Name: The Last Dance: Luc Longley silent on Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls documentary on ESPN and Netflix
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The Last Dance: Luc Longley silent on Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls documentary on ESPN and Netflix

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Longley's deafening silence on Jordan and Bulls documentaryWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.DismisscloseAdvertisementBy Log in, or to save articles for later.Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeAdvertisementIt isn’t until halfway through episode eight of The Last Dance that Michael Jordan mentions Luc Longley for the first time in the 10-part series.“Steve [Kerr], Luc, all those guys, they come in riding high on the three championships we won in 1991, 1992, 1993,” Jordan says. “They didn’t have anything to f---in' do with it. Now they’re playing for the Bulls.“No. We were shit when I got there. We were elevated to being a championship quality team, and there are certain standards you have to live by. You don’t come pussy-footing around. You don’t come in joking and kicking around. You have to come in ready to play.”The absorbing documentary, which charts the rise of the Chicago Bulls through the 1990s and in particular the 1997-98 season, is edging towards its conclusion.Episodes seven and eight drop on Monday night, and they focus on Jordan’s legendary hostility and aggression towards his teammates on the practice court, especially so after he returned to the NBA following a stint with the Chicago White Sox' minor league baseball team.They're the most fascinating episodes so far. Jordan admits to punching Kerr in the eye during one training session.“It was a war,” explains Kerr, the Bulls point guard who went on to win three NBA titles as coach of the Golden State Warriors. “He talked a lot of shit.”A lot of that talk was also directed at Longley, the 218cm Australian who joined the Bulls as a 25-year-old in 1994, became their starting centre and went on to win three championships with them. Until that point, no Australian player had won any.AdvertisementIn his book Running With The Bulls, Longley discusses his volatile relationship with Jordan.“I’d have to say after he came back, I really didn't like the guy,” he wrote. “I found him difficult to be around and he and I obviously didn't see eye-to-eye. We were at each other's throats in practice and that was a case of frustration from both of us, mostly from him.”But you won’t hear from Longley in The Last Dance — because he wasn’t interviewed. You won’t even hear him speak about the documentary — because he's knocked back every media request to speak.Indeed, Longley is becoming conspicuous in his silence since the first episode aired on April 19.Now residing in Western Australia, having been a valued consultant with the Sydney Kings last season, he's become so frustrated with the volume of approaches he's changed his mobile phone number.Why is anyone’s guess. Longley had been prepared to speak to the Herald at the start of the week before curiously changing his mind with no reason given.The documentary’s director, Jason Hehir, insists Longley wasn’t snubbed.“Unfortunately, it was because of geography and budget,” Hehir told the Herald. “We were way over budget with the amount of people that we interviewed. It was tough to justify flying our crew to Australia. It would’ve been tens of thousands of dollars to go there.”Hehir also said, having pored through hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes footage, that the towering Australian import was a passive presence in the Bulls set-up; understandably so among the likes of Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman.“Luc was one of the quiet, more reticent figures in that locker room,” he said. “If Luc was this gregarious storyteller, and had more of a vocal presence in the locker room, we may have worked harder to get him on camera.”In his 2014 biography Michael Jordan: The Life, author Roland Lazenby explores how Jordan would vent his fury at foreign-born players like Longley and Croatian Toni Kukoc.“Those guys were so talented,” Kerr tells Lazenby. “Luc was a huge piece, literally and figuratively. I mean we need him to man the paint and anchor the defence and rebound and you had to light a fire under Luc to get the best out of him. So, I think there was a reason that Michael … stayed on those guys. It was because they needed it. They needed the kick in the pants … I never saw Toni snap. I never saw Luc snap. And so it was like they were just fair game for Michael.”Especially so when Jordan had a point to prove. He had one to make in the 1995-1996 season. He felt humiliated in his return to the Bulls the previous season when the Bulls lost to the Orlando Magic in the eastern conference semi-finals.Jordan walked onto the practice court, picking fights with teammates, calling them "bitches" and running sessions with the intensity of an NBA game.“I wanted them to understand what it felt like to be in the trenches,” Jordan says in the documentary. “If you don’t understand that then you’re not going to understand when the war starts.”Longley has explained in the past that he didn’t take Jordan’s abuse personally. He knew what was at play.“He does let up,” he told reporters during the 1997-98 season. “He’s gotten better about it as he’s gotten to know me. He understands what different guys can tolerate, respond to. It was heavier early on, but he knows me better now … I don’t get tired of it at all. It’s part of the dynamic of this team.”That dynamic was about trying to bend the rest of the players around the greatest athlete in the history of team sports. For trying to drag teammates up to his standard, Jordan is unapologetic.“Winning has a price, and leadership has a price, so I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled,” he says. “I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates came after me. They didn’t endure all the things I had to endure.“Once you joined this team, you live to a certain standard that I play the game. I wasn’t going to take any less. If that means I had to get in your ass a little bit, then I did that.“You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f---in’ do.“They might say, ‘He wasn’t really a nice guy, he was a tyrant’. But that’s you — because you never won anything. I wanted to win but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well.”At this point, Jordan becomes emotional. He kept it together when talking about the murder of his father, James, in 1994. But when he's talking about his competitiveness, about his single-minded character, he begins to choke up.“I don’t have to do this, but I’m only doing it because it is who I am,” he continues. “That’s how I play the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that way, don’t play that way … Break.”And then Jordan gets up and walks away from the camera.Episodes seven and eight of The Last Dance will be available on Netflix from Monday night. Log in, or to save articles for later. is Chief Sports Writer of The Sydney Morning Herald.Advertisement

Longley's deafening silence on Jordan and Bulls documentaryWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.DismisscloseAdvertisementBy Log in, or to save articles for later.Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeAdvertisementIt isn’t until halfway through episode eight of The Last Dance that Michael Jordan mentions Luc Longley for the first time in the 10-part series.“Steve [Kerr], Luc, all those guys, they come in riding high on the three championships we won in 1991, 1992, 1993,” Jordan says. “They didn’t have anything...

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Andrew Webster

The Sydney Morning Herald - Australia's leading news source. Independent. Always.

The Last Dance: Luc Longley silent on Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls documentary on ESPN and Netflix

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