June 22, 2016 was a big day in the basketball world. There’s an obvious reason for this: It was the day that the Cleveland Cavaliers held a parade to celebrate the first championship won by one of the city’s teams in more than 50 years. The entire city seemed to turn out, J.R. Smith ripped his shirt off, and a whole lot of other extremely entertaining things happened as the Cavs were honored for knocking off the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals.
But down in Charlotte, something else was going on that ended up leading to the most highly-anticipated basketball documentary of our lifetimes. In a new piece by Ramona Shelburne of ESPN, we learned that Mike Tollin, who will serve as the executive producer for ESPN’s upcoming docuseries The Last Dance, was afforded the opportunity to sit down with Michael Jordan and map out the project.
“The universe has such a funny sense of humor,” Tollin said of the day. “Because when I woke up, I put on ESPN while I’m getting dressed, and there’s LeBron [James] and the Cavaliers parading through the streets of Cleveland with the trophy that they’d just won.”
The gist is that a film crew followed the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls around and captured their entire season on film. The condition under which Jordan was cool with this, however, was that the footage could not be used without his consent, and as such, Jordan and former NBA Entertainment boss Adam Silver agreed that they needed permission from one another to do something with it.
As Shelburne explained, plenty of folks tried to make something of the copious amounts of footage the NBA had in its archives in lovely Secaucus, New Jersey, but no one could ever get Jordan on board. However, after meeting with Jordan’s associates, Tollin got his foot in the door. He brought with him a number of documents with him. Jordan read all of them, and one bit in particular at the very end of the presentation caught his attention.
The last page of the presentation was a look at the documentaries, movies and shows Tollin and his company, Mandalay Sports Media, had done.
“So there’s Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar], there’s Hank Aaron, there’s ‘Varsity Blues,’ there’s ‘Coach Carter’ and so forth,” Tollin said. “He’s actually looking at them all, and in the bottom right corner is ‘Iverson.’ He goes, ‘You did that?’”
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Tollin mumbled a cautious, “Yes.”Jordan took his glasses off, looked up and said, “I watched that thing three times. Made me cry. Love that little guy.”
It was quite the confluence of events, and fortunately, it led to The Last Dance finally becoming a reality. It also shows that LeBron James and Michael Jordan seem cosmically preordained to be tied to one another forever, which hopefully means LeBron will respond with a gigantic docuseries about the 2015-16 Cavs some day.