Michael Jordan documentary? No thank you
(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)
Twitter had its first “let’s watch this together and have fun” event in a while Sunday night (the last one I remember was Sharknado 2 in 2014, and man that was a different kind of fun, but it was so much fun). Everybody got together to watch the first part of The Last Dance, ESPN’s Michael Jordan documentary. There were so many tweets about Obama being a “former Chicago resident,” Scottie Pippen saying the F-word, and so many other things.
Meanwhile, I played card games with my wife and brother-in-law.
This is not in any way meant to be a downer to what someone enjoys. If you love watching the Jordan documentary, go nuts. I wouldn’t ever dream of taking it away from you. But — and maybe this is actually a personal failing — I don’t care about it. That is true not only for Jordan specifically — this dude has been covered so much for so long in so many different ways that I can’t imagine learning something new about him — and for documentaries in this style more generally.
Obviously, this isn’t universal, but it applies more than it doesn’t: The very thing that makes athletes, especially the best athletes, as good as they are is exactly what makes many of them uninteresting (for me) documentary subjects. You know what makes a great athlete? “Man,” the athlete said, “I really wanted to be good at my sport. So I worked really hard, and I got really good. But that wasn’t good enough, so I worked even harder and got even better.”
The beats change, but that’s the crux of most “here’s a great athlete” documentaries, and only the specifics change. Jordan’s legendary competitiveness drove him on golf courses, in baseball fields, and at casinos. Larry Bird would talk trash. Barry Bonds would stop at nothing. These guys are historically interesting athletes, and by and large that makes (again, for me) historically uninteresting people.
I have watched shockingly (if you know my sports affinity) few 30 for 30 documentaries. 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic, was definitely well-made and well-acted … and told us almost nothing we didn’t already know.
I was in a speech class my freshman year in college, and our first speech assignment was to give a one-minute talk about the person we “most” wanted to meet in the world. There were a lot of presidents and athletes and other influential people. I stood up and told the story of Alton Davis. And who is Alton Davis? No idea. Twenty minutes before class, I called my mom and asked her to open her phone book to a random page, a random name, and tell me who it was.
Until that moment, Jackie Robinson had actually been my choice. But if we’re picking one person, why would I want to spend more time with a person I’ve literally been learning about my whole life? What would I learn from Jackie I didn’t already know? Meanwhile, Alton Davis was a blank slate. Maybe he was boring. Maybe he was a virulent racist. Maybe any number of things, but the point is that I would definitely learn something I didn’t know before, something that was wildly unlikely with any of the famous potential subjects of that assignment.
(I got an A.)
If you enjoy the Michael Jordan documentary, by all means watch it and tweet it and have a ball. I’m clearly in the minority here. But personally, I don’t find anything that captivating in watching a multi-hour documentary on a subject that I could learn just as much about by streaming old episodes of SportsCenter.