What will ESPN’s ‘The Last Dance’ reveal about the ’97-’98 Jazz?
The 10-part documentary series on the Chicago Bulls’ final championship season with Michael Jordan covers a lot of ground — including their battles with the Utah Jazz. We’re very curious.
SALT LAKE CITY — The wait is almost over.
After four years in various stages of production, “The Last Dance” is finally premiering on ESPN this Sunday, April 19.
The 10-part documentary series, directed by Jason Hehir (“The Fab Five,” “Andre the Giant”), chronicles Michael Jordan and the ’97-’98 Chicago Bulls as they chased their final NBA title of the Jordan era. It was initially scheduled for a June release, but was moved up since the coronavirus shutdown has postponed all current sporting events.
Pulling from 500 hours of never-before-seen footage from that season, as well as more than 100 recent interviews with teammates, competitors, journalists, models and even former U.S. presidents, “The Last Dance” is likely the most comprehensive video exploration of this historic team.
For Utah Jazz fans, it also holds special significance, as the Jazz battled the Bulls in Jordan’s last two NBA Finals. Fittingly, Jazz alumni John Stockton and Karl Malone are among the hundreds interviewed in “The Last Dance.”
Early reviews say the docuseries is quite revealing about numerous Bulls topics, but there’s a good chance it’ll reveal things about the Jazz, too, given the team’s place in Bulls history. Here are some Jazz-related questions we hope “The Last Dance” answers.
What the heck happened in Game 3?
Five of the six games in the ’97-’98 NBA Finals were decided by five points or less. Game 3 was not one of those games.
The Bulls laid a historical smackdown on the Jazz in Game 3, winning 96-54 — a 42-point walloping that remains the most lopsided win in NBA Finals history.
The Jordan mythos loomed large by 1998. No Western Conference team had ever beaten the Bulls in the finals, or taken the series to a Game 7. However, the Jazz won both games against the Bulls during the ’97-’98 regular season, and the rest of those 1998 finals games were nail-biters. Game 3 was an anomaly. We can’t wait to see what Stockton and Malone say about it.
Fun fact: Stockton was the very last of the 106 people to be interviewed for “The Last Dance.” Hehir told Rolling Stone magazine that Stockton was interviewed only a month ago, right before the U.S. went on coronavirus lockdown.
What did Rodman do in Vegas?
According to early reviews, “The Last Dance” revisits a moment from the ’97-’98 regular season when Jordan “rescued” teammate Dennis Rodman in Las Vegas. Tensions were high among the Bulls that season, as Jordan, Scottie Pippen and head coach Phil Jackson publicly sparred with Bulls ownership (and sometimes with each other). In the regular season, the team gave Rodman permission to visit Vegas for a few days, but he didn’t return on time. So they dispatched Jordan to Vegas to retrieve Rodman personally.
Rodman also partied in Vegas between games in Salt Lake City during the ’97 and ’98 finals. At one point during his ’98 finals bender, the Las Vegas Sun reported that Rodman had more than $20,000 in chips.
“As the night wore on and the sun crept up, members of the entourage slumped into seats at nearby slot machines,” the newspaper reported. “But their bleary-eyed leader remained standing and showed no signs of slowing down.”
“We couldn’t have a society that acted like Dennis,” Jackson told the media a few days later. “Dennis is not a normal person in our society, but he’s great in what he does here.”
There are already some great details out there about this particular Rodman trip. We’re hoping Rodman shares more in “The Last Dance.”
Did Jordan push off?
The world remembers Game 6 of the ’98 finals for “The Last Shot,” as Jordan held his shooting form while watching his series-winning jumper splash through the net. For Jazz fans, though, it’s been remembered as “The Push”: Jordan created space between he and Jazz defender Bryon Russell by nudging Russell with his off hand. It’s been a hotly debated moment for decades now. And since it was the final moment of that historic Bulls season, we know it’ll be explored in “The Last Dance.”
Other reasons to watch
Over the next five weeks, ESPN will air two new episodes of “The Last Dance” back to back every Sunday at 7 p.m. MDT. A cleaner-language version of “The Last Dance” will air concurrently on ESPN2. All episodes will be available on the ESPN app with a subscription, or ESPN.com with a cable login, immediately following the broadcast. For viewers outside the U.S., new episodes will show up on Netflix internationally every Monday at 12:01 a.m. PDT.
