Brief 18: The Last Dance

 I watched the Netflix documentary series 'The Last Dance', about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s. Of all major sporting stories of my lifetime, this was probably the one I'd been most deliberately indifferent to, so it was rare and interesting to enjoy it not just for the character and the nuance but for the actual frontline story. I knew only the bare bones.

I didn't like basketball when I was young. I played it a bit but never took to it - where I usually took immediately to ball-and-run sports, basketball somewhat eluded me.The rules seemed arcane and contrived. I was not tall. Kids would sometimes be playing basketball in the sports hall when we wanted to play 5-a-side football.

I resented the Dream Team at the 1992 Olympics- resented that we were meant to care more about these sportsmen I'd barely heard of than all the other great sportspeople there that I had heard of. They won easily. Who cared about that? In a sense, fascinatingly, as this documentary revealed, my suspicions were accurate. The "Dream Team" was one of the great marketing coups of all time - not that they weren't great sportspeople and the best basketball players, but in America telling the rest of the world "these are the most famous sportspeople", something not true became true. Basketball's value exploded and increased exponentially. It became a global game in a way it had never been before.

I did come to enjoy and understand basketball in about 2013 - I was poorly for a length of time, up in the middle of the night after night, and the only live sport on was the NBA Finals, so I appreciated and studied them as never before. I came to realise that the notion that it's just "one team scores, the other team scores" for the duration is way off. The ebbs and flows are fascinating - how a team can be 15 points down, then get a couple of unanswered baskets and then there momentum is inevitable, how the other team, who had previously been scoring seemingly unchallenged now had to struggle for every point. I found the like of LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry compelling and admirable.

Yet still I avoided Jordan - steered clear of the idea he was the world's most famous sportsman and didn't get to know the nature of his greatness. 

Brief takeaways 1. he was amazing. He always won 2. He's the definite alpha male/bully 3. His ability to reflect but not regret seemed pretty honourable. 

What made the show excellent was the supporting cast, though, the likes of Scott Pippen, coach Phil Jackson and (current Goldens State Warriors coach) Steve Kerr, not to mention a parade of sports journalists and luminaries such as Barack Obama.

Jordan was a pretty unflawed sportsman - though there were some interesting detours, there was not much in the way of palpable failure. I think I probably like my sportspeople to fail a bit more, but I appreciated that this doc didn't try to shoehorn failure in when there was none.