Share & Tell with "The Last Dance" Director Jason Hehir and The Charlotte Wilder Effect

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

I'm going to stick a cattle prod

up Jerry Krause's butt.

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Yeah, how are you doing?

Good.

Great.

I mean,

you look not haggard.

Thanks.

How old is your son?

He's seven weeks.

He'll be eight weeks Thursday.

He was in the ninth.

He was early.

Jason Hare is handing Charlotte an iPad with his baby on it.

Okay, that is a very cute baby.

And I'm not going to lie, I don't always say that.

I feel like I get hit by a Mac truck most days because I was an uncle.

I am an uncle five times over, and I'm 47 years old.

So all of my friends have been down this road, and I've played like the quasi-uncle to a dozen other kids.

And I figured like, I have this figured out.

Jason came to me for advice, and I was like, aha.

Finally, I'm being recognized for my parental wisdoms.

This is something I wanted more than professional success or anything else.

I do need to tell Charlotte that like when you came to me to talk about like having a kid, my scatting report on you was, this is the most sincere enthusiasm I've encountered for having a child.

I appreciated a lot more because I thought that that ship had sailed.

I got married late in life and had a kid late in life and really was kind of married to my job and my kids were my projects.

And it wasn't something I was proud of or indignant about, but I just figured, you know what, I have such good friends, such good family.

I have a dream job.

The other part is probably not going to happen for me.

And you can't have it all.

Now,

is your son aware

of what a big deal you are?

I've told him many times.

He doesn't seem to care.

He hasn't seen The Last Dance yet?

He has not.

He's not aware of any sort of lingering feud between Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen.

He doesn't know any of those stories yet.

Wait, but you told him that Larsa Pippen, that Scotty Pippin's ex-wife is or was dating.

Well, he heard the pod already.

Yeah, yeah.

In Vitro, he heard the pod because my wife was listening to it.

So he was up on all that.

Because that's the important stuff.

Yeah.

And Scotty sent a baby gift, obviously.

He did.

He did.

Did he?

No.

I was going to say he sent a flaming bag of.

I don't think that Scotty.

I hope Scotty doesn't.

have any ill will to i don't think he would know who i was if i was standing in front of him i think it's my guess that he has not seen the last dance, that he has been told.

That's my favorite part of this whole thing.

Wait, really?

I think he's been told by several people they did you wrong and all that, but

I would bet a lot of money that he did not sit down and watch all 10 hours of that doc and say, in conclusion, I can see why they did this and why they did that, but they gave me my flowers at the end.

I don't think that he did that.

Scotty,

happy to discuss on the pod.

Yeah.

Anytime.

If there's any

podcast wants to offer an olive branch to the Pippin family, it is this one.

Oh, man.

So I bring Jason Hare into the studio, Charlotte,

because I wanted you guys specifically to be at the same table.

And so Jason is, for those who are not aware aware based on the prelude to this part, director of The Last Dance, director of so many great films, Andre the Giant, Fab 5, go down the IMDB page.

All of it is impressive and it's really worth your time.

That's not why he's here, though.

Jason wanted to bring us a topic that he had selected.

And so Jason, what are we starting here with?

We have discussed

my fatherhood and my lovely wife.

And I have a lovely picture that we can show for our video.

Yes, on YouTube.

And the reference work later on.

You can see this.

And that picture is of my wife, my newborn son, and our dog, Ozzie.

And that picture would not be in existence were it not for Charlotte Wadler.

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

What?

So back in 2008?

Charlotte, why do you think?

What do you think is about to happen?

I'm going to blush so hard.

I have no idea.

So just the context, though, of you guys having met before, what is it, Charlotte?

What is is your experience with Jason previous to this table?

I don't know that we have met.

I don't think we have.

I think we're aware of each other maybe as

a Bostonian.

I'm a huge, huge fan of your work.

I was always proud that you were also from a Boston suburb.

I was like, look, we, you know, there is a place for Boston people in the media.

Yeah.

Because they're not enough.

No,

you have to search in deep corners, but leave it to Pablo and his intrepid journalism.

I regret this already.

Noma garcia para.