Beyond the Utah Jazz stuff, “The Last Dance” promises considerable depth on most other Bulls topics, to a degree we haven’t seen before. The Los Angeles Times reported that the documentary “jumps between the basketball dynasty’s farewell tour and the arc of Jordan’s remarkable career, with detours into the lives of teammates Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman and coach Phil Jackson.”
This choice to expand the documentary’s scope, Hehir said, was to put the team’s achievements in proper context. For however charmed the Bulls’ six NBA titles now seem in hindsight, the realities of those players’ respective upbringings was anything but ideal.
Pippen was the youngest of 12 children, born into poverty in rural Arkansas, and was not offered any college scholarships. Rodman was raised by a single mother in one of Dallas’ poorest neighborhoods and was either benched or cut by all his high school basketball teams. Their Bulls teammate Steve Kerr, meanwhile, was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and spent most of his childhood in the Middle East — Kerr’s father, who was president of the American University of Beirut, was murdered by a Shia Lebanese militia when Kerr was 18 years old.
“(Kerr) maybe was the toughest guy on their team,” Hehir told Rolling Stone. “I think that the most surprising thing for me was how difficult it is for these guys to get to where they are.”
“The Last Dance,” the Los Angeles Times noted, is “extraordinarily perceptive about celebrity — what makes it, what breaks it, what shapes its character and magnitude.” And all the major players in the Bulls’ final championship season with Jordan achieved a level of celebrity they would have never achieved elsewhere. They changed the NBA — and all of professional sports, really — in a lasting way.
The Undefeated’s Jesse Washington wrote, “But for all his huge dunks, fresh kicks and clutch shots, Jordan’s biggest impact came off the court as he empowered athletes — especially African Americans — to obtain full economic participation in the billions generated by their labor.”
Jordan’s own teammates, though, didn’t enjoy that same leverage yet. Pippen’s yearly salary, for example, never exceeded $4 million during these championship Bulls seasons, while Jordan’s base salary became $30 million. Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause regularly used Pippen as trade bait and even tried moving him to obtain Tracy McGrady with the No. 1 pick in the ’97 NBA draft. In a seeming act of defiance, Pippen delayed getting necessary foot surgery till right before the start of the ’97-’98 season and didn’t play till January — while spending the early part of the season saying he was either going to quit the team right then or after the season.
This didn’t sit well with Pippen’s teammates — yet Jordan, Rodman and Jackson were all on one-year contracts during that final season. Jackson had informed Bulls managing partner Jerry Reinsdorf that the ’97-’98 season would be his last with the Bulls. And Jordan frequently told the media he wouldn’t play for the Bulls unless Jackson was there.
“Let me say this again: I won’t play for another coach,” Jordan told longtime Bulls writer Rick Telander during that season. “If Reinsdorf and the other owners don’t like it, sell the team. … The question is, who’s going to take a step back? Who’s going to flinch? Not me. Even if it means I don’t play anymore. Even that.”
Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times last week, Telander added, “And let me tell you something about Michael. When he says stuff like that, he means it.”
It was a high-pressure, dysfunctional season for that Bulls team, and a championship was hardly a guarantee.
“I’m interested in finding out just how messed up it was behind the scenes, as this was on the brink of being disassembled,” journalist J.A. Adande recently noted on ESPN’s “Around the Horn” program. “I’m interested in seeing how much worse it was than we knew.”
From what we can tell, Jordan doesn’t hold back in “The Last Dance.” Hehir said he got nearly eight hours of interview time with Jordan for the documentary. Generally, Jordan has chosen his words carefully in recent years. In “The Last Dance,” though, he reportedly lets loose on a variety of subjects — including theories about his notorious gambling binges, his hate for Detroit Pistons rival Isaiah Thomas, and conspiracy theories about his own father’s murder. “The Last Dance,” it seems, delivers the unfiltered Jordan-on-Jordan commentary that fans have been desiring for decades now.
“I wasn’t around 22 years ago, so I can’t tell you whether he’s mellowed or not,” Hehir said, “but I do know that when you hand him an iPad and you play him a clip from something that happened 30 years ago, you can see that fire in his eyes again.”