5 Chapter Five: The Last Dance, Episode IX (2020)

The penultimate episode of The Last Dance wasn’t the first documentary to cover Jordan’s exploits in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, the notorious “Flu Game.” It wasn’t even the first documentary produced by ESPN to cover the “Flu Game.” The network that was once the Worldwide Leader (and still has the audacity to refer to itself as the Worldwide Leader) first did so with an episode of its SportsCentury documentary series in 2002.

SportsCentury as a series still holds up as truly excellent storytelling through sports journalism. Evidence of a time where ESPN actually cared about sports, stories, and substance and backed it up through its programming. A relic of a bygone era.

My current frustrations with ESPN do not mean that I wasn’t simultaneously charmed and enthralled by The Last Dance along with the rest of the world. I was when it came out in the spring of 2020 when we were all confined to our homes, and I still am today. As the 10-part docuseries marched forward two episodes at a time, the “Flu Game” was far and away my most anticipated touchstone in the story of the Chicago Bulls’ second three-peat. The Last Dance may not have been chronological storytelling, but we all knew there was no way in hell “The Flu Game,” was not going to be covered before the grand finale of the series.

Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals is one of, if not the most iconic chapter of Michael Jordan lore. In all six of the Bulls’ championships they were never at a more vulnerable point than they were entering that game. It is the only Finals he ever played in where Jordan lost consecutive games on an opponent’s home floor. The Utah Jazz and MVP Karl Malone stole all the momentum in front of their notoriously raucous crowd en route to knotting up the series at two games apiece. A win in Game 5 would put Malone, his running mate John Stockton, Hall of Fame Coach Jerry Sloan, and the rest of the Jazz on the doorstep of their first championship after 13 consecutive playoff campaigns that fell short of making it to the Finals. A sense of urgency rarely laid with the Bulls in those Finals and almost always with the opponent they were pushing to the brink. A loss in Game 5 would put them in the most desperate position imaginable.

All great heroes need great conflicts to overcome, and the ‘97 Bulls had theirs and then some. An additional obstacle revealed itself in the wee hours of the morning before Game 5 that felt downright unfair.

“Michael Jordan is sick.”

The words reverberated around the sports world like bells tolling midnight on a team’s championship dreams. Chicago faced a game it could not lose. The idea of facing such a challenge without their G.O.A.T. felt impossible. Apart from his 18-month baseball experiment, Jordan never missed a challenge, a fight, or even a practice. Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals taking place without Jordan was beyond comprehension.

Jordan did miss that morning’s shootaround. Some retellings, depending on who you ask, say Jordan made it to the shootaround but lay in the training room shackled to an IV the entire time. He looked more like a corpse than a Finals MVP. He didn’t die, though. He didn’t even miss the game. He showed up to the arena, a zombie in Armani, and as ESPN’s Kris Fowler described as the host of SportsCentury, he was “retchingly-wobble-kneed-head-in-a-bucket ill.”

To make a long story short, he played almost every single minute of the Bulls’ 90-88 win. His game-high 38 points doubled Malone’s output, which led the Jazz in scoring. Chicago trailed by 13 points after the first quarter and by five points heading into the fourth. The Jazz were playing their game and their crowd was going crazy. None of it mattered. Jordan played through the illness to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat the only way he was capable of. His hero/villain narrative (depending on who you were cheering for) was made complete when he delivered the final gut-punch with a 3-pointer in the final seconds when Utah’s defensive specialist Bryon Russell somehow decided to leave Jordan wide open and double-team someone else. Poor Bryon Russell, this may have been the first moment MJ made him bow down to the king in a crucial Finals moment, but it wouldn’t be the last.

Few images of Jordan have felt more iconic than this one. The buzzer sounds, the Jazz are walking off the court in disbelief, their fans already mourning the inevitable Game 6 loss to come in Chicago, and Jordan’s completely spent body collapses into the arms of longtime right-hand man Scottie Pippen. Only fitting that the man who just gave one of the most incredible performances in the history of the game on the game’s biggest stage needs his trusted teammates help to simply walk off of it.

In the phenomenal essay collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib, there’s a brief essay on Prince’s memorable performance in a downpour at the Super Bowl XLI halftime show in Miami. Prince, one of the few performers we can put on Jordan’s level, bent Mother Nature to his will and transcended the elements to deliver a performance that will live forever. Abdurraqib’s thesis of Prince’s masterful performance:

“There are moments when those we believe to be immortal show us why that belief exists.”

This was one of those moments for Jordan. He entered the Finals hellbent on telling the world “Oh, you think Karl Malone is the MVP of this league? Okay, watch this.” Game 5 served as the clincher for Jordan’s supremacy over the rest of the league whether he was in sickness or in health. Utah’s stifling defense, their MVP, their rowdy crowd, and whatever sickness that attached itself to Jordan, formed a formidable foe, and yet it still couldn’t vanquish the man wearing No. 23.

