Henry O'Brien
During the heart of the COVID-19 lockdowns, sports fans, myself certainly included, were starved. Without any live sports, we tried to find anything to watch that could fill the void. I got so desperate that I watched live marble races on YouTube. Fortunately, director Jason Hehir and all-time NBA legend Michael Jordan came to save the day with the 10-part docuseries, The Last Dance.
The documentary depicts Jordan’s career and his 1997-98 season, his final one with the Chicago Bulls. Originally, The Last Dance was supposed to release during the summer of 2020, but it moved up due to COVID-19. And boy did sports fans need it.
With a boatload of interviews from not just Jordan but every living member of the ’90s Bulls and so many more celebrities and star athletes, the documentary became a sensation. The benefit of time between the 1998 championship and 2020 gave Jordan and company the ability to be forward and open. With so many players speaking unfiltered, there were legendary moments and plenty of talking points for shows like First Take to dissect and discuss with the lack of actual, present NBA games happening.
Not only was The Last Dance a critical hit, winning the Creative Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, but it also became ESPN’s most-viewed documentary. To many, Hehir’s 491-minute documentary matched Jordan’s legendary status as the greatest basketball player of all time.
But during the spring of 2020, there was a multi-part sports documentary that overlapped with The Last Dance and served to be a narrative and stylistic counter to the Jordan doc’s glitz and glamour. Jon Bois, the creative director at the sports blog network SB Nation, and co-producer, co-writer and co-narrator Alex Rubenstein released The History of the Seattle Mariners, a six-part series on the trials and tribulations of the only MLB team to never appear in the World Series.
Bois had already made a name for himself with his YouTube series like “Pretty Good” or 17776 (also known as What Football Will Look Like in the Future), a serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about figuring out what football will be. The sports writer/YouTuber had created bigger video projects before like Fighting in the Age of Loneliness and The Bob Emergency, further cementing his style of Google Earth, Apple iMovie and plenty of irreverent humor and smooth jazz.
But The History of the Seattle Mariners served as Bois’s largest project to that date. And while the six videos on the Mariners amassed about five million views in total, about the average number of viewers on a single episode of The Last Dance, Bois and Rubenstein forged ahead with a radical view on how we view sports and how we view documentaries about it.
The History of the Seattle Mariners and The Last Dance, both inadvertent products of the sportless COVID-19 pandemic, take differing stances on how sport can be an extension of culture and what we should define as success. Additionally, the two documentaries take opposing narrative structures and methods of accruing information, fundamentally striking at the heart of how cinema and television can be agents for feelings, statistics and anecdotes.
While The Last Dance garnered many fans and admirers from all walks of life, one of the most legendary documentarians of the 20th century, Ken Burns, took a far different viewpoint. Indeed, he said he would never have agreed to the direction that The Last Dance took. Namely, that Jordan was an executive producer on the project.
“If you are there influencing the very fact of it getting made it means that certain aspects that you don’t necessarily want in aren’t going to be in, period,” Burns said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal at the time. “And that’s not the way you do good journalism […] and it’s certainly not the way you do good history, my business.”
Burns’s concerns seemed mild at the time but have really started to manifest within the genre. Since the release of The Last Dance, there has been a sharp increase in athletes revealing documentaries that show their side of the story. Look no further than Netflix’s Untold series, with each film covering a supposedly lesser-known sports story or a new perspective on it.
Over the years, Untold has forgone some of the more journalistic qualities of a documentary in favor of films that are just a famous athlete retelling their life story—regardless of whether that’s the whole truth or not. The best example of this series messing with the truth is in the episode “Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul,” which features an extensive interview with disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy. In it, he makes claims of the mob threats against him. Author Sean Patrick Griffin, through his 2009 book and beyond, has spent his career poking holes in Donaghy’s claims, and the Untold episode is no exception.
The whole episode appeals to the seductive nature of hearing perspectives from infamous people and audiences’ desires for satisfying and bitterly cynical conclusions. Jason Jones of The Athletic wrote of the Untold episode, “The ratings for the documentary underscore that there’s still just enough cynicism in the world to keep Donaghy relevant for debates.”
