Gods of clay – Leisure News

Herman Melville begins his unfinished, posthumously published novella Billy Budd with an invocation of the ‘handsome sailor’, worshipped by his fellows as “some superior figure of their own class, moving along them like Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his constellation”. The Last Dance, a recent 10-part documentary that has captivated the US and much of the rest of the world, follows Michael Jordan, the archetypal handsome sailor, through his last glorious season with the Chicago Bulls before the team, six-time champions in an eight-year period, is broken up by management imperatives.

Jordan is a peerless basketball player. A dollar billionaire who has made much of his fortune from his eponymous Nike shoe, a street fashion icon, Jordan may have thought his playing legend could do with one more polish. How else to explain this hagiography, these hours of relentless self-justification? Except the kinetic thrill of Jordan’s explosive, airborne game makes for an unflattering contrast with the curdled, self-serving reminiscences of an ageing man unwilling to leave his armchair, expensive alcohol at his side, plutocrat’s cigar in his mouth.

Physical qualities, Melville wrote in Billy Budd, needed a moral corollary for deeper, longer lasting homage to be paid. The Last Dance wheels out the likes of Barack Obama, no less, to insist on Jordan’s significance in the culture, without ever asking what that outsize significance says about our culture. Jordan appears to recognise that it’s not enough to be a great player and perhaps that’s why he tries so hard to explain his bullying away, to show us he had to be a jerk to succeed.

Being good blokes as well as good players, the Amazon Prime documentary The Test shows, became a preoccupation of an Australian cricket team chastened by a cheating scandal and the debilitating loss through suspension of two brilliant players. No doubt cricket fans, and India is known to have one or two, will enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at elite preparation. For the rest of us though, there is a lack of genuine reflection, of anything more than lip service paid to what it means to be a good teammate, a good player, and a good person.

If anything, watching both The Test and The Last Dance suggests we want top athletes to show little sign of life, of independent thought, that we would rather they just shut up and play. Not surprisingly then, documentaries about sporting failure, ineptitude and chaos are far more compelling. Sunderland ’Til I Die on Netflix is about a decaying club in a decaying industrial city in England. Sunderland was once a rich, famous football club, six-time champions of England, once nicknamed the ‘Bank of England club’, and last relevant maybe 60 or so years ago. Still, it was even recently a Premier League club, before it slipped to consecutive relegations, finding itself now in the third tier for only the second time in its 141-year history.

Sunderland’s extraordinarily loyal support can seem sentimental, even deluded in their keening hope, captured in the plaintive, swooning theme by local songwriter ‘The Lake Poets’, for things to go right, desperately clutching to the dodgy new owners as a drowning puppy might to seaweed, but in their way they are as beautiful as Jordan in his prime. And much more human. We may follow athletes because they are Ubermensch, but there is no ‘there there’. Professional sport and its superstars are made vapid, vacant because that’s how the money men want it. Top level sport is part of the entertainment industry thanks to Jordan, suggests The Last Dance; real sport, Sunderland ’Til I Die shows, is much more than that, it’s about community, and it’s about unstinting, if largely unrequited, love.

Home advantage

LOSERS (2019)

Each of the eight episodes of this docuseries is dedicated to a different sport, golf, boxing, etc., and to a different story of an underdog whose loss was as spectacular as their opponent’s grand victory.

NETFLIX

ANDY MURRAY: RESURFACING (2019)

Once in the same league as Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, Murray’s career was threatened by multiple hip injuries and operations. Resurfacing tells the story of his somewhat impossible comeback.

AMAZON PRIME

CHEER (2020)

Navarro College has the best junior college competitive cheer squad in the US. This wildly popular and emotional docuseries follows its cheerleaders as they train hard for the 2019 national championships.

NETFLIX