While he did remind us in Game 5 why we sometimes viewed his all-world talent and prescribe it to immortality because it couldn’t be explained any way, Jordan’s embrace with Pippen also held the tenderness and vulnerability that are both deeply human. “There are moments when those we believe to be immortal show us why that belief exists.” And then there are moments when those we believe to be immortal show us that they are human. That they are exhausted and unwell and need the waiting arms of someone they trust to hold them and carry them off into whatever it is that awaits after the final buzzer sounds.

Jordan’s performance in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, his 38 points, seven rebounds, five assists, three steals, and the back-breaking 3-point shot with 25 seconds left, showcased the whole spectrum of both his talent and his humanity. It should be remembered the same way we remember Prince at the Super Bowl. A performer performing at the height of their talent, bending the world to their will, and forcing us to ask questions of our own collective mortality.

To make a short story long, there’s more to it than that, and the way Jordan came to feel as poorly as he did on the day of June 11, 1997, has been one of the more controversial and hotly debated points of his lore. The Last Dance had the perfect opportunity to fully unpack the events of that night and the night before, but opted to include only one perspective and glaze over the rest.

In the nearly 500 minutes of run-time in The Last Dance, less than 15 are dedicated to “The Flu Game.” In those 15 minutes, only three individuals share any information on how Jordan ended up in such a condition.

According to the story spun by The Last Dance, Jordan was hanging out in his room with his entourage and security guys the night before the game and got hungry at about 10:30 pm. The Marriott the Bulls were staying at didn’t have room service, which already feels suspicious, but for the sake of argument we’ll entertain it. A combination of Tim Grover, Jordan’s personal trainer, and George Kohler, Jordan’s driver and best friend, found a single pizza place open for delivery.

Grover hangs onto this fact in his testimony-like interview as if finding only one late-night pizzeria in a resort town 45 minutes outside of Salt Lake City automatically proves the existence of some kind of nefarious black market pizza underlords.

“We find one, one place that’s open,” Grover says while holding up one finger and allowing a most pregnant of pauses to hang in the air.

Kohler corroborates his fellow Jordan entourage-mate and adds the curious detail that another entourage of at least five pizza delivery people show up to deliver the pizza and try to get a glimpse of Jordan.

“You normally don’t have five guys from the pizza delivery place bringing you your pizza,” Kohler says.

Grover adds, “I pay them, I put the pizza down and I say, ‘Mike, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’”

This is the entire framing of how Jordan came to feel as bad as he did in one of the most pinnacle chapters of his career.

“I eat the entire pizza by myself,” Jordan says. “So it wasn’t “The Flu Game”; it was food poisoning.”

Many viewers naturally rolled their eyes at this description. I mean, “The Food Poisoning Game” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. By this point of The Last Dance, we’ve already entered hour number eight of Jordan deep diving on the many different slights he experienced in his career, both real and perceived, perhaps viewers just didn’t care to interrogate the building blocks of the story not fully coming together. Perhaps Zack Snyder could have been of some assistance in the dramatization department had he been available. It’s fair to ask, does it really matter how Jordan got as sick as he did? He clearly felt like dogshit and he played a game for the ages. Can’t we leave it at that?

I’d say we can. I truly don’t care. How Jordan came to be in the condition he was in for Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals is of no interest to me. Whether he was a victim of food poisoning as he claims; or hungover, as longtime opponent Jalen Rose claims; or fell to the horrors of altitude sickness like his teammate Steve Kerr claims (altitude sickness is a bitch, but considering the Bulls had been in Utah for almost a full week by the time Game 5 tipped off, I have my doubts, Coach Kerr). His performance in that Game 5 can never be tainted for me. And considering the absurd price that the black and red Jordan 12’s he was wearing during the game still go for (always north of $325 for my size 11 by 3rd-party resale), I don’t think it’s been tainted for many people either. My question in regards to “The Flu Game” is entirely concerned with the way the most anticipated docuseries in a century approached it even after sitting on all that footage for 23 years.

• Question No. 2: Why wasn’t NBA media icon and Jordan’s friend Ahmad Rashad included in “The Flu Game” segment of The Last Dance? Why wasn’t the team doctor (who Grover mentions, but doesn’t mention by name) Jeffrey Weinberg interviewed at all in the 500ish minutes of The Last Dance?

Thankfully, as we have already mentioned, The Last Dance wasn’t the only documentary (and not even the only documentary PRODUCED BY ESPN!!!) interested in the events of “The Flu Game.”