American Exceptionalism, the Cold War, and The Last Dance
- American Exceptionalism, the Cold War, and The Last Dance
Nominally, the ESPN docuseries The Last Dance deals with the Chicago Bulls' 1997–98 season. In all honesty, it is about the life and legend of Michael Jordan. The first episodes stress his unparalleled popularity at home and abroad to illustrate his mythic status: time and again, the experts declare him the greatest and most recognizable athlete in the world.
ESPN tends to present male-centric, heteronormative, and patriotic narratives. The Last Dance is no exception. For sports historians, the docuseries offers a unique opportunity to contextualize this notion of American exceptionalism—Jordan incarnate—and the international developments that made this global success story possible.
Jordan's rise to worldwide stardom coincided with the end of the Cold War and the concomitant commercialization of sports. When he entered Chapel Hill in 1981, the sporting world looked very different and inconducive to the international career he would embark on. The United States had led a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow: in the Americans' absence, Yugoslavia won basketball gold, Italy silver, and the Soviet Union bronze.
The Soviet Union and other Communist countries, in turn, boycotted the 1984 games in Los Angeles. In episode one, the Bulls' general manager Rod Thorn (1978–85) chuckles at his ingenuity of drafting Jordan just weeks before the opening ceremony. ESPN, which had launched in 1979, had started broadcasting regular college games, while the networks only carried top games and the NCAA championship. Not even all NBA games were televised live yet. By contrast, the Olympics, especially the 1984 games, for which ABC had doled out an unprecedented $225 million, were a major TV spectacle that guaranteed U.S. athletes, including Jordan, a favorable nationwide audience.
During the Cold War, it was common to toughen up the U.S. Olympic hopefuls by pitching them against professionals. While for the college players these exhibition games were a halfway station to the NBA, the pros used the opportunity to put the future rookies in their place. Notoriety for its brutality gained the game in the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis on July 9, 1984, in which Bobby Knight's protégés faced off against a selection of NBA players, among them Larry Bird, John Paxson, and Isiah Thomas.
On August 10, 1984, the U.S. team won gold for the tenth time in Olympic history. Jordan, intermittently plagued by toothaches, was key to this success but so were Chris Mullin and Patrick Ewing. The true star of the 1984 games was, of course, Carl Lewis, the first since Jesse Owens to win four gold medals.
In the 1980s, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were on the brink of becoming legitimate competitors. The United States, represented by Steve Kerr, Muggsy Bogues, Sean Elliott, David Robinson, and others, won the 1986 FIBA World Cup; the USSR came in second and Yugoslavia third. Dražen Petrović, who joined the Portland Trailblazers in 1989, was voted the tournament's MVP. Two years later, at the Olympics in Seoul, the [End Page 269] Soviet Union defeated the United States in the final—for only the second time in history. In 1990, Yugoslavia, reigning Euro Cup champion, won the FIBA World Cup. The team included the championship MVP Toni Kukoć and the two NBA players Dražen Petrović and Vlade Divać. Although packed with talent, the U.S. team barely managed to place third with a two-point overtime victory over Puerto Rico.
The emergence of such competition, as well as the projected profit margins of broadcasting rights, sponsorships, and new markets, convinced NBA Commissioner David Stern to give in to FIBA's secretary general Boris Stanković, who, for years, had sought to have the U.S. pros join international competitions. Stanković, who hailed from Europe's basketball bastion Yugoslavia, hoped to attract more public and private investments if U.S. pros participated in the World Cup and the Olympics. Due to the communists' habit of employing "state athletes," amateurism had been a farce, and the International Olympic Committee had more or less abandoned amateurism after Los Angeles. FIBA passed the vote in favor of NBA players' participation in April...