All of this is to say that The Last Dance didn’t directly spew misinformation. But when you show how exciting and interesting it can be to get the perspective of these titanic figures without any form of outside perspective, problems like the Donaghy Untold episode can begin to emerge. Beyond that, The Last Dance inspired a cottage industry of legacy-affirming sports documentaries, like Stephen Curry: Underrated, where Curry’s production company is foundational in making the film. Danny Chau of The Ringer noted how documentaries like these aren’t necessarily new, but the lack of outside voices and perspectives really started to become noticeable, especially since The Last Dance’s release in 2020.
“ESPN’s 30 for 30 series has been a gold standard for more than a decade, but each of those films crucially had an outsider’s perspective framing the narrative, while a good lot of post-Dance profiles give the subject ultimate control over how their legacy is depicted,” Chau wrote. “These documentaries are a way of re-living the primacy of an athlete, but only within the confines of selective memory—at a certain point, the spark dulls, especially if the doc starts smelling a bit like retroactive propaganda.”
Of course, it would be unfair not to acknowledge the sheer delight and entertainment that can come from a documentary like The Last Dance. The Jordan-centered documentary focused not just on the 1998 season or any of the Chicago Bulls’ championships from the ’90s, but the little moments that display Jordan’s psyche.
Take the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals between Chicago and the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons, the two-time defending NBA champions known for their physical brand of basketball. Jordan and the Bulls, who had lost to the Pistons in the postseason three straight times, finally got over the hump and defeated their rival. But as the final seconds ticked down on Detroit, its star point guard and team leader Isiah Thomas led his teammates off the floor.
To Jordan, this was a massive slight and he made it known that this was still on his mind.
This blend of matter-of-factness, media cynicism and downright foul language was undoubtedly a moment that made The Last Dance so distinct. Here we have one of the greatest athletes, not to mention basketball players, still airing out his grievances on a massively viewed documentary. In this moment, any viewer could see how Jordan remained bitter and, above all else, competitive with one of his greatest on-the-floor rivals. The initial shock of it, along with the many anecdotes of Jordan’s competitiveness and work ethic, serve as examples of him being such a singular athlete. The entertainment value—and the subsequent media cycle it engendered—from this moment points to how this documentary doesn’t necessarily have an opinion on whether or not Jordan’s attitude is normal or a little over the edge. Instead, it shows how this attitude can lead to results, fame and success.
Other athletes can move on. But Jordan didn’t. Even if you question it, he has the championship rings to prove his excellence. So any criticism or genuine questions about Jordan’s attitude and psyche may fall on deaf ears.
These shock moments like the one portrayed in The Last Dance sparked crumbier copycat versions. Once again, we return to Untold with a four-part docuseries on the Urban Meyer-led Florida Gator teams of the 2000s, who had two national titles and far more players who got arrested. In the trailer for the docuseries, titled Swamp Kings, there was plenty of hyping of the “untold” and “wild” stories of what happened with these teams.
While the series focused on how intensely Meyer trained his players, there are very few anecdotes about the players’ off-the-field activities. More specifically, Meyer’s system of coaching preached an intense dedication to one’s craft in football, but there seemed to be a clear discipline issue once the players trotted around campus as essentially celebrities. Swamp Kings rarely seemed to give a critical eye to Meyer, who, less than two years before the series’ release, had been fired from the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars for mistreating players and kicking a player on his team. Even with four 45-minute episodes, it felt as though there was a clear lack of substance, as Brian Tallerico argued on rogerebert.com.
“What’s funny is it still reads like there’s way more story to tell here, given the vibrant personalities and issues regarding Urban Meyer’s coaching style that it arguably doesn’t take seriously enough,” Tallerico wrote. “Florida Gators superstars like Tim Tebow comment on how seriously Meyer takes his work between scenes of him yelling and swearing at players in locker rooms, players who are often seen in extreme physical duress during workouts, and it feels like maybe there’s a version of this that questions Meyer’s choices a bit more.”
The key draw for a docuseries like Swamp Kings, like The Last Dance, is the access to the players and coaches who accomplished these great feats like winning two national championships.
To say The History of the Seattle Mariners does not have access to the many players and coaches of the Mariners is to miss the actual point of the whole undertaking. From the very jump, aside from the obvious caveat that this person has been long dead, Bois starts out the true history of the Seattle Mariners by going back to a story of an arsonist burning down a baseball field from 1932. Bois then relates this seemingly unconnected story to the brief history of Seattle gaining a baseball field and the short but sweet tenure of the Seattle Pilots, who, after a disastrous year full of mediocre baseball and horrible plumbing, moved to Milwaukee.
