The Last Dance’s Missed Step

Predictably, I’m hooked. Four episodes into its 10-episode run, The Last Dance on ESPN is proving to be must-watch television. Great memories. Unforgettable characters. Horace Grant’s succinct, profane summary of the Detroit Pistons’ petulant walk-off after being swept by the Bulls in the 1991 conference finals. Dennis Rodman getting the green light from Phil Jackson, mid-season, to go on a 48-hour bender in Vegas. Countless electrifying highlights of Michael Jordan in his prime. For any basketball fan – and especially a Bulls fan – this is watching sports pornography. What’s not to like?

Actually, I do have one small beef with The Last Dance, and I think those of you who are from Chicago, grew up in Chicago, or lived in Chicago at any point before or during the Jordan years will understand. So far, at least, The Last Dance has failed to capture Michael Jordan’s enormous impact on the City of Chicago’s image and its citizenry’s collective self-esteem. MJ turned out to be a six-time NBA champion, zillion-time All-Star, Olympic champion, and the greatest-of-all-time at his sport. But before he was any of those things – and while he was building his legacy – he was our superstar.

I’ve seen some quibbling, critical reviews of the series – typically from those who acknowledge Michael Jordan’s status as Basketball Jesus, cultural icon, marketing phenomenon and all that, but clearly aren’t enamored of Michael Jordan the Person. One described Jordan as a 57-year-old with a paunch who – sadly – cannot let go of decades-long grudges. (On that charge, I find him guilty, though I’m not sure it’s so sad – the paunch or the grudges.) Another remarked that the series is too wed to telling the story from Jordan’s point of view. To that, I say “What? You want to hear more from Scott Burrell and Jud Buechler?” Call me crazy, but I am far more interested in Jordan’s perspective than Luc Longley’s.

Yet another scribe suggested Jordan only agreed to allow extensive access because he saw LeBron James as a threat to his status as the GOAT. Frankly, I don’t much care why Jordan agreed to sit down for hours and hours of interviews – I’m glad he did it. If you’ve seen the excellent 30-for-30 feature on the 1985 Bears, you saw an incredibly poignant story angle focused on Buddy Ryan, the team’s defensive coordinator. By the time the cameras rolled, Ryan was a dying man who had lost the ability to communicate much at all, let alone tell stories. The love his former players had for Ryan, and the love he had for them, came screaming out of the television. But man, what I would give to hear Buddy Ryan tell stories about Hampton and Singletary and McMichael and Dent and the Fridge. So yeah – I’m fine with lots of MJ in this series, and relegating his supporting cast to supporting roles.

Chicago Basketball B.M. (Before Michael)

Pre-Jordan, professional basketball in Chicago was more or less a wasteland. The Chicago Bulls were actually the third NBA franchise to call Chicago home. The Stags (1946-50), Packers and Zephyrs (1961-63) had failed to stick, but the NBA awarded the city an expansion franchise in 1966. The Bulls, coached by Chicago prep and University of Illinois great Johnny “Red” Kerr, actually made the playoffs – the first time an expansion franchise had done so in its first season. The Bulls first draft pick was the legendary Dave Schellhase of Purdue, a 6-3 guard who played in 73 games for the team and scored fewer points per game (2.8) than he had functioning limbs (presumably, 4). The initial success did not last. By 1968, the city was sufficiently disinterested in the Bulls that one of their home games was contested before 891 fans, and some “home” games were played in a far western suburb – Kansas City, Missouri.

In the mid-1970s, the Bulls put together a pretty decent team, and they were the first team to break my heart and make my nine-year-old self cry. Featuring Jerry Sloan, Norm Van Lier, Chet “The Jet” Walker, and Bob “Butterbean” Love, the 1974-75 Bulls took the eventual NBA champion Golden State Warriors to seven games in the conference finals, but lost. To this day, I hate Rick Barry and his silly underhanded free throw style – the one he used to make better than 90 percent that year. I recall the sting of that loss if it happened yesterday. After the game, I retired to my room, pulled the covers over my head, and cried myself to sleep. I had been initiated into the fraternity of disappointed Chicago sports fans.