So 2018, I think we were working on Andre the Giant at the time.

And I'm at a boxing gym.

I used to go to this boxing gym and try Becca regularly.

And there was this attractive woman there who was there as a consultant, a business consultant to kind of save the business.

They brought her in as a freelancer.

And there's, you know, a line of guys who want to talk to her because there's a lot of testosterone, it's a bunch of dudes hitting inanimate objects.

And it's not the best place to try and get someone's number or try and strike up a conversation because you're doing it on a stage, first of all.

And what is your boxing skill?

What is is your self-scouting report on that?

Slow, 42-year-old white guy, amateur as you can be.

Like picture that and then just go a little less athletic and that's me.

But did you commit?

Like were you committed to the bet?

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

I mean, I wasn't like grunting or anything.

I wasn't like doing the rocky thing.

But as long as you're really trying, that's what matters.

I did it for

I still do it a little bit now, but I did it for 10 years religiously.

It puts you in great shape.

My trainer was a great guy.

I had some good friends from the gym.

You're also the guy who was doing like 24 7 that's how i got into it because i was i lived in in gyms i was at hbo for seven years and the majority of those years uh i was spending in boxing gyms profiling the floyd mayweathers and de la hoyas and fernando vargas and all those people of the world and you said i could do that yeah it looks easy just bada the bada bada come on real real quick aside when i did a story on like amateur wrestlers who want to be pro wrestlers training they i went and trained with them and it was at gleason's in dumbo sure and i went back multiple times and just took boxing it's addictive there's something about being in that environment you're like i must hit something and also i'm a dive bar guy more than like a lounge club guy and i'm definitely a boxing gym guy over an equinox guy i'm i moved to la in 09

And the first day I went to Equinox in West Hollywood, you can imagine what that scene was.

Not a dive bar, Jason.

No, it's not.

It's the opposite.

It's fumed air.

The eucalyptus matched the the scent of everyone's sweat and the headbands matched all the tube socks it was everyone was color coordinated and like ready for their close-up and i was like this is not the place for me and then i found this boxing gym with no mirrors no nothing just like a sweaty old wooden place with like hip-hop blasting and i was like hey that's the spot for me that owner of that gym has a place in new york fast forward to 2018

And Erin, my now wife, is there and I have really nothing to talk to her about and not a lot of time to even strike up a conversation if I did have something to talk about.

But I knew she was from Georgia.

I knew she was a former cheerleader for the Falcons.

So being a Pats fan, I could talk a little bit of Smack about that.

And she was a Georgia football fan.

So this is in 2017 season, 2018 national championship against Alabama.

Oh my gosh.

Charlotte now, the light bulb was going off.

So I needed to get Aaron's number.

in order to talk with her outside the gym and ask her out for a drink or whatever.

Because you would never actually just say, hey, if I did this and it didn't go well i could never go back to that gym it would be very difficult so you're a coward yes

immensely so i had to i mean this is you know i i've grown up figuring out ways around actually confronting things so now same in the most important moment of my life uh it turns out she told me about this bar that she would go to with her georgia friends to watch games called american whiskey And being an avid reader of Charlotte's content,

I'm very flattered.

I've got an article called Watching the National Championship at a Georgia Bar is what Heartbreak Looks Like.

So I came in.

Do you remember this story?

Vividly.

So the story was Georgia was playing Alabama.

Would have been the first time in 40 years that Georgia had won a title if that went well for them.

And I, you know, I've always been fascinated by fandom.

It's something that I kind of understand, but I think we'll also never fully understand.

And that's why I keep going back to that well.

And I was like, I would love to see what the experience is when the stakes are so high, but I am in New York City.

I can't go to the game.

What is a way to get that experience?

And I think Amanda Mull, who now writes for I Believe Insider,

she is a huge Georgia fan.

Right, right, right.

She was like, the bar to go to is American whiskey.

And I was like, okay.

So I I went there and there was a bulldog there.

Yeah.

There were

a bulldog puppy.

That's what Erin had told me: she goes to this bar, and being Erin, she cares more about puppies than football.

And she said, this bar is incredible.

They have bulldog puppies there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was the most devastating thing I've ever seen because there was hope.

