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They had the best, Michael Jordan, they were writing pages for the history of world sport, they could win the sixth NBA title and they felt that the 1997-1998 season would be the last of the group. The bulls were idolized. The attraction to Michael Jordan, pure talent and magnetism, contained the most suggestive ingredients. His biography, despite being 34 years old that season, was already dense and included episodes as biting as the murder of his father in 1993 and as unusual as his first retirement from basketball to play professional baseball a year later, his obsession with golf. and the game and the dark side of his personality already revealed by Sam Smith, journalist of the Chicago Tribune, in the book Jordan’s rules, published in 1992.
Follow the interior of the locker rooms, offices, hotels and planes with a camera where the supreme work of that star was woven and that team seemed like a utopian dream. But in the fall of 1997, Michael Jordan, coach of Phil Jackson and Chicago franchise owner Jerry Reinsdorf, agreed to allow an NBA Entertainment film crew to accompany the team throughout the season. The 500 hours of unpublished images obtained constitute the raw material for the series of ten episodes. The last Dance (Final release, in the Portuguese version), which premiered on ESPN this Sunday in the United States and on Netflix this Monday in the rest of the world. The title was ready as Phil Jackson had the idea to motivate his players with this perspective, that of a last time, one last dance, as he called it, to culminate the epic with the team’s sixth title. “Michael Jordan and the 1990s Bulls were not only global superstars of the sport, but a global phenomenon,” says series director Jason Hehir.
It was already in the public domain that, despite having won five rings in the last seven years, the situation was explosive within those Bulls. The future of Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman, in the final year of their contracts, was quite uncertain. Almost everyone’s bad relationship and disagreements with Jerry Krause, the managing director, became unsustainable. “Even if you finish 82-0, you won’t continue,” Krause had told Phil Jackson. In the preseason, the coach had warned his players. “Krause said that it is the organizations that win the championships, not the players or the coaches. I signed a New Year contract with the Bulls and I know they have plans to hire another coach for next year, possibly Tim Floyd from Iowa. “Jordan added:” It is a bad way to end an amazing career. “
The emotional factor is latent in the series, which tries to unravel the complexities of that team, the glory and the misery. “It was an incredible opportunity to explore the extraordinary impact of one man and one team,” says Jason Hehir. “For almost three years, we have gone everywhere to present the definitive story of a dynasty that defined that era and to show the human profile of these sports heroes.” More than a hundred protagonists of the time contribute their testimonies to the series, such as Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Steve Kerr, then a member of the Bulls and now a coach of the Golden State, as well as personalities such as Barack Obama, former president. from the United States, a faithful follower of the team.
Michael Jordan cannot hold back his tears when asked if it pays to be so overbearing at the expense of his personal reputation. “Winning has a price,” he says. “And leadership comes at a price. So I dragged people to where they didn’t want to be taken. I challenged them when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates didn’t put up with all the things that I had to put up with. Once you join the team, you should live in a similar way to how I live the game. I was not going to settle for less. If that means you need to tighten the screws a bit, that’s what I did. What I never did was ask them for something I wasn’t doing. “
Money and loyalty
The erosion of relationships between Krause and the cast reached such a point that Michael Jordan revealed in an interview: “I love the city, but I will only play if I go to Phil. One thing is for sure: money won’t keep me in the game. Never Simply change the CEO and let Phil be the CEO and the coach. Krause? I don’t want to start a war here. I’m just saying that sometimes it’s hard to work for an organization that doesn’t show loyalty to us. ” They didn’t listen to him.
Faced with all the controversies and bad prospects, the group remained focused on obtaining the sixth title. “All of that shouldn’t have been a topic of conversation. Unfortunately it was. But once you hit the court, it didn’t matter. It was not blurred. We maintained a commitment to ourselves: to win the title. And then we would evaluate the options. “They reached that goal, the sixth title in eight years, the last of that group. They didn’t renew their contract with Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan retired and the Bulls were out of the playoffs for the next six seasons, and they never played a final again.
The basket of your life
The Bulls achieved that sixth crown in 1998 in a surprising way. They concluded the regular phase in the first position of the Eastern Conference, with 62 victories. Its balance was identical to that of Utah Jazz, leader in the Western Conference. In the playoffs, they swept the Nets and Charlotte. In the regional final, Reggie Miller and Rik Smits’ Pacers took the duel through Game 7. But Jordan, with 28 points, and Kukoc, with 21, sentenced the ticket to the final. The Utah Jazz of John Stockton and Karl Malone were waiting for us, waiting for a rematch of the previous year’s final, resolved 4-2, after two very similar games at the end of the series. In late 1998 it was again. The Bulls lost the first game, but chained three wins. Jazz won his fifth game by two points. The sixth was played in Salt Lake City. A great opportunity for the team led by Jerry Sloan to force the seventh game. He failed to.
Jordan’s magic, at the height of his career, prevented him. A Stockton triple with 41 seconds left Jazz ahead (86-83). The rest was left to MJ. He made a basket with 37 seconds remaining (86-85). He stole a ball from Karl Malone with 18 remaining. He crossed the court, dribbled, braked, stopped in front of the ring and, 6.6 seconds from the end, scored a basket for history (86-87). There were still 5.2 seconds left for one last action. Stockton failed.
“I don’t know if anyone could write such a dramatic script,” said Phil Jackson. “Babe Ruth, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali … They defined the American sport of this century [o XX]. Now, there’s Michael Jordan, “wrote the Boston Globe. Nothing and nobody managed to convince him to change his mind. Not even the more than 300,000 fans who, 36 hours later, celebrated their triumph at Chicago’s Grant Park. “Other year!” They screamed in chorus. But MJ, at 35, retired a second time. Three years later, in 2001, he returned to the courts with one of the worst teams in the NBA at the time, the Washington Wizards. At age 40, he played the last game of his career on April 16, 2003.
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