That Bulls squad, coached by Dick Motta, dribbled off a cliff the next season. They went 24-58. Motta was out, and the forgettable Ed Badger replaced him. This began a dark, dark time in Bulls history. Playing mostly to empty seats at the Chicago Stadium, the Bulls teams in the eight years leading up to Jordan’s arrival in 1984 were most remembered for bad basketball and consuming copious amounts of cocaine (if The Last Dance has it right). This was my team, though. As I staggered through adolescence, I rode with the A-Train, Artis Gilmore – he of the creaky knees and gigantic Afro. The A-Train was 7-2, a bruising lefty with a blacksmith’s touch, and the best center in team history. Incredibly – given the weight of having been a Bull – he ended up in the Hall of Fame. The only reason he was a Bull at all was that the team drafted him #1 overall when the American Basketball Association folded and the NBA held a dispersal draft to claim players from the teams that were not being merged into the league. The Kentucky Colonels’ loss turned out to be the Bulls’ gain. Probably my favorite Bull of the Dark Ages was Reggie Theus, a flashy gunner from UNLV who was basically a thoroughbred running around with donkeys.

Trivia Question 1: In the 1977 NBA draft, the Bulls selected two players from the Atlantic Coast Conference who had played for the US Olympic basketball team in 1976. Who were they and what schools did they attend?

Trivia question brought to you by the one true team

The NBA draft in 1979 proved to be something of a bottom. The Bulls’ ineptitude had earned them the right to flip a coin with the Los Angeles Lakers for the first overall pick. The Bulls lost the flip, and the consolation prize was David Greenwood of UCLA. The Lakers took a guy named Earvin Johnson out of Michigan State. Went by the name Magic. That worked out okay for the Lakers. As the Greenwood Tree took root, in 1982 the Bulls drafted Quintin Dailey out of the University of San Francisco in Round 1. Dailey, a reasonably good player, was most memorable for his nickname, “San Quintin.” Apparently, a few months before the Bulls drafted him, Dailey had been accused of sexually assaulting a resident assistant at USF. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received probation, dodging any time in the penitentiary that inspired the nickname he could not shake. Decent folk – and even some local sportswriters – pilloried the Bulls’ selection of Dailey.

Eventually, the A-Train was shipped to San Antonio and the Bulls hit “re-set” for what seemed like the 15th time in my 17 years on Earth. In the six seasons pre-Jordan, the Bulls won an average of 30 games a year – or precisely 36.7 percent of the time. On the good news front, tickets to their games could be fetched for a song. That would change.

The Little School By The El Tracks

While Chicago professional basketball was in a dismal state pre-Jordan, Chicago was home to a powerhouse college program. Coach Ray Meyer’s DePaul squad, playing initially in 5,000-seat Alumni Hall at Belden and Sheffield, proved that the public would pay attention to winning basketball. DePaul built its program largely by recruiting the suburbs. In 1974, the Demons added Proviso East’s Joe “The Godfather” Ponsetto, Thornton’s Randy Ramsey, and Hersey’s Dave Corzine to an already decent squad. The next year, the Demons added Thornton’s Curtis Watkins and a rangy guard from East Orange, N.J. named Gary Garland.  The table had been set. (Later in life, Garland, whose nickname was “The Music Man,” toured as a backup singer for his half-sister, a modestly talented gal named Whitney Houston.)

In 1979, Chicago’s own version of Michael Jordan arrived in Lincoln Park in the person of Westinghouse High’s Mark Aguirre. A 6-6 forward with hands Coach Ray once described as being as large as toilet seats, Aguirre was the best pure scorer I ever saw play college basketball. As a teenager whose dad wisely bought DePaul season tickets when Aguirre was a freshman, I worshiped Mark Aguirre. (So much so that I forgave him for being a Piston later in life.) As a freshman, Aguirre joined a veteran Demons squad and led it to the Final Four, losing to Larry Bird’s Indiana State team by two points. Between that year and 1983-84 – the six-year run-up to Jordan’s arrival – the Demons were 153-27 (an .850 winning percentage). It’s no wonder that DePaul regularly drew crowds of more than 15,000 after moving to the Rosemont Horizon – the House that Mark Built. Meanwhile, the Bulls struggled to fill half of the lower level at the old Chicago Stadium.

After building the program largely with suburban kids, Meyer turned to the Chicago Public League to take his program to the next level. In addition to Aguirre, he recruited Carver’s Terry Cummings, King’s Teddy Grubbs, and Skip Dillard and Bernard Randolph from Westinghouse. I still can hear PA announcer Jim Riebandt’s spirited introduction of DePaul’s Chicago Public League-dominated starting five … “from Chicago King …,” “from Chicago Carver …,” and of course, “from Chicago Westinghouse.  Number 24.  Mark.  Aguirre.” Still gets me pumped.

