A superb new ESPN documentary series reminds us that everything in the NBA legend’s playing career was bent towards a single goal: winning
Have we never seen Michael Jordan like this before, or is it simply that we forgot? Anyone who lived through the Chicago Bulls’ domination of the NBA during the 1990s – even, like me, as a kid – can probably still recall the broad outlines of Jordan’s talent, the qualities that made him such an exceptional athlete: the elasticity; the hang time; the spectacular dunks, ludicrous switch-hands layups, and clutch buzzer-beaters; the raw power. Jordan reigned at “the end of history”, in that curious decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, and for all his ability with a ball in his hand he’s always seemed a little remote, a little above it all. He was the perfect athlete, in a sense, for the decade that fancied itself post-political. In an era that thought it had figured it all out, Jordan was the player who actually had.
And yet. As The Last Dance, the 10-part documentary whose first episodes premiere on ESPN in the US on Sunday (with the worldwide releases for each on Netflix the following day), shows, he was so much more. Yes, Jordan was gloriously, unironically macho. Yes, his body worked like a Swiss army knife, limbs cutting through the air in all directions at one moment then snapping back into a streamlined cylinder the next. Yes, he was capable of outrageous things on the court. But he was also a bully, a wrecking ball, the owner of a volcanic will to win, a man of almost unbearable intensity. However much joy Jordan gave to millions throughout his career, and will surely give to millions more with the release of this banquet of a documentary, it’s hard to escape the feeling that being him – occupying that body, harnessing that talent, channelling that unrelenting drive to be the best – must have been incredibly hard. The Last Dance is nominally about Jordan’s last season with the Bulls, but flashbacks give us the full, luxurious history of His Airness, and what we’re really offered by the end of it all is a study in sympathy. The man who emerges from these 10 hours of pure 90s nostalgia is heroic, preposterous, demanding, difficult, and sometimes outright tyrannical – and somehow only even more appealing for all his flaws. He cared about one thing, and one thing only: winning. Once you understand the singularity of Jordan’s focus, everything else about him makes sense.
