As LeBron closes in on his fourth title with a third team, I’m going back to reflect on The Last Dance which I watched with my 11 year old son and how Michael stills looms over what should be LeBron’s crowning achievement.
Unlike most people I’ve encountered, I have a relatively great memory that goes back to about when I was four years old. I became fully interested and obsessed with sports around 7 years old in 1996 and one of the first things I learned was the doom that Michael Jordan brought upon the rest of basketball and really the sports world in general. To date myself, the only athletes remotely in the realm at the time were Pete Sampras, Brett Favre and Peter Forsberg. Many people around my age have faint memories of MJ and I’ll be honest, I don’t remember plays or games, I remember feelings. I know I watched plenty of games with my brothers and I can probably cobble together a deep recess memory of some game, but it doesn’t matter because since that tender age I’ve always known MJ was the best basketball player, despite spending much more time watching Lebron throughout most of his career. As a child growing up in the 90s and 2000s, I know many felt that Kobe and even later LeBron were like MJ, but neither of them ever was automatic, like the sure fucking thing that MJ was.
The Last Dance, chronically Michael’s career and truthfully giving us less than we thought on his last season, gave my son a glimpse of that same dread I felt which stands as a constant to me and the rest of the 90s kids. Maybe all kids born throughout the latter half of the 20th century feel that nostalgia for whatever decade they grew up in, but I think the 90s are different and as the opening song of Portlandia posits, the dream of the 90s is real and those faint wisps of memories of a decade before everything got complicated, before 9/11, before the internet, before fear came to define both my and my son’s generation, MJ was Plato’s perfect form of basketball. The Last Dance gives us who remember our early reveries of sports and for me at least, the full amplified vision of my childhood in the 90s.
The documentary so appropriately seizes both the feelings of certainty of the Bulls and the forlorn fright of any other team. Michael’s life during the first three-peat became fantastical as he rose to a godlike status and I finally saw what got him there. Of course we saw some of his warts; the gambling with seedy characters, him being generally a dick to everyone, but what many in my generation don’t understand is that it doesn’t matter what he did off the court, because we know gods don’t exist in real life and while his personal life throughout the 90s seemed chaotic at best, he gave us the sublime on the court where what he did mattered most to him. In this age, an NBA player can barely be just a basketball player. He must stand up for the right issues, have a strong online presence and unfortunately be that role model at times that NBA players never wanted to embrace back then. Save for a few players like Kawhi Leonard, each NBA player’s online presence is an amalgamation of branded content of quotes about working hard, self-indulgent workout videos or emotional responses to events. Not that it’s a bad thing, but in some ways it’s changed the escapism of sports. Don’t get me wrong, I love what current athletes are doing from a social standpoint, engaging with real issues, but in nuance, we can both appreciate what they do off the court and also miss a time when the sports world was simpler. The Last Dance showed us the other side of a man, before we cared about what they did off the court. Other than the gambling, which we as a society have evolved on, his biggest flaw seems to be that he was mean. That was it, he was mean because his competitive drive steered his emotions and he gambled a lot, sometimes with sketchballs that hang out on golf courses in Florida where prying eyes never lay. But I knew all of that and while those who remember OJ fondly, watched him destroy his life and many others in the 90s, MJ didn’t come close to doing something remotely heinous. I don’t care that he was mean because as he stated, he never asked anyone to do what he wasn’t willing to, which his teammates admitted. In 2020, being an asshole as a famous athlete becomes something of scarlet letter or when it’s paired with a lesser competitive edge, a circus show (see Cleveland Browns receivers during the 2019-2020 season). I choose to not care about what MJ was as a person and I think The Last Dance gave us permission to look at a man not for the worst of him, but to critically analyze a life in the public eye, knowing our own faults and arrive at the point where the sum of a person’s life cannot be defined by their least defensible qualities. As I sat with my son watching this, I believe he started to understand true greatness, whatever the profession, knowing that it comes at a cost and opens a portal into our questionable impulses. When Jordan has everything in the world he wanted, his greatest sin was punching some teammates (which any of us who played sports competitively is familiar with) and gambling a lot. In contrast, we see what stardom did to OJ, where every bad impulse he had came to fruition resulting in terror and calamity. As far as I’m concerned, MJ wasn’t very complicated, just competitive to an asshole level degree and the only terror he wrought was over his opponents on the court.
My biggest hope as many like me who only remember how MJ felt and those like my son who’ve only heard about them, is that they have a new appreciation for how difficult success can be. Regardless of one’s field of success, the temptation to become the worst of ourselves is there and while in 2020 we’re not allowed to have sympathy for rich people, almost everyone who achieves massive success understands that the money and fame doesn’t fill whatever deep hole they spend all that time filling. Of course we know all the stories of how this went wrong, especially with athletes, but like MJ, many of the most successful people in the world understand that it doesn’t stop with that big break; success is about maintaining that balance and sustaining excellence. This documentary also deftly explores the heaviest ingredient to create that success, failure. Michael Jordan was in a similar place that James Harden is in now before he won his first title. At age 28 in 1991, MJ had two MVPs, a defensive player of the year, but also several early playoff losses and three straight, painful exits at the hands of the Pistons. It’s a familiar story for Rockets fans and the foreseeable future for 76ers fans (sorry, they’re never getting over that hump). He failed time and again as many greats do, but that failure taught him everything he needed to achieve and hold onto greatness. As he found out as well, the moments that we witnessed and he lived were the bulk of the experience; the journey made all the difference because success really is a moment. The last legacy of Jordan is one of inspiration, not only for basketball, but for any of us. One title validated Jordan, giving him all he needed on his way to a hall of fame resume, but he didn’t stop and neither should we.
Bo's Gamut 