And then, was that the Jalen Hurts game?

Was that one?

Yeah, that was the Tua Tunga Vailoa.

Tunga Vailoa trying to make up for it.

Fires to the end zone.

Touchdown.

Comes in in relief

and throws that touchdown and wins the game.

I was at that game.

It's an

old game.

While you guys are doing this, I'm over there actually in the

yet, and I wasn't going to show up at this part by myself.

That would be something that's outside of my purview.

Yeah, so Georgia loses, and everyone, it was like truly one of the most depressing.

It was like worse than funerals.

I've been.

Some guy was like, he literally, he was standing by a railing because it was a multi-floor bar.

He's like, I'm going to throw myself off this.

And I was like, genuinely concerned for the people inside.

I was there for subsequent SEC championship losses to Alabama, and it was just as depressing.

And I felt like, I felt like I didn't belong.

Like I didn't deserve to be amidst this

mass mourning because I really didn't have a dog in the, oh, no pun, but I didn't have a dog in the fight.

But it was also in Atlanta.

Yeah.

Oh, this is the key part.

Oh, my God.

It was at Mercedes-Benz.

Yes.

Oh, my God.

It's It's there.

Like, Georgia has overtaken as much as they possibly could.

And the father versus the son, Kirby Smart facing Nick Sabin.

Yes.

So all of these subplots, the sadness was, of course,

powerful.

And let's say that I had gently overstated my fervor and passion for the SEC at this point.

Okay.

As a talking point.

I'm more of a pro football guy than a college football guy.

I'm from Boston.

We had Doug Fluty.

I was Doug Flutty for Halloween when I was eight years old.

Wow.

Not Corprag.

Wow.

Because I was Nomar when I was eight years old.

Were you really?

I mean, come on.

That's why you brought us together.

Probably might want to step out.

I'm disturbed.

So

that was one of the things that I could connect with her on.

So I literally was like, just kind of casually studying up on who they were playing that week.

Like, this is one of my ways to talk.

So I walked in the day after that game.

And I remember I was surprised that she knew my name because I walked past the front desk and she was standing there and I heard her over my shoulder, Jason.

And I was like, whoa.

And I turned around and she said, my dogs.

And I was like, yeah, like, that's tough.

I was like, so she told me about, she watched the game there.

And I was like, oh,

I think this is the place where you watch.

You should check out this article.

And she took my phone and she put her number in my phone and sent herself the article.

And then I asked her out that weekend with that number.

So Charlotte doesn't write this article.

Oh, my God.

This is the most meaningful thing.

I've always been like, yeah, okay, here's a, here, I'll be a clown in a bar and write about it.

But it had.

A butterfly flaps its wings in London and there's a hurricane in Florida.

We all know the butterfly effect.

Well, the Charlotte Wilder effect.

Yeah, an espionation

vlogger.

The flaps

has led to this baby being yes.

Oh my God.

I'm going to cry.

That's the sweetest thing.

Thank you for telling me that.

Of course.

You just made my yellow.

I've waited this long to tell you this in person because we've never had the chance to actually meet each other.

Yeah.

And I've never been able to tell this story to you.

Jason?

Oh my God.

Well, I'm going to start, I'm going to start going to more bars and writing about it.

Yeah, maybe.

You never know who you're going to connect.

Yeah, maybe more people will get married.

Wait, so where does it go from?

Okay,

article, number, no, that's a pro move.

First of all, that such a pro move.

Here's something I think you might be interested in that is nothing to do with me wanting to talk to you.

It's just like, hey, you'll like this.

And then, hey,

I still maintain that she must have known what I was doing.

And she says, no, to the point where I then asked her out, I think I wait.

That was like, let's say a Tuesday, like the day after the national championship.

It was a Tuesday or Wednesday, whenever that game was played.

And I waited two weekends to ask her out.

I saw her at the gym again.

And then, and then I texted her and said,

night of on a Saturday.

Do you want to grab a beer?

Are you around for a beer?

Or something like that.

Wow.

And she to this day is like, I hate beer.

You know I hate beer.

I was like, I didn't do anything.

I barely knew your last name at that point.