Naturally, because it was a Chicago team of my youth/adolescence, the Demons underachieved. I absorbed another memorable gut punch in March 1981. My Dad let me skip school, and he and  I climbed into his baby blue Lincoln Continental and road-tripped to watch top-ranked DePaul in (we assumed) the first two rounds of the NCAA tourney in Dayton, Ohio. Alas, in one of the biggest upsets in tournament history, DePaul lost to St. Joseph’s at the buzzer, 47-46. A completely forgettable guy named John Smith made an uncontested layup at the buzzer. Aguirre put on headphones and left the arena in tears, walking all the way back to the hotel in his uniform. His supernova college career was over just like that – he was the first overall pick in NBA draft a couple months later. My Dad and I stayed for the second game (eventual national champion Indiana dismantled Maryland), and made the 1,000-mile drive back to Chicago the next morning. Crushed.

Air Jordan Arrives

There was a bridge of sorts between that DePaul program and Michael Jordan’s Bulls in the person of Dave Corzine. Corzine turns out to have been at DePaul just prior to Aguirre’s arrival, and also on the scene when Jordan arrived. After a stellar career at DePaul, Corzine was drafted in the first round by the Washington Bullets, made his way to San Antonio, and in the summer of 1982 was traded to the Bulls along with the great Mark Olberding for the A-Train. Corzine was listed at 6-11, but in college he’d played at about 7-3 thanks to a glorious ‘fro of his own. Like a lot of the big men of his era, he was simply an outsized version of a normal human being – he wasn’t the chiseled, super-hero that we see today. Consummate pro, played his 25 minutes and scored his 10 points. Set solid screens, leaned on opposing centers. Nice little mid-range jump shot. In the two years before Jordan arrived in 1984, Corzine scored 14 and 12.2 points per game – his best marks as a pro. He was part of the core of the train wreck of a squad Jordan joined.

That Jordan arrived in Chicago at all is a story often told, and already told in The Last Dance. Corzine and Co. were bad enough that the Bulls earned the third overall pick. The Rockets and Trail Blazers, in need of big men, selected Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon and Kentucky’s Sam Bowie. Jordan fell into the Bulls’ lap, and the rest is history.

There’s no point to me walking through Jordan’s career, but there were two seminal moments for me.  As The Last Dance detailed, Jordan scored 63 points in a playoff loss to the Boston Celtics in 1986 after missing most of the season with a broken foot. I remember the game vividly, because it marked my return to being a sports fan, after a long period during which it seemed like every game I watched was a game I covered as a college journalist. I remember sitting on a couch and enjoying a ridiculous display by Jordan. He relentlessly loped around the court like a colt, contorted himself to score over, under, and around the great Celtics front line. That was the day I thought to myself, this guy is really something special. And I pinched myself – he actually plays for my team.

Trivia Question 2 – Which Bulls’ player threw the inbounds pass to Michael Jordan that led to The Shot, and where did he play in college?

trivia question brought to you by the one true team

The second MJ moment, for me, was The Shot – the dagger of a buzzer-beating jumper in  the deciding Game 5 of the first round in 1989 playoffs. Of course, Jordan hit that shot over Craig Ehlo to give the Bulls a 101-100 win, leaped about 14 feet into the air, and pumped his fist wildly as his teammates mobbed him and the Cleveland fans stood in silence. That was the first inkling that Jordan could not only shine spectacularly as an individual, but that he could will a team to win.

Move Over, Al Capone

By the time the 1990s rolled around, and certainly by the time of the 1997-98 season on which The Last Dance is focused, any Chicagoan traveling just about anywhere on Earth was almost certain to get something like this, in one accent or another:  “You’re from Chicago? Ahhhh – Michael Jordan!!”  By anywhere on Earth, I mean Europe, Asia, even Alabama or New Mexico. Jordan had become an international icon. If you were from Chicago, Jordanphiles from everywhere – and obviously, there were lots – envied you merely because you happened to live where Jordan played. “Chicago” no longer conjured up images of Prohibition era gangsters and the rat-tat-tat of their machine guns, but of the most dynamic, graceful, dominant athlete in the world.

