1. Help: We Need Somebody to Love.
God knows we hoops lovers needed SOMETHING in these bleak and trying times. What a season! Yes, Luka Doncic’s star shone brightly, and Zion Williamson–along with Lebron James–returned to dazzle us, but soon David Stern was gone, with Kobe’s departure following less than a month later; more untimely, but no less unexpected and shocking. And now the season itself, it increasingly appears, is gone, with even the playoffs in doubt.
My hypertrophied need for pleasure and diversion, along with the advance hype of ESPN’s The Last Dance, gave me hope that this ten hour series, spread out over five weeks, would be wonderful in a similar way to the Love Story, (Liss, “Love Stories, Black and White His and Hers, Then and Now,” First 2018), a prior foray into celebration of the game of basketball, also presented in the off-season, but then by design. ESPN had planned on airing The Last Dance during the 2020 NBA playoff Finals[1].
The Last Dance follows the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls through their sixth and last championship season, the culmination of two three-peats, separated only by the two year break Jordan took (to play minor league baseball! Remember?) the season before the Bulls’ dynasty ended and tragi-comically disintegrated. A great story, almost begging to be retold, just as we, today, are begging to be retooled.
So we take hope where we can, but this ESPN production, unlike Love Story is hardly commercial free. The series has turned lefty watch-dog Dave Zirin into a terrible scold (The Nation, May 13), and he is right in branding it an exercise in brand management (The Nation, May 6), brand management for an NBA franchise owner who happens to be Michael Jordan. True: Jordan’s real identification is now with ownership and management, but Michael the player still has unique appeal, sufficient to drive the price for a special pair of his sneakers up to $150, 000. If you’re short on cash, sorry: you can’t get just one for $75K.
After feeding us a heady hagiographic brew of jaw-dropping highlights in the first two episodes on opening night, the series jumps around in time in sometimes confusing fashion (I had to consult my NBA encyclopedia more than once to differentiate the different championship runs), and tends to repeat itself, but incorporates plenty of spectacular footage.
After all, watching Michael Jordan is the main attraction, and he left us plenty to savor: the first two hours display enough of his spectacular talents to remind us that superhuman talent did not originate with Lebron James. Indeed, this series revives a debate that had been closed in my mind for several years now. James, I had come to believe, by virtue of his superior size and strength (at any position except center as played traditionally by the archetypal majestic giant whose prototype has remained Wilt Chamberlain for fully half a century) eradicates the need to bifurcate the designation of best player into best big man and best all court virtuoso.
The series lags somewhat in episodes three through six, but revives itself admirably in the seventh, which features Jordan’s father and their marvelously close relationship, a knowledge of which intensifies the inherent tragedy of his father’s horrible, brutal, senseless death, and should mitigate the now-popular harsh assessments of Jordan’s character. The unspoken common ground Michael shared with Steve Kerr, whose father was also senselessly killed, is among the most moving aspects of the entire series, and should give critics and scolds further pause.
Still, those of us hoping for some kind of redemptive glow in compensation for our currently reduced lives would have to ignore some unpleasant realities, most notably the sad subsequent last (so far) acts of the post-greatness careers of the Chicago Bulls’ two incomparable bright lights, Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson, both shown at the zenith of their charismatic greatness. Neither player nor coach, inseparable and each possessed of a singular charm, was able to replicate his popularity and success at the management level. Jordan remains an owner, but of an also-ran franchise, while Jackson’s tenure as general manager was but another farcical chapter in the sad history of Knickerbocker mismanagement.
Much has been made of the unseemly aspects of Jordan’s hyper-competitiveness. People debate whether this is simply part and parcel of his alpha male status; or should he be deemed reprehensible as a human being? Similarly with his refusal to be a social activist: Jordan always withheld himself from political involvement, remaining steadfastly focused on developing–not tarnishing–his brand.
He had long become synonymous with Nike when he won his first NBA title in 1991, at last dethroning the villainous Detroit Pistons. He then disappointed the world when he refused the mantle of political activism, not choosing to walk the path of Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, and Muhammed Ali, all of whom leveraged their unique greatness for the greater good. Instead, Jordan always allowed charm to trump caring, as in his off-hand remark that “Republicans buy sneakers too.”
No, this is not simply a love story, though it indeed chronicles an ecstatic experience for spectators around the globe, in thrall to the aesthetic that Jordan’s game embodied. Watching him again, though, and then again, what would we have to forget in order to remain unforgiving?
2. Turning Against the Worm: Rodman and Jackson
I am prepared to give Michael a pass, and to admire his unique greatness, but I remain, many years later, outraged at Jackson for having rescued Dennis Rodman and abetted his antics.[2] As players, Jackson and Rodman were birds of a feather: Like Rodman, Jackson could disrupt rhythm, was uniquely capable of making a quintessentially rhythmic game arrhythmic. These two men were the atonal counterpoints to the historically significant rhythm creators eloquently described in Nelson George’s brilliant 1992 book Elevating The Game: A History of Black Men in Basketball. If helter-skelter Jackson had been country and western, then herky-jerky Rodman was some weird form of late gangsta rap.