But she thought I was just like, hey, buddy, want to grab a beer.

She's like, that's what you say to one of your bros.

You don't ask a girl out that way.

Want to grab a beer?

Read some more SBNation.com blog posts together.

Charlotte has a real banger on why Taylor Swift is like the Patriots.

It is Saturday.

So we went out and I thought it went great, but she didn't think it was a date.

So then the next, I mean, she just said, I remember you talked a lot.

I was super nervous.

She's like, you talked a lot.

I just, I remember telling my roommate like he's a talker he's got great stories but he can talk and i you know what's funny is that i just started the last dance so we started the last dance the day after martin luther king day in 2018 so on that tuesday whatever that date is on wednesday night was our first date wow and i asked her out because i just threw this hail mary i was like you know what i'm going underground for the next four years anyway

What happens?

If she says no, I'm not going to that gym and I'm not leaving my edit room for the next couple of years anyway, so I might as well throw this Hail Mary and see what happens.

But so she had known me for the first two years of our relationship.

She knew me as someone who was

totally consumed by the 90s Chicago Bulls.

I don't think you're the only 47-year-old man who is still totally consumed, but just for the record.

I have several Instagram followers who would agree with me.

Yeah, there you go.

But I am now realizing that Charlotte Wilder arguably deserves credit for the last dance being good.

Yeah.

Okay, how did you make that leap?

Jason's mental health clearly

benefited from a relationship that flourished into his actual household

family.

Yeah, absolutely.

No question.

The fact, the way that I was obsessed with the last dance, the way it gave me just something to do sports-wise in the pandemic.

You didn't even know it was because of yourself at that point.

Well, it wasn't.

It wasn't.

You played a bigger role than Pablo did.

I'll tell you that.

Yeah, well, Pablo didn't do anything.

A producer credit, maybe, for Charlotte and like the, you know, the laser disc.

The acknowledgement that like the,

you know, the producers' directors would like to thank.

Like special thanks?

Yeah.

Yeah, you should get like a very special thanks.

For part 11, Scotty's rebuttal.

If you're looking to add something special to your next celebration, try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

This smooth, flavorful cognac is crafted from the finest grapes and aged to perfection, giving you rich notes of oak and caramel with every sip.

Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Veeen Champain, a 14 alcoholic volume, 400 by Remy Control, USA, Incorporated, New York, New York, 1738, Centaur Design.

Please drink responsibly.

I do want to get to the last stance as this thing that has become omnipresent, though.

So, Jason, who has been a listener of this show and has seeded this story in my brain for so long that I've wanted to pay off with just you guys finally meeting each other.

That was amazing.

Wow.

It also has been dovetailing with the larger sort of subplot of this show, which is me finding out about the Michael Jordan Industrial Complex and all of the ways in which Jason is arguably editorially responsible for the rememing of this guy that we are newly, since the pandemic, obsessed with.

And the last dance as a phrase, it's gone everywhere.

I also should point out that it also, I guess, Charlotte should deserve credit for this as well, it got Jason

onto Saturday Night Live.

One year ago, my documentary about Michael Jordan's final season with the Bulls, The Last Dance, aired on ESPN.

And even though it was 10 hours long, there was so much left on the cutting room floor.

So tonight, I'd like to share an extended scene that I think really speaks to what made Michael Jordan such a great competitor.

Enjoy.

Do you remember where you were when you saw

how you heard that you were now being played on?

I vividly remember.

So

had rented a house in Atlanta near Aaron's family and friends to get out of the city because everything was still locked down.

What would this have been?

21?

21.

Yeah, I think so.

These are crazy Saturday nights that I have.

Oh, yeah.

Reading Espy Nation,

pizza, beers by myself.

This particular Saturday night's a little bit crazier.

I'm doing the Sunday Times crossword on my laptop.

On a Saturday, you click before Sunday.

I don't let myself click it before midnight.

I do it because Sundays get crazy, you know.

Do they?

More SP Nation, articles to read.

I can't keep up.

So Saturday night, I'm sitting there by myself.

Aaron's in bed.

My dog is asleep at my feet.

And I have the TV on,

but it's muted.

