you see the footage of (me riding with Scott Burrell), you’re going to think that I’m a horrible guy. But you have to realize that the reason why I was treating him like that is because I needed him to be tough in the playoffs and we’re facing the Indianas and Miamis and New Yorks in the Eastern Conference. He needed to be tough and I needed to know that I could count on him. And those are
the kind of things where people see me acting the way I acted in practice, they’re not going to understand it.”
Jordan might have been especially driven that season. As the title suggests, it was the last year of the Bulls dynasty, an eight-year period during which they won six NBA titles.
“The beginning of the season, it started when (general manager) Jerry Krause told (coach) Phil Jackson that he could go 82-0 and he would never get a chance to come back,” Jordan said Thursday during a video conference with “Good Morning America.” “Knowing that I had married myself to him, and if he wasn’t going to be the coach, then obviously I wasn’t going to play. So Phil started off the season saying this was the last dance — and we played it that way.”
The 20-hour series doesn’t limit itself to one season. Take Jordan’s second season, for example.
While many people know he missed 64 games that year because of a broken foot, only longtime Warriors fans will recall that the injury happened at the Oakland Coliseum-arena. It was one of the few distinctions of a 30-52 season for a team led by Purvis Short, Joe Barry Carroll and Sleepy Floyd (with rookie Chris Mullin coming off the bench).
The documentary includes a scene in which Jordan argues with Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf about the injury. Jordan wants to play through the injury, especially after
doctors tell the team there’s a 90% chance he will recover anyway.
“If you had a terrible headache,” Reinsdorf says, “and I gave you a bottle of pills and nine of the pills would cure you and one of the pills would kill you, would you take a pill?”
Jordan replies, classically: “It depends how bad the headache is.”
Jordan held himself to a high standard, a superhuman standard. He met it, and he expected others to meet it.
“Look, winning has a price,” Jordan says in the documentary. “And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game. And I wasn’t going to take any less. Now, if that means I had to go in there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates. The one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t do.
“When people see this they are going say, ‘Well he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win to be a part of that as well. Look, I don’t have to do this. I am only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that way, don’t play that way.”