Why, oh why, does Rodman receive such voluminous attention in this series, whereas Horace Grant, who was as perfect a third for Jordan and the surprisingly engaging Scottie Pippen as could be imagined–or purchased–is only shown in brief sound bites? Commercially, the answer is obvious, but aesthetically? A worthy third star, Grant was in Chicago building that winning team before they became champs, and after Michael left, before departing for Orlando to play with the young Shaquille O’Neal. Ron Harper, the versatile complementary guard, also gets short shrift, perhaps because he was at other times Michael’s rival.
It is largely forgotten that between championship runs in Detroit and Chicago, Rodman had a disgraceful season in San Antonio where he wound up responding to Coach Popovich’s sitting him down in a crucial game by removing his sneakers–while remaining on the bench–to make a mockery of the Spurs’ loss and of his coach’s authority. It was my opinion then that Commissioner Stern should have publically interpreted this action as a declaration of voluntary retirement from the NBA, irrevocable without a unanimous vote among the league’s coaches.
Overly harsh? Well, this incident also had precedent: Rodman’s flagrant and dangerous push of Pippen in Game Four versus Detroit, after which the Pistons (“straight up bitches,” Grant called them) skipped the handshakes, congratulations, and even hugs that had become obligatory in the BirdnMagic Era, and–dethroned as repeat champions–sullenly walked off the court in silence.
But, instead of serving that retirement sentence, Rodman wound up taking his unorthodox talents to Chicago, where he turned a beautiful final championship celebration into an aesthetic nightmare by lying on top of Jordan for photographers at the customary champagne-soaked celebration.
A haunting post-buzzer shadow image still lingers: Rodman smothering Jordan, actually lying atop him, depriving us of seeing Michael’s face at the most emotional moment, and providing us with his own butt instead: a too obvious symbolic gesture even to explicate: Dennis Rodman fucked the NBA. Jordan and Jackson were as if his latex: in the season that HIV positive Earvin Johnson made his abortive comeback, it was Michael, more than Magic, who successfully promoted safe sex!
Rodman was a genuinely dirty player whose lewd sexual suggestiveness probably contributed to his rebounding and defensive talents by arousing and capitalizing on the disavowed homophobic tendencies of many opposing power forwards. Karl Malone tolerated him, but would he have survived against Maurice Lucas?
3. GOAT Meal
But what about James and Jordan? Riding the crest of a giant wave of the league’s rapid growth and popularity, Jordan had great predecessors and precursors, harbingers one might even say, but there had always been a split between great leaping ability and fundamental soundness of shooting stroke. Jordan stood squarely in the line of descent of Julius Erving, taking the game high into the air with dazzling swoops and dives, but like most–if not all–the great leapers in this lineage, Erving was not a fundamentally sound jump shooter. Taking to the air was all about improvisation, whereas Jordan brought textbook execution into the stratosphere, somehow attending to buckling his seat belt before taking flight. Jordan’s was a breathtaking stillness, one that seemed to both stop and extend the flow of time, while he gathered himself and calculated how best to strike. He is described as always being “in the moment,” but his leaping ability allowed those moments to expand and linger. And the tremendous intelligence required to make that happen!
Larry Bird and Earvin Johnson, the truly great players that followed and joined Erving in that era’s pantheon, were not leapers. There was that split, but Jordan went straight up–way up–on his jump shot, uncannily—unfailingly–finding a resting point of stillness with his jump shot in such a manner as was previously associated with lesser athletes who perfected their jump shooting technique as a way to carve out a niche in the league and survive. Think Don Ohl and Hal Greer.
After Jordan retired, and the league struggled to replace him, I began to lose interest in the NBA, at least until the playoffs were winding down. Pettit, Russell, Elgin, Wilt, Oscar, Earl the Pearl, Larry, Magic, Michael: I felt I had seen it all.
Then came James, and suddenly my interest was rekindled, with the expectation that, at any time, I might see something I’d never witnessed before. Like Jordan, James is a physical genius of the highest order, rivaled only by Wilt Chamberlain, who was in effect a genetic mutation, stretching the ever-advancing cutting edge of athletic prowess of the human species about half a century at once.
I’d come to champion James’s claim to be recognized as the GOAT, but I hadn’t watched clips of Jordan for many years. While watching The Last Dance, I was stunned all over again: the angles which he cut through space, as if the space was solid but penetrable only by him, the crevices through which he weaved. That image of his knife-like body taking flight has to be seen somewhat regularly to be fully present, at least for me.