So I'm on my laptop, just kind of like looking around Twitter.

I remember doing the crossword.

And then I see that logo, the ESPN Films logo.

So I look up and the first thing that I see is this guy talking and it says Jason Hare

underneath his face.

Yes, Mikey Day, the SNL case.

The slowest four seconds of my life.

I was like,

I know you're going to bleep this because I listened to your show, but what the

is going on?

I literally stood up and said,

what the f is going on?

And then I turned it up.

I immediately thought, now, if you're on SNL,

it's probably not for a good reason.

Right.

And being where we were, especially in 21, coming off the tumultuous year of 20,

I was thinking,

what have I done?

Yeah, exactly.

Have I been canceled?

What did I do?

Honestly, I didn't want to use the canceled word because it just feels lazy, but I was like, I'm canceled.

What did I do?

I'm rocketing through my past, just Rolodexing, like, who did I offend?

How did it make it to the writer's room at SNL?

A million thoughts going through.

And then I turned it up and we had joked about that exact scenario so many times in the making of the dock of like, how brutal did this get when the cameras weren't there.

Tip off is in two hours.

I am playing quarters on the wall with my head of security, John.

You know, John, say, hi,

I'm ready for my close-up.

Because Michael was ruthless to everybody.

He makes exponentially more than these guys, but he was taking their $20 bills.

So watched it, laughed, and then my phone exploded.

Went upstairs.

I took a screenshot of it and went upstairs and woke Erin up.

And I was like, hey, I'm sorry to do this, but I got to talk to somebody.

Like

this was on SNL just now.

And she was like, bleary-eyed, like, what?

What are you talking about?

And then, you know, she, she cared.

She loved me.

She kissed me on the cheek and went back to sleep.

That was, I can say without a doubt, the most surreal moment of my life.

What did you think of the casting?

What do you think of the wardrobe they gave you?

I don't think that was supposed to be me.

Now, here's the sad part i think they went let's go just standard white documentarian nerd and they nailed it like quarter zip the hair though

if

he wasn't wearing the glasses because i don't wear glasses i mean i wear glasses like late at night i wear contacts but if he if he wasn't wearing glasses i'd be like oh wow they found a picture of me watching a game last weekend at some bar in atlanta like the quarter zip button down hey guilty i that that probably is me in the winter i feel like they found a pick The hair, too.

The hair.

Can we just show the visual again?

Yeah, here we go.

So they did find a picture.

His hair looks great.

I wish I still had that hair.

His hair looks tremendous.

And he's in great shape.

Props to Mikey Day for how Jason Hare wishes he looked.

My brother and several of my friends, when I call their phone, that's what comes up.

Oh, that's good.

They have saved that as my picture.

But that scene, it's a sample of the way in which the last dance, like the minor, minor characters

became globally famous.

Like Heidi Gardner playing, and I forget his name, but the security guy.

James.

John Michael Wozniak.

Yeah.

Who, by the way, deserves his own.

We interviewed him and it didn't make the cut.

If I had known.

Oh, wait, wait, wait.

There's John Michael Wozniak.

He was one of the 11 interviews that did not make the final cut.

Oh, my God.

Wait, what did he, what was his view on all of this?

Well, we didn't interview him about that.

We interviewed him about like Michael at home and what the fans were like on the road.

And we had other sound bites that were frankly better than John Michaels.

But we interviewed him at Michael's

still

unsold home in Chicago, where he passed away.

But he was the head security detail on that home until his death.

So he was there.

We interviewed Will Perdue there.

We interviewed Tony Kukoch there.

So we decided to sit him down and ask him some questions that didn't make the cut.

But it never occurred to me that there would be a meme, let alone a slew of of memes from this thing.

That's what I was going to ask, was like your predictions for what would go super globally viral.

No concept of that.

No concept.

Maybe like the montages of like, I wanted to make sure there was like some fun in this and that kids my nephew's ages could understand how fun it was to watch him and to put some some era-specific music in it

because we didn't get to see Michael playing two hip-hop back then.

They were playing, you know,

Deion Warwick and Jeffrey Osborne for NBA superstars, those kind of things.

