“The most dominant player in the game.” “Michael Jordan was as good at his job as anyone was at their job, ever, in anything.” “You don't need to be a sports fan to know that this man is superhuman.”
The Last Dance, Netflix's latest unmissable documentary, is a study in the impossible task of putting into words just how good Michael Jordan was at basketball.
Early on in the documentary, which follows the globe-bestriding 1990s Chicago Bulls team as they attempt to win a sixth NBA world championship, Jordan's teammate Steve Kerr is asked what makes the Bulls different to any other basketball dynasty. "The difference is that"—he pauses, looking for a way to say something beyond the obvious, before submitting—"we've got Michael."
The documentary can't escape the event horizon of Jordan's greatness. Its ostensible storylines—an interfering coach, a changing-room war—evaporate in the white heat of the on-court footage. Even to those of us who didn't know beforehand, the answer to the show's central question—"Can he do it again?”—feels like a foregone conclusion.
Like most panegyric, The Last Dance ends up making its subject more distant at the end than they were at the beginning. Fame does this to people. Jordan was “the most famous man on the planet” (or in the US it seemed that way), and the endless scenes of him flanked by adoring crowds, sniping journalists and terminally ill children whose dying wish has been to meet Mike, suggest how oppressive that fame must have been to inhabit. The most penetrating contribution comes from a talking head who says simply, “Michael was competitive at everything. His life was just one big competition."
The language of sports is so desiccated and unfit for the purpose of meaning that this takes a little time to sink in. It turns out to be the documentary's chief insight. Jordan lived to win. He trained all day to win at basketball, then won at basketball. On his days off he played golf (we see him kicking himself after missing a put). In the evenings, even after matches, he played cards late into the night. On plane trips to other cities, after cleaning out his teammates at high-stakes poker, he would walk down the aisles for a hand with the backroom staff. It didn't matter that they were playing for pennies. He wanted their money in his pocket. At one point we see him lose to his eccentric-looking bodyguard at a coin-toss game the two have improvised in the changing rooms. Jordan begs him for a rematch, certain he can get it if he just has one more try.
He needs to be the best. As a college basketball player, Jordan's coach shrugged him off when the young man came to him and said he wanted to be the best player the university had ever seen. Jordan just said, “I'll show you.” And he did.
In The Last Dance this sequence of events happens again and again. Someone questions Jordan's ability, explicitly or implicitly. He responds by crushing them in the next game—often in a humiliating and personal manner. Sometimes even the documentary's talking heads are taken aback. In the most intriguing instance, a victorious opponent puts his arm around him and says, “Nice game, Mike.” Before the next match, Jordan said “In the first half, I'm gonna have what that kid had in the [last] game.”
“Nice game, Mike” was enough to get him going. By that point in his career, the insinuation that any other player was his equal counted as a slight. Jordan scored 36 points in the first half. And the strangest thing of all, is that Jordan admits there was never any incident at all. The player in question never said anything to him. He dramatised what had happened because he needed to find someone to dominate.
The documentary's image of Jordan may not be entirely even-handed. But since it was overseen by the man himself, we can only assume that this desire to crush, even to humiliate the people who stood between him and victory, is entirely sincere. It is the main take-away from the documentary, and the documentary was overseen and signed off by Jordan. All of which implies that this is what Michael Jordan wants you to know about him.
This kind of hyper-competitiveness is very normal among sportsmen. It's not a bad thing at all, though it would be wrong to say it is completely without malice. It's what drives the superhuman feats players perform to satisfy both their and our desire for victory and entertainment. What's unusual in Jordan's case is that it came twinned with a superhuman ability, and together these things allowed him to yoke the course of events to his desires. He could do what he wanted. And what he wanted was to win.
For all our talk of healthy competition, be it in the marketplaces of ideas, money or culture, I don't think most of us encourage competitiveness, for the simple reason that it is so personally destructive for the competitive person. I can't play competitive sports—or cards, or board games, or anything else—because I find losing too painful, too humiliating. I know I'm not the only one.
The Last Dance is an exhilarating work of documentary, and Michael Jordan is—how else to say it—the best to ever do it. But there is something almost painful about seeing a man who, within the bounded-world of the basketball court, exists inside his own life as we would like to be in ours: controlling events from the centre, the authors of our own destinies.
While I was watching, my father sat down to join me for a second. I don't think he was planning to stay and watch. But we sat there in silence, utterly fixated on the beauty of Jordan's movements as he went once again towards his inevitable goal: tongue-out, his face a mask of focus, driving towards the hoop, leaping into the air to simply hang there as men fell away around him, faking a shot, still holding the ball and still hanging in the air, head and shoulders above the rest as the last man disappeared and he gently popped the ball up and round and ever-so-slowly down into the net. When it fell through the basket, my father and I both yelped, as though somehow wounded by what this man had done.