Arriving on the heels of the Dark Ages of Bulls’ basketball, Jordan elevated the franchise to heights no one could have imagined. Wildest dreams? Nope – way, way beyond our wildest dreams. Remember, this was the franchise of Coby Dietrick and Ricky Sobers and Tom Boerwinkle. Of Granville Waiters and Leon Benbow and Sedale Threatt. Fine fellows and excellent ballers, for sure – but players who played on teams for whom the playoffs were an inconvenient and unwelcome delay from the start of the summer.

Not only did he lift the franchise, but Jordan lifted an entire population’s self-esteem. That he came, in a short time, to symbolize and represent all that was good about Chicago is a little bit ironic. After all, Jordan was from Wilmington, North Carolina. Though Jordan played in Chicago, became famous in Chicago, opened restaurants in Chicago, and raised his first family in Chicago, Jordan was not from Chicago. Jordan was not Aguirre, or Cummings, or Isiah Thomas, or Doc Rivers. They were from Chicago (or, in Rivers’ case, Maywood). MJ just played here because Portland had to have Sam Bowie and his brittle legs. As it turned out, MJ was better at basketball than all of them. And he put their town on his back and took all of us for an unforgettable ride.

Chicago’s reaction when Jordan left was interesting – a collective shrug. We didn’t really care that he found it necessary to come out of retirement and putter around with the Wizards for a couple of  years. I could not have cared less. Jordan was mine when he was at his greatest. His career ended, as far as I am concerned, with the pose in Utah after nudging Bryon Russell – ever so slightly – to free himself for a jumper that sealed a sixth title. (I have a feeling we’ll see that shot at some point in The Last Dance.) I was not the least bit bitter when Jordan decided to play for a team other than the Bulls. He’d earned the right to do whatever he wanted. I hardly watched, not because it bothered me, but because our time together had ended. I don’t even recall being very upset that the dynasty was (maybe) ushered to an early end by Bulls’ management, personified in the series as GM/Punching Bag Jerry Krause. Let’s face it, Pippen needed to get paid. Phil’s Zen act was wearing a little thin. MJ was not getting younger. And the two ends of Dennis Rodman’s candle were converging. Did the team have the right to lose its title on the court? That can be argued. But I, for one, felt satisfied with the double three-peat.

I have never met Michael Jordan in person, or been anywhere closer to him than in the same arena on the few occasions I was able to see him perform. I share very little in common with him – apart from a love of basketball, golf, and (to a lesser extent I think) casinos. But somehow, for some odd reason, I felt entitled to take more than a small measure of pride in the simple fact that he and I – and millions of others – shared a city.

A Missed Step, Or A Lost Cause?

Thankfully, The Last Dance – and not the Tiger King – will be the Covid-19 series I’ll remember best. Like any documentary that covers a lot of ground, viewers will quibble with things left out. My point is this:  the producers have missed (so far, at least) capturing Jordan’s impact on my hometown, Chicago. And they’ve missed deeply exploring the impact he had on civic pride and a city’s self-esteem. When Jordan arrived in 1984, the last championship any Chicago team had won was in 1963, when the Bears won the NFL title. The Bears would win a Super Bowl before MJ would get the Bulls to the promised land, but Jordan was the best thing that ever happened to Chicago sports, with apologies to many who were great – but not as great.

There are bits and pieces of The Last Dance that convey the Dark Ages of Bulls’ basketball, and even the footage of Jordan’s rookie season shows an ocean of empty seats at the Stadium. We heard Michael dish about the cocaine, booze, and women his teammates soaked up on road trips when he was a rookie. We’ve seen plenty of footage of parades and celebrations and adoring crowds – and we’ll see more as the series unfolds.

But what the producers missed is something that is not easily captured and communicated:  the story of how a singular athlete lifted up not just a teammate, or a team, or an entire franchise – but changed the perception and self-image of an entire city.

He is the greatest player of all time. He is maybe the most ruthless competitor to ever wear sneakers. He is a marketing force. He is a cultural icon. He’s all of the things that
The Last Dance highlights. But during the years that really mattered – during that glorious span of 14 years – he was all ours.

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Answers to Trivia Questions: 

Q1: In 1977, the Bulls selected Duke’s Tate Armstrong in the first round, and Maryland’s Steve Sheppard in the second. Both played on the gold-medal winning 1976 U.S. Olympic team. Seven of the 12 players on that team were from the ACC. 

Q2: Brad Sellers of Ohio State inbounded the ball. The highlight of his career.

answers provided by the one true team