A primary manifestation of the “The Last Dance” documentary—but hardly news—was the glorification of Michael Jordan’s ferocious competitiveness. All the subplots aside—Jordan’s soaring dominance, the Chicago Bulls team dynamics, the spoils of victory—front and center was Jordan’s embodiment of the historical romanticizing of every sport’s success obsession: The zero-sum I-gain-by-your-loss addiction.
Over and over, we saw Jordan as the “hypercompetitive weirdo,” as labeled in a New York Magazine review; as what The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner found to be “borderline pathological” in contests of any nature. Slate’s Joel Anderson reasonably judged that Jordan was “portrayed as a distant, win-at-all-costs guy, abusive to teammates.”
Chicago reporter Sam Smith had established as much with his 1992 book, “The Jordan Rules.” So, no surprise there. It in fact is a cliché in all sports: Doing anything—anything—to win is admirable. And, by contrast, losers lose because they don’t care enough; don’t give their all; are not “competitors.” As if sheer ability wasn’t the essential ingredient. As if the runner-up hadn’t lent just as much commitment to the struggle.
“When people see this,” Jordan says during “The Last Dance,” “they’re going to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ But that’s you. Because you’ve never won anything.”
That Jordan was a basketball wizard, plenty worthy of spectator awe, is immune to overstatement. His hoops contemporary Larry Bird once called him “God disguised as Michael Jordan.” Jerry West, among the previous generation’s stars, said Jordan was “the modern-day Babe Ruth.”
There were revelatory NBA performers before Jordan—Elgin Baylor and Julius Erving, just to cite two with similar styles of suspended-animation flights and fluid creativity; singular talents such as Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar—but Jordan’s mesmerizing skill unquestionably ascended to another level.
And he certainly filled record books: Six league championships. Ten times the NBA’s leading scorer. Five times regular-season MVP. Records for the highest career scoring averages in the regular season (30.12 points per game) and playoffs (33.45). And on and on.
Yet “The Last Dance,” beyond providing some timely nostalgia for a golden NBA era while the current world plague holds live sports in abeyance, felt a lot like Jordan’s need to insist that he could—and would—get the better of any man. Any time. And that such athletic superiority is supremely important to him.
Several commentators have raised an eyebrow over the appearance of “The Last Dance” just when barstool arguments have been put forward for LeBron James’ candidacy as history’s best player. Before the coronavirus pandemic brought this season to a screeching halt, James appeared on his way to the NBA finals for a 10th time. Four more than Jordan had.
Such comparisons dealing with different eras are a fool’s errand. Still, “The Last Dance” deification of Jordan came across as his reminder that he is the sport’s rightful king. NBA fans in an ESPN poll at the documentary’s conclusion agreed—73 percent picked him over James.
That kind of public regard is how Jordan long ago made Nike a global superpower and supplied, along with Bird and Magic Johnson, the glitz that moved Olympic officials to finally welcome NBA pros. It caused Harvard historian and intellectual Henry Louis Gates to proclaim Jordan “the greatest corporate pitchman of all time.”
“The Last Dance,” two decades since Jordan’s retirement as a player, demonstrated that Jordan not only retains the marketing Midas touch, but that the thing he markets best is himself. The competition goes on.