The Last Dance and The Danger of an Agreed Upon Fantasy Presented as Reality

ESPN's much anticipated 10- part documentary “The Last Dance" was just about everything anyone could ask from a doc and more - if what you prize in documentaries is story, revlations and entertainment. It was riveting from start to finish, funny, insanely quotable, and a much more inviting portrait than I would've expected from its subject the notoriously introverted, and reclusive Michael Jordan. It was a fascinating character study not only of Jordan, but of his teammates, bosses, of the Bulls organization, and ultimately of us the audience. But, it is also undoubtedly a fiction of sorts, and one that we all engaged in, one that America frequently engages in, and I found myself troubled by the response to one particular aspect of Jordan's philosophical approach to the game. About mid-way through the documentary Jordan goes back to make his case regarding why it was that he feels he acted the way he did during his tenure with the Bulls, and why he won't apologize for it …

The statement was indeed emotional, and it was clear that Jordan meant what he was saying and that it was a still unresolved source of hurt, but it is still nonetheless a fiction Jordan relied upon to give himself the competitive edge he needed. We should absolutely NOT play that way, work that way, or act that way. It is a fiction the Bulls co-opted and cooperated with in order to make sure that their most prized asset could be his best self but it truly only contributed to Michael Jordan's greatness not to anyone else's. It was fascinating but not surprising to watch the reactions to this statement from not only his teammates on screen, but the audience watching in Twitter who had helped make the doc a must-see event. There was a range of responses, but it wasn’t a large one, and many seemed to support Jordan in his thinking. Others didn’t say anything, even fewer interrogated it.

Reading Phenomology ( a kind of approach to philosophy rather than a philosophical stance or position) it's almost immediately recognizable that a fundamental aspect of human civilization is an agreed upon reality. We have to agree upon what a stop sign looks like, what its signitifers are, what it means, and what its function is. If a group of us dont, it endangers others. The problem is, like most things that have evolved, much of our agreed-upon realities today have little to do with our survival and more to do with helping to justify perverted states of existence like inequality, or rape culture, or various forms of abuse. In other cases it's not so much that it is used to necessarily or directly justify as much as it is improperly correlated with a result rather than a consequence. For example in M Night Shyamalan's recent film “Split" it would not be a reach to say the supposition by the end of the movie is a very precarious, but often repeated notion that abuse makes us stronger people. This is directly extended from the idea that pain makes us better. A fair but now perverted notion found implemented in society prolifically from sport to boot camp. Pain though, is different from abuse, and abuse is what was inflicted upon Anya Taylor-Joy's character in Split, and what Michael Jordan in certain cases inflicted upon his teammates. Pain I believe is an essential and natural component to life directly tied to joy. There could not be one if you never knew the other. Most biological processes involve some form of violence and what could be construed as painful if the objects they were inflicted upon felt what is known as pain ( for all we know maybe they do). In order to make a beautiful garden we must tear and rip from the earth in order to plant the seeds . The lush soil found in places like Hawaii which makes for the exquisite greenery is in part due to the ash of the destructive force known as volcanoes. A human example would be that when I get down on the floor and do push-ups and ab workouts it causes me a great deal of pain but that subsequently leads to the joy of seeing gains. The agreed-upon acknowledgement of this experience leads to the commonality of the expression "No pain no gain". The more common the expression becomes, the more relayed it becomes, the more malleable and flexible it becomes. This becomes a problem because it is actually a rigid concept that best serves the master it belongs to, which is that of fitness. This flexibility, this movement into other realms foreign to it, ( the workplace, relationships ) starts to change its composition overtime, and the more shorthand it becomes, the more the words themselves begin to take on new meaning. They are now open (outside of the bubble and the safety of the realm in which they belong to) to dangerous infidels or invaders like misinterpretation, misconstruing, and conflation. To be specific, pain can become synonymous with abuse. Ignoring the most important distinction between the two, that one is a natural state of things, a natural occurrence, and/or consequence, the other is an act of inflicting the state upon another being. Slavery, Patriarchy, Capitalism, can all be said to contain elements of this position. Torture quite stubbornly supposes that information can be gained from the act of inflicting large amounts of pain, despite little evidence to support it…

These two ideologies stem from the same branch, and I would be remiss to ignore the fact that this is a distinctively male branch. My own personal theory ( one capable of being as off base as Jordan’s) being that it is women who are inherently, biologically, and then of course socially connected and indoctrinated to pain through the various processes of their body ( birth or the menstrual cycle ) and of their existence in a Patriarchal society where they are othered. Being so intimately familiar with pain, they tend to not obsessed with it. It is not dissimilar from the idea espoused by those who live in the hood that they don’t need to glorify it, because they live it (though this too can be interrogated as to its veracity). Women have no need to be curious about pain, because it is such a part of their existence and without curiosity there can hardly be obsession. Kay Wicker writing about what she grasped from Toni Morrison's books wrote …

““We make something out of our pain, we do not let it fester, because we have no use for it, whatsoever.” -Toni Morrison Taught Me Many Things but One Thing Changed My Life”

In her Essay on Beyonce's “Lemonade” bell hooks writes definitively...

