‘The Last Dance’ shows Reinsdorf as villain breaking up the champs
For those of us who covered pro basketball in the 1980s and ‘90s, ESPN’s sweeping docuseries, “The Last Dance,” is a feast of nostalgia, but there’s not much revelation. We knew Michael Jordan was a very difficult teammate. Sam Smith mined that topic in his 1992 book, Jordan Rules. So the Chicago Bulls partied with cocaine? I’m not shocked. Those who covered the team spoke of white lines from the front office to the locker room. They were Houston Rockets North.
And it was no secret that Jordan and Scottie Pippen detested general manager Jerry Krause. The mystery was why Jerry Reinsdorf adored Krause, valuing him over Phil Jackson. So far, after two episodes, ESPN hasn’t answered that question. Krause, who died in 2017, is cited as a shrewd judge of athletic talent who assembled all the complementary parts. But he bitterly resented Jackson – and even Jordan – receiving more credit than the short and stout front-office executive.
And yet, while exposing few secrets, this series mesmerizes as we see how much the game has changed and how Jordan changed it. In 1984 the NBA was center-centric. Jordan, 6-foot-6 guard, was No. 3 in that year’s draft, behind 6-11 Akeem (later Hakeem) Olajuwon and 7-1 Sam Bowie.
The future of the sport was thought to be Twin Towers, the prototype being Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson in Houston. It seemed so logical: big athletes over small athletes.
Even after Jordan won his third of 11 Most Valuable Player trophies, Olajuwon told me he considered himself the better player. “If we’re going one on one, I win. I’m bigger and stronger, and he can’t jump over me.”
But now we see the center position reduced almost to irrelevance. Houston, Olajuwon’s team, doesn’t even have one. It’s no longer a game of height, but of length of shot. Jordan was part of that transition, but he was not the best shooter of his era. He was a career 32.7% on 3-pointers, compared to Larry Bird’s 37.6%. To show you how the game is evolving, Jordan for his career was less accurate on 3’s than the notoriously gun-shy Ben Simmons (33.3%) is now.
“The Last Dance” so far has focused more on off-court drama than athletic brilliance. I was expecting more Air Jordan; it was levitation that set him apart from anyone who has played the game. Hopefully we’ll see more verticality in Episodes 3 and 4 that air Sunday night.
Nowadays there’s no disputing that Jordan was the greatest player of his day. Reportedly, his reason for releasing “The Last Dance” is to push back against the notion that LeBron James could supplant him as basketball’s G.O.A.T.
But I remember when the consensus of basketball writers was that Magic Johnson was better overall than Jordan. Johnson was praised as a facilitator, while Jordan was branded as a selfish ball-hog. The docuseries emphasizes Jordan being the consummate defender, but that was rarely said while he was still playing.
The most newsworthy part of the first two episodes was Jordan’s criticism of Scottie Pippen for delaying foot surgery at the end of the next-to-last dance. “Scottie was wrong in that scenario,” Jordan said. “He could’ve gotten his surgery done as soon as the season was over and been ready for the next season.”
But aside from Jordan, the rest of the Bulls apparently supported Pippen’s protest of Reinsdorf paying him a salary of $2.7 million, compared to Jordan’s $36 million.
Pippen, who Jordan called “my greatest teammate ever,” rejoined the team in January 1998. He played 44 games and was instrumental in the dynasty’s sixth and final championship.
Reinsdorf, now 84, offered Pippen a contract that was so parsimonious that the owner advised the player not to sign it. But Pippen wanted to buy a home for his parents (his father was disabled by a stroke) and was unwilling to hold out.
Reinsdorf comes across as Scrooge for not rewriting the contract, but that was a time when athletes in all sports had to live by whatever they signed. After all, if their play declined, they weren’t seeking a downward revision.
That said, Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago White Sox as well as the Bulls, was and still may be in a class by himself when it comes to strong-arming his labor force. He designed the disastrous strategy by Major League Baseball to crush its union in the 1990s. That effort led to the canceling of the 1994 World Series.
“The Last Dance” presents a world very much apart from today’s. For sportswriters, it was better back then. We had the best seats in the house, between the benches of the opposing teams. It was almost like being in the game. Players would hurdle the press table. I could overhear coaches casting aspersions on opponents: “Is Harris in the game? Post him up.”
By the late ‘90s, the press was shoved upstairs, and our courtside seats were rented for hundreds of dollars a night. Practices became strictly private affairs. In the ‘80s they were open to all media. In those days, superstars such as Jordan, Bird and Johnson were very accessible before and after practices and games. There were rarely podiums except in the playoffs.
The docuseries reminds us of NBA arenas, including Chicago’s before Jordan, that had many rows of empty seats. David Stern, who became commissioner in 1984, believed the seats would be filled if the league creatively marketed its stars, not just in America but globally. Too bad Stern died in January and didn’t get to see “The Last Dance”. He above all others would have loved it.