And how he carried himself in those oversize suits that were privileged to hang loosely over his glistening chiseled body! Jordan’s body was a lethal weapon that was entirely at his command. He exercised precision control, in a way that demanded and bespoke extraordinary intelligence. Because he was able to establish a point of stillness in the air, almost any shot was possible. It was up to him. He demanded more of his own body than he ever did of his team-mates.
4. Character: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Jordan remains, as always, unapologetic about his extreme competitive nature; ruthless, always with a point to prove, a score to settle. This aspect of his nature was integral to the hard work mentality that produced the textbook form that complimented his athletic gifts and took him places that Julius Erving could not reach, heights even he could not scale.
Most of what people criticize Jordan for is simply the jive shit of a performer getting his ass good and ready. What a story the Bulls were! Still are. He talked trash? So what? He was following in Larry Bird’s footsteps, and only after having endured the physical and mental abuse visited upon all the Bulls by the Detroit Pistons’ Bad Boys.
Having become the game’s greatest player, definitively ending the Bird-Johnson debate, he became a champion just ten years after Larry and Magic transformed the NBA from a failing enterprise that was being abandoned and maligned in ugly racist tropes by its meager white fan base. Jordan endured the loss of his father right after winning three titles, and humbled himself for over a year playing minor league baseball, never losing the charisma that made him more like Muhammed Ali than any other great athlete. He can’t be legitimately criticized for getting his motivation from wanting to humble rivals like Karl Malone and Reggie Miller. Or for getting juice from those he loved, like Gus Lett, the Chicago Stadium security guard.
Come on: everyone rode his coat-tails. And, oh, the coat-tails on those suits! Phil Jackson proved a great coach, came to be known as The Zen Master, but, given his marginal status as an NBA player, might he have lasted more than briefly had he not been so fortunate as to inherit Jordan from Doug Collins? Pippen was a great player, but coming from nowhere, would he have become Scottie Pippen without Jordan? Would John Paxson be remembered at all? Would Steve Kerr have so easily gotten the broadcasting and coaching opportunities he subsequently enjoyed? And Jerry Krause? Would any of us even recall his name if Portland had not chosen Sam Bowie as the second pick in the 1984 NBA draft, leaving Jordan available to a moribund Chicago franchise as the third pick?
Hanna Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” In strangely parallel fashion, Jordan exemplified what we might dub “the inherent altruism of transcendent greatness,” a greatness and an exuberance that lived wholly in the moment. His body was entirely his own, a weapon that he controlled completely, that was entirely at his command.
For all his relentless self-aggrandizement and competitiveness, behind his winning smile lay an aesthetic that incorporated both humility and dignity [3]. He was genuinely inspiring; charming beyond belief.
Unlike James, who occasionally and inexplicably struggled in clutch situations (against Dallas in his first title series after joining the Miami Heat), and who, inexplicably, failed to eliminate the sideways drift on his jump-shot until this year, Jordan, as a Bull, never faltered or failed.
His rise was relentless and meteor-like, seemingly inexorable. Watching footage of both his parents provides clues as how these winning attributes came his way. He had fully internalized his father’s confidence in him, and his love. As such, he was fully capable of mourning; and of letting go. The tale of his friendship with Bulls’ security guard Gus Lett is inspiring, and hearkens back to his love for his lost father.
We should remember him as he wished we would after he left Chicago: with his heart, soul, and love ensconced there forever. That is the true love story, between player and championship-deprived city. David Halberstam once remarked that if he were giving an alien from outer space a sense of our world, he would first take him to Chicago Stadium to witness a Bulls game.
But there is also sadness: the loss of youthful beauty is even harder for someone whose youth brought with it such power to achieve aesthetic perfection. Too bad Jordan had to come back so many times and let us see him when he was no longer himself. Makes me wonder how it will all end for Lebron. Next time he wins something big, he might think of the advancing cadre of young greats like Zion, Giannis, Joel Embid, Kawhi, and Luca, and exit early enough (maybe by the time he nears his mid-forties!) to make sure we remember him as The King.
Memories are all we have these days as lovers of the game. Memories and dreams. Other than turning back the clock to the eight team league of the early 1960’s that featured Oscar, Elgin, Wilt, Russ, and Bob Pettit, I’d most like to go live and see LeBron battle Kawhi for the (presumptive) soul of L.A. Looking past that, maybe there’ll be a heaven, and we can watch the all-time greats battle one another, each in his prime, to settle all disputes. It’s really hard not to go with Michael.
Footnotes
1 Ironically, in The Last Dance, Reggie Miller refers to Michael Jordan by the nickname that originally belonged to Earl Monroe, who was involved in the production of Love Story. His legend formed in the Philadelphia school-yards, Monroe was “Black Jesus” before he was “Earl the Pearl.”
2 Liss, “Helter Skelter: Ambivalently Appreciating Phil Jackson.” FORUM, 1998.
3 For a socio-historical perspective that contextualizes Jordan’s extreme drive to succeed and clarifies how his value system was formed, see https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29180890/michael-jordan-history-flight