“Violence does not create positive change.”

It's important to note this distinction and this difference, Men, who know very little about pain in their lives and are much more sensitive to it than women, are as concerned with it as white people are about crime. Curious about it to the point of obsession. Not knowing it and not having it be a part of our daily lives, it would seem in order to satisfy this curiosity we become either sadist or masochist or both. I want y'all to keep in mind this is not saying that a woman cannot be a sadist or a masochist, it is simply saying that it is definitely not fetishized as a part of the experience of womanhood like it it is men's, even though they are much better at dealing with it, and much more used to feeling it in all its various forms. Many of men's ritualistic activities are concerned with, and centered around inflicting or absorbing pain as a foundational principle, whether in sport or rights of passage. Historically or present day.

I say all this as a critique and an interrogation of one of the more problematic ideologies that I saw spring forth from the documentary. I saw people who even like to concern themselves with social justice espousing these views and sharing these views with Michael Jordan. Without thinking about what it is ultimately that he's saying. Which ultimately considering what he was doing is this : that abuse is somehow a necessary component to greatness, to getting the best out of people. This becomes important to interrogate because Amazon exists and one of the key components of white patriarchal capitalism seems to be abusing and exploiting a workforce in order to get the optimum amount of gain. Sports after all is commonly spoken of as a metaphor for life, so that many of life's lessons can supposedly be grafted from the games. But we have to be careful about grabbing so many said lessons from places where on many occasions wanton violence is sanctioned. This is not the Thunderdome folks, and much of what works inside those stadiums and those rings does not work outside of them in the same way torture does not work. Abusing co-workers, subordinates, and potential girlfriends is terrible as an application in life and yet I’ve seen them in many occasions used and trumpeted quite falsely and stubbornly as effective in things like docking pay, and “negging" women.

Here's the thing, Michael Jordan did not become arguably the greatest of all time because he abused other players and on occasion himself. Michael Jordan became the greatest of all time because he had a skill that he worked on tirelessly, (and he was very skilled in the first place) because he was on a team and an organization that wanted to win with people that were knowledgeable and knew how to apply that knowledge in ways that very few people could repeat. It must be understood that the Bulls scouting department like any other all time great team was in peak condition, and in fact it could be argued that whoever made up the department is amongst the greatest scouting department of all time. In effect it seems as though they did not miss, losing one great functioning player and instantly tapping another who was equal to, and on occasion better than the last. They had arguably the greatest coach in basketball and also arguably the greatest coach in sports history in Phil Jackson who understood all of the various egos in his locker room to such an extent that it can hardly be said enough that is quite possible this was his genius, and that it was a singular genius. There is the fact that Jordan came at exactly the right time where his contemporaries were not as good as he was. That he was in fact the best of his class, and those who are considered as his contemporaries were not actually his peers. Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Larry Bird, many of these men had already had established careers by the time Jordan arrived so that they were fading out just as Jordan was ascending. Add to that the changes in media, and media consumption, the meteoric rise of ESPN, and some great business decisions on behalf of Jordan and his partners, and all of these things came together as a perfect storm to make the conditions ripe for Jordan to be thought of in ways that no player before him and very few after him could ever be thought of, if any at all. The facts are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has six rings and he didn't have to abuse his teammates, Larry Bird although also highly competitive himself and possibly a masochist, did not have to abuse his fellow teammates in order to get his three, and LeBron James has three and may very well end with four and Tim Duncan has five and neither engaged in abuse of teammates. If engaged with as the fantasy that it is, then we can be fine with the propaganda and illusion as part of the drama of sport, but when it is treated as some sort of philosophical truth, or objective reality of the pursuit of success and greatness, it is incumbent upon us to demand interrogation and criticism of that idea rather than take it at face value simply because we now see the end result. Racism, sexism, gender essentialism, were born of this kind of laziness. Many of these stem from ( amongst other things) agreed-upon realities that were in fact subjective fantasies meant to explain away phenomenon, processes, and identities, which were complex, difficult to understand, or hard to define, and guess what, the formula for continued and sustained success in sport is complex, difficult to understand, and hard to define. We seem to be little better at finding rational answers than ancient cultures found for why the sun rose in the East and set in the West. Instead concocting potentially harmful and dangerous platitudes that seep their way into other areas of society where they serve masters of oppression.

I believed and empathized with Michael when he broke down in tears over the way in which people have framed his actions during his tenure with the Chicago Bulls. I believe that he feels as though that it was a necessary component to their winning ways, but that does not make it true. What it is, is a reality, he constructed to give himself a competitive edge that was agreed upon by his teammates and the organization in order to satisfy their best asset it's important to make that distinction so that we understand that while it may be a subjective reality it is most certainly not an objective reality and by far the worst reality that anybody should accept. There are many things to appreciate about Michael Jordan, including the sacrifices he would make for himself, and his rigorous work ethic, but the emotional and physical abuse of those around him is definitely not one of them.