Looking Back on "The Last Dance"

Five years on, a look back at the legacy and reality of one sports most famous pieces of media.

When two of the largest media conglomerates and one of largest brands in the entire world have to choose between fact and legend, they will do everything in their power to make sure the only thing you will ever know about the subject in question is the legend.

In hindsight, this should be a given. Hell, going in it should be a given. It’s Michael-Bluth-opening-the-bag-to-find-a-dead-dove level of obvious. The myth of Michael Jordan is so enormous and far reaching that it becomes a machine unto itself. The man, such as he even exists on his own terms anymore, is the machine. It’s the reality that Jordan hawks at every turn because it sells the best. Anything else isn’t worth sharing. The moments when honesty and true vulnerability peak through the layers of gloss and artifice feel incongruous with the rest of the series. The phrase “curiously little insight” comes to mind, yet, it’s not really that curious. Michael Jordan is the most accomplished basketball player of all time. Phil Jackson is the greatest NBA coach of all time. Pippen, Rodman, Kukoc, Grant, and Kerr were all among the best and most important players of their era. They could tell you how they did it- how they really planned to attack their opponents, how the locker room actually felt about all of the events, how Jordan’s gambling was a genuine and serious problem that led to him being forced out of the game for a year, etc. But those elements (and countless others), as fully fleshed out extensions of the storytelling, do not fit the press release.

Instead, we get a Rorschach test. When you look at this piece of nostalgia, how do you feel? Does it make you happy? Sad? Angry? Across ten hours, this becomes almost the only trick Jason Hehir has in his arsenal (I have more to say on his work later.) The Last Dance is so much more about what you bring to it than what it brings to you. It frequently feels like an opportunity for dialogue rather than a genuine attempt at insight. A chance for kids to ask their parents if they remember seeing Michael play or what they remember about that time. I don’t think it’s a coincidence any insight into the man or his team is essentially elementary school, book fair-grade insight masked by the high gloss of a True Crime credits sequence. Many of the episodes feel very nakedly like they were designed more by corporate meddling than by Hehir or any of his team. As if Jordan himself is behind the scenes saying “I look too mean here, add in more pathos but only this pathos- the focus groups love this shit.” The possible honesty of corporate-produced art is always dubious- doubly and triply so for anything produced by a Disney company- but make no mistake, this is pure and complete bullshit being fed to you. Jordan’s image is at the stage where his work and accomplishments are passing further and further into the myth. It’s already been punctured by the memes, terrible fashion, and the countless stories that have come out after his retirement(s). This feels like a last attempt to rehab his image and solidify the myth.

What goes unsaid across the full runtime, and what I find most curious about all of it, is how much The Last Dance leans on the intangibility of sports to build Jordan’s myth. Anyone who watches sports knows about the extra gear. It’s the gear that all “the greats” have- that unknowable switch that can only be found at the very bottom of their gas tank that pushes them to win. The very idea of that extra gear is a recurring theme throughout. Time and again people repeat some version of “he was gassed but he went somewhere and just flipped a switch.” And while it’s something that cannot be quantified, it also feels cheap. It’s true that there are things you can only know from working with someone for a long time- particularly with regard to physical performance. Sometimes people need that little push. They need to be told to give more. It is an intangible thing, but it’s also a grey area that allows the series to brush off Jordan’s more asshole-ish qualities. If you look at Jordan’s entire job description as “doing everything in his power to win games,” then it doesn’t matter that he was toxic or cruel or had a gambling addiction so serious he was forced out of the league for a year. Because he was really fucking good at his job. It’s written off as “he knew when and how hard to push people and he got the results.” His greatness is presented as concrete because of the awards but when it comes time to discuss the tangible things Jordan did to improve himself personally and professionally, it mostly ducks the question (with one or two exceptions- the Bad Boy Pistons being one.)

The whole series rests on this unspoken gulf between knowing Jordan was really good and understanding how and why he got there. There’s tangible answers but they’re never acknowledged because acknowledging them- and the reality of what it took to become Jordan- is essentially endorsing a psychopath. It’s no secret that competitive athletes share a lot with psychopaths. As do artists, as do politicians, etc. There’s hints of Jordan’s particular brand here- his ability to blow up even a small slight into fuel for his competitive drive is mentioned typically as a joke- but there’s never any serious, in depth attempt to probe it. Jordan wanted to be the best at everything. He had to be on top, he had to have that person’s money in his pocket, he had to do this and that to meet some kind of deep-seated wound that would never be fulfilled by any accomplishment. By the end of the series, Jordan is still saying he thinks he could have won a seventh championship. That’s the core of Jordan and the core of his brand. He’s a psycho that is selling you the idea of loving the game. He’s Howard Ratner placing bets, except he could actually keep them. But Jordan couldn’t have kept that up forever. No one could. Just look at his time with the Wizards. Look at Howard Ratner. But that doesn’t fit the narrative.

Which really just leaves a broad overview of Jordan’s career. Through the airlock of a corporate product, Hehir manages to find a few solid, compelling stories that last across a stray twenty minutes here or there. There is almost no reason for this to be 10 episodes long and it is a joke to spend ten hours and only walk away with a nice trip down memory lane. The segment on Gus is probably the strongest, most complete piece in the whole thing and it doesn’t even show up until the second to last episode. The flashback structure is a smart choice but rarely do the flashbacks feel like anything more than an essay assignment. Often they end up rambling so much that by the time they cut back to the actual ’98 season, you’ve forgotten what the flashback was supposed to give you further insight into. It ends up feeling like a lot of churning for very little earned story momentum.

But for as little insight as actually we get, Hehir and his team do still deserve a mountain of credit. Tackling a project as ginormous and heavily branded as this and making something that is at the very least good and at the very worst boilerplate is no small achievement. For all intents and purposes, The Last Dance does usually work on a basic functional level. The fact that he also manages to sneak in some all time great NBA gossip (there is no better kind) and pulls genuine vulnerability (however rare) from all the interview subjects deserves to be recognized. Even as he’s kept at arm's length, he still manages to interlace certain scenes and interviews with a subtextual reality that feels quietly more entertaining. It makes me wonder what a real, honest attempt at something like this would look like. The hours and hours of BTS footage they had access to surely must’ve produced more than clips of Scottie Pippen getting a back massage or Rodman being snuck out a stadium back door. If anything, there’s almost certainly another version of this that leans heavily into the gossip and spills every drop of tea on what playing with that team was like. That version might not have given us the Jordan the conglomerates love to push, but it sure as shit would have been more interesting than what we actually got. Laboring under the constraints could not have been easy, but Hehir and his team do a remarkable job with what they have.

At the end of the day, I am always going to want more from something like this. Jordan was such a monumental force in the league and the world at large. NBA Locker rooms are notorious for their ego clashes and high-stakes gossip. Countless prospects were dubbed “The Next Jordan” and countless teams prepared for Jordan in different ways. His game was so complete, how did anyone even prepare to guard him? The series largely eschews any and all questions on the reality of the man for reasons both obvious and disappointing. Jordan is a singular figure whose story beyond the game would very likely be psychologically fascinating, profoundly tragic, and deeply wounded. There is no way he became the greatest because he just loved the game so darn much. Jordan, by all other accounts, is an actual fucking psychopath who wanted to bury you under the earth. The Last Dance barely even acknowledges that or what could have possibly inspired such venom to be sustained across an entire career. There is so much story left on the table here and I hope that someday, someone is able to tell it. Then again- future generations buy sneakers too.