The Mariners officially come to Seattle in 1977, but Bois uses this prologue, featuring poop jokes and political strong-arming, to help us re-examine how a professional sports team becomes a professional sports team. While a socialist arsonist didn’t burn down baseball fields to get a team to come to Seattle, it shows that the political and cultural elements in our society play a clear part in sports. This can serve as a direct counter to the (typically) conservative plea to keep politics out of sports.
Everything in our society is connected, and Bois goes to great lengths to show how that’s the case. Even from a design perspective, Bois acknowledges the connectivity of the whole fluid history of the Mariners. The documentary itself takes place on one giant calendar, with each day being a season in Mariners history.
Bois and Rubenstein litter the calendar with archival footage of athlete/manager interviews and baseball games, but the heart of the documentary comes through the graphs, grids, charts and lines. Bois has been profiled before as a man who “turns sports statistics into riveting cinema.” But the usage of stats doesn’t just change how we view sports, it also points out the various ebbs and flows that do not fit well within a standard “rise-and-fall” narrative, which The Last Dance and so many of its clones look to exploit. Frank Falisi, in a piece on Bois for MUBI Notebook, identifies Bois’s whole approach as not just an inversion of standard sports documentaries, but of history itself.
“Part visualization, part vocal monologue, a ‘Jon Bois thing’ approaches fundamental questions of form and content such that neither is entirely separable from the other,” Falisi writes. “Namely: to sketch alternative models of history—ones that don’t rise and fall under the influence of capital and surveillance, that aren’t in thrall to rabid individualism and braindead corporatism—the eye must first see them, and then render them.”
The chronological approach Bois takes points to never letting influences such as individualism or corporatism take over a narrative for too long. Yes, the chapters of the documentary display distinct eras, including one part dedicated to the 1995 American League Division Series playoff matchup between the Mariners and New York Yankees that essentially saved baseball in Seattle. But the slow display of all the horrible years in Mariners’ history makes us not only understand the exciting moments of victory all the more, but also helps us remember and dissect history differently.
That isn’t to say there isn’t good journalism and fact-finding in The History of the Seattle Mariners. Indeed, there is an anecdote about a former Mariner player-turned-broadcaster correctly predicting when a current Mariner would hit a home run. The result is an astonishing moment of luck and chance, but again underscores how the most brilliant moments involving sports teams don’t have to come during the postseason or from true, unbridled excellence. The most magical plays can come during a regular-season game in a year when the Mariners missed the playoffs.
While maybe the most gratifying moment comes from the walk-off in the 1995 ALDS and subsequent vote to keep the Mariners in Seattle, the thrilling victory becomes inherently a matter of city politics. Bois and Rubenstein never sidestep how this collective of players is both defined by themselves and the environment around them, creating a far more conscious and breathing, living document of history.
The two directors go even further later in the documentary. I would like to argue that the truly most heartfelt scene from The History of the Seattle Mariners comes toward the end of its last chapter titled, “The Seattle Mariners enter the great beyond,” which depicts the franchise from 2010-19 where it missed the playoffs every year and never cracked 90 wins.
But when pitcher Felix Hernandez pitches for the final time in front of the Seattle fans in 2019, Bois clearly has a grasp on the true power sports can do. Yes, the winning and hyper-competitiveness of Michael Jordan has become a brand and will be forced down our throats forever. But as Bois talks about how 2019 marked the time when the Seattle Mariners became the only team never to make the World Series, and with Hernandez’s tear-filled walk off the mound playing on the screen, he blurts out, “Who gives a shit?”
It’s a direct challenge to what fans, the media and the viewing public in general can define as success. Hernandez’s time in Seattle, full of top-tier pitching and a 2010 Cy Young Award, can feel as meaningful to the community as Jordan’s was to the city of Chicago. The History of the Seattle Mariners allows for a further examination and, more succinctly, to put the history books back into the hands of the people and not just the victors.
And during a time when there were no sports, Bois, Rubenstein and Jordan graced us with two different ideas and worldviews of how we can understand these games we put so much time, energy and passion into. Both for good and bad, The History of the Seattle Mariners and The Last Dance truly display how sports are a mode of cultural expression, whether we want it to be or not. The sports documentaries that are worth celebrating will try to tackle this consciously or unconsciously. And the ones that don’t should be avoided at all costs.
At least, that’s how I will go about it as I yearn for a sports documentary about competitive marble races.
