The Last Dance

These days, retail is something that happens online while we’re sequestered indoors, leaving the UK’s shopping streets barren and foreboding (like our future outside the EU).  Back in retail’s nineties heyday, our greatest weekend treat was being taken to the Bentalls shopping centre in Kingston for a good old browse.  Of all the pointless branches on its many glistening floors, the enormous Warner Bros Studio Store lives on in my memory as the most extravagant of them all.  A whole shop dedicated solely to merchandise with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck on it.  Looking for a leather jacket with the Tasmanian Devil on it?  They had it in three colours of course.  Among the shiny trinkets and branded apparel, whole displays dedicated to Space Jam loomed large.  My eleven-year-old self wondered what be this mysterious film?  The animated characters I knew, but my Surrey childhood meant that Michael Jordan was an unknown entity to me.  Fast forward twenty-four years to this summer and I still hadn’t seen Space Jam, but everyone at my gym was gushing on about a new Netflix documentary on a basketball dream team with a banging soundtrack.  Not being one for team ball sports, I waited patiently until conversation turned so we could speak about something else.  Months later, I saw that The Last Dance had an IMDb rating of 9.2 and decided I had to watch it, if only to guarantee to myself that I could consume a high-quality boxset after devouring Industry.

I admit that I initially felt some regret at my decision.  Not only was this clearly all about sport, but it was about some very specific things to do with that sport.  Luckily, these were glamorous American sports from abroad, not the endlessly ubiquitous soccer that constitutes half of all “news” in the UK (the other half being articles about why immigrants have ruined your life).  Basketball was even a sport I had seen in real life during a 2012 trip to New York when a beloved pal got us tickets to see the Knicks at Madison Square Gardens.  The oversize foam finger was just one of many highlights, with the speed of play, the high scores and the party atmosphere all making for a very entertaining spot of spectating.  But The Last Dance is all about the Chicago Bulls’ mid-nineties team and their ability to win successive NBA championships.  Our main narrative plays out around the 1998 season with our Bulls going for their sixth title (and second run of hattricks), but each of the ten episodes whizzes back and forth in time to fill in the backgrounds on different players’ careers, the team’s earlier fortunes and their overall approach to the championships they had previously won.  It’s a kind of lottery of early nineties years, but there’s a helpful graphic of a timeline by which to orientate yourself.

Instead of whiplash, though, I was gradually and irresistibly drawn in until I was powerless against a characteristic compulsion to get to the end.  What bolstered the intrigue?  Firstly, the multiple first-hand accounts from key players and onlookers involved at the time, told as pieces to camera with the frankness and the perspective only twentysomething years of intervening life can give you.  Secondly, the footage from the actual time, when a camera crew had unprecedented access to the Bulls’ legendary team, offered further unique insight, as if the whole programme was planned as a follow-up almost a quarter of a century later.  What’s more, for the non-sports fan, you’re excused the commitment of sitting through seasons and seasons of matches and simply shown montage after montage of breath-taking steals, assists, scores and slam dunks.  There’s no other valid response but to be impressed.

Of course, nobody thought to capture the nineties in HD, but the skills still shine through, and there’s some very strong nostalgia at play here.  It seems news readers were always filmed in very close frame, with lead images of their stories’ subjects selected solely for the extent to which they could be deemed unflattering.  Everybody chewed a great deal of gum (though this could be carrying on till now – I have no frame of reference) chomping away on great gobfuls.  Surely there were some bitten cheeks as the players careered up and down the court.  There’s a huge internet trend for people in their thirties to comment and post endlessly about how their lives and indeed the world peaked in the nineties.  The Last Dance corroborates this as I wistfully realised I had missed out on everything at the time.

The tension builds around the epic struggle to win that sixth championship, with my ignorance keeping me genuinely in the dark about what the outcome would be.  Even more captivating, though, is the incredible charismatic personality of Michael Jordan himself, outshone only by his sporting determination, work ethic and competitive spirit.  The Last Dance covers the team effort, but everything comes back to this one-man superstar whose global influence in a world before social media must have come with pressure beyond our imagining, and that’s before you factor in traumatic personal tragedy.  As we arrive at our poignant closing episode, the sense of time passing, of lost youths and changing lives, becomes almost unbearable and you wish that everything could just stand still.  Life is terrifying highs and dizzying lows, so how must it feel if your greatest peaks are in a bygone decade?  It’s moments like this that make you glad never to have achieved anything, as at least then you can write an irreverent weekly blog about other people’s successes and the documentaries that Netflix has made about them.