Nathan Schiller

The Last Dance, a miniseries from two years ago, is ostensibly a 1997-1998 Chicago Bulls documentary. In reality it is an absurd, glossy, enthralling rendition of the myth of Michael Jordan. It’s like a casino, and Jordan’s the house. His career wasn’t so different. 

I am as susceptible as anyone, maybe more so because a) I came to it late and b) never got attached to a team. I think I remember watching his final shot live, but I don’t know. I was finishing eighth grade and cared about football. I enjoyed playing basketball, but soccer was my sport. I probably would have liked to own a pair of Jordans, but not having them didn’t pain me.

In the last century—in all of human history—you couldn’t tune in and latch on to things outside your physical orbit. Web 2.0 made it possible to watch old sports highlights without ESPN or a video compilation. 

Edited moving images bring narrative gravity that never existed in the lived experience. When I watched old Jordan clips, buzzed in college, arguing with my friends, played pickup games, I let that MJ arc, from being cut from his high school to winning his sixth NBA title, take hold.

The miniseries immortalizes this, makes you feel it. But that’s about it. If Jordan has interest in looking inward, he’s not saying. The tell comes in one of the early episodes, when he remarks that, as time passes, he finds himself reflecting on how he became the person he became. For him, it boiled down to beating his older at sports. Competitiveness is the differentiator. 

The best basketball players ever

At any given time, there are, let’s say, a couple hundred world-class athletes suited to excel at a sport. A third never get a chance, another third get derailed. The final third make the pool. They’re professional grade generalists, and become legendary by systematically eliminating their weaknesses. 

Basketball was created in 1891. For its first 90 years, it was not a popular American sport. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird change that in the 1980s. But it was Bill Russell who set their stage. Then Jordan took the game global. LeBron James, who first played in 2003, built the streaming bridge.

Russell, Jordan, and James are the three best basketball players ever. They elevate on physical prowess—fluidity, grace, power, intensity—achievements (excessive winning), and advancements of the sport into modern dimensions. 

Russell was a genuine political hero and martyr. LeBron speaks his mind. Jordan could barely go halfway, and that exemplifies, or is an element of, the sadness that seeps through his series.

His most infamous line is, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” He actually exonerates himself, not that a sensible person needs it. It was always a throwaway quip that media gobbled up.

Jordan wasn’t without awareness. He knew what he was doing when he snubbed Bush’s White House invitation. But he’s not here to talk about that. He’s all basketball, basketball’s his capital, we’re his commerce.

This series excels in ’90s nostalgia

Watching this series filled me with nostalgia for a time when myth was earnestly possible. Jordan began his career during Reagan’s first term and ended his during Clinton’s second. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, America prospered, China woke up. Being like Mike meant that adults could be cultural by caring about his stats and titles.

His last game of the “last dance” season was on June 14, 1998. The rest of the summer, the American sports world went crazy over the McGwire-Sosa home run race. Baseball’s position is still that that didn’t happen. 

That sanctimony did its part to turn me away from pro sports. Of all that plagues our planet, pro athletes using steroids is low down. If you are living under the weight of nuclear suicide and a boiled planet but no one’s talking about it, you can devote great passion to nonsense. 

If today the world feels crazy, we can at least remember it germinating during Michael Jordan’s career. But he had games to win, enemies to destroy, sneakers to sell. We bought it up.

The subtle horror of the end

At the end of this miniseries, during the Finals against the Utah Jazz, I felt claustrophobic and in an increasing state of horror. The whole time, little of the real world appears on screen. Big business basketball is an indoor milieu: gyms, offices, weight rooms, locker rooms, hotel suites, luxury buses, chartered airplanes. 

Once he was world renowned, Michael Jordan lived cramped. At one point, he’s lying on a hotel couch, smoking a cigar, watching daytime TV. It’s how he experiences quiet: with a video crew.

A televised basketball game is a product. The game has a 48-minute timer, so production and advertising triple it for profit-seeking. The product is often available only at night. Jerry Seinfeld once joked that a comedian spends all day waiting for the sun to go down. I wasn’t too surprised when Seinfeld appeared, on screen, in the Bulls locker room.

Salt Lake City sits directly at the base of the mountains. It’s not a boisterous city. The Jazz are the only pro sports team in the state. The basketball arena is raucous; the seats are steep, the court seems sunken like a stage in Ancient Rome.

John Stockton and Karl Malone ran that court brilliantly for years. They weren’t afraid of Jordan, but they couldn’t beat him. The severe closeups of Jerry Sloan’s profile as he haltingly responds to questions after Jordan’s “flu game” (which wasn’t really the flu) are terrifying. 

The Jazz came close. Jordan’s jump shot is iconic, but it’s helped by the fact that, afterward, Stockton’s only almost went in.

It was The Last Dance because, by then, the team was functionally obsolete. Before the season, ownership and management said this was it. Jordan is emphatic that everyone would have returned on one-year contract if given the chance. 

Would they have won another title? Jordan isn’t asked this question. But he answers anyway, and says he doesn’t know. All he wanted was a chance.

Talk about a bubble bursting.