So that was fun to do.

But it didn't, we had a thousand decisions to make per day.

We were not thinking like, how can we meme this episode?

It got funny.

Like the former Chicago resident, that was never planned.

Oh, the Obama Chiron.

Yeah, that was a little bit of me being a brat because the Powers of Bee insisted that certain people be in this doc.

Now, there's probably no one on earth I'd rather sit down and interview than Barack Obama, but I didn't think he belonged in this documentary just because he was a president wait we're gonna get that aggregated jason hare did not want barack obama to be in the last chance the the messages i've received and the the research people have done to see how i've voted and how disrespectful it is like

because they took because they took it seriously because they thought that i deliberately did that that was so tongue-in-cheek it was so funny former chicago it's like this guy loves basketball and that's what we're talking to him about he's not just a president saying michael was great at basketball it's that he was there in chicago couldn't afford a ticket to the upper deck blah, blah, blah.

Same with Clinton, that he was in it.

I didn't want him just to say like, yeah, they were great

during the 90s.

Why are you organic to this story?

And it was that he was the governor of Arkansas and used to drive to see Scotty Pippen play college basketball.

So it was former Arkansas governor for him.

So anyways,

those things we never could have imagined.

And if you told me beforehand, I probably would have thought that the show was a huge flop and that people were just joking about it online.

I still think that when it came out was probably the most generous, forgiving moment culturally of my lifetime.

And that people were so grateful for anything new.

If this came out in a time of non-pandemic, regular level cynicism of the American, especially sports viewing public, during a finals in which LeBron may or may not have been playing.

Right.

That's when it was supposed to air.

It was on off nights of the finals in June.

Oh, I forgot.

That's right.

So I think there would have been a lot more vitriol.

There would have been a lot more criticism and people would have been a lot more scrutinizing of a lot of the stuff.

But when it came out, I think people were just so happy to have something to watch and something to forget about this horror around them for two hours that they were willing to just say, you know what, entertain me.

I'm going to drop the remote and then we can all talk around this virtual water cooler for the next week until the next one comes out.

It was also one of the rare times in the past 10 years that there was one thing everybody was watching.

that wasn't a live sports game.

We literally had a captive audience globally.

That's what was so interesting to me is that

I think we're so ethnocentric as Americans.

It's like, okay, this is happening here.

We're going to have to get into cricket.

No, they're indoors too.

But this was also about a guy that they were aware of.

Yeah.

So it's also you're getting back into the time machine to get to a truly globally monocultural figure who,

through his own business and

media savvy, and because of the times that he played in the Olympics was scarce.

Michael Jordan could go on and read the phone book for 10 hours during the pandemic, and it still would have gotten incredible ratings because he'd never speak.

He had never, that's the thing that, so, in the aftermath of all the memes, what has been forgotten is that it was the Hall of Fame induction speech where he cries, which was an incredible, my favorite all-time basketball Hall of Fame speech.

But short of that, there really wasn't Michael Jordan talking in a way that felt real

until the last dance.

And when we got it all in this 10-part format,

I think people have since forgotten, like, oh, this was like a wild, endangered sort of like creature had emerged.

And he went back into highlighting.

Like, I've seen a few things with him since, but he's still super, super picky about what he does.

Well, he's a rare person in that he commands a kind of gravitas.

Like, there is a there is like a weight to Michael Jordan in that, like, if he, I've been writing about sports for a while, talked to a lot of athletes.

I think if I were to encounter him in person, I would have a like, oh, you're, you're real moment.

It's almost, you know, it's like the sightings of the Loch Ness Monster.

We know like he.

I think the Loch Ness Monster loved tequila.

Yes.

Like he, he's so real, but he's also so behind

his own myth that he doesn't, you kind of, if you have the reputation he has, the best thing to do is not say anything and not disturb it.

And then he managed to solidify that when he did talk about it in the last dance, and then he disappeared again.

And look at what he hasn't engaged in.

Battles he's won because he's just chosen not to stoop to that level.

It's a lesson for all the rappers out there.

Dude, Isaiah Thomas is on Twitter all of the time, just tweeting.

I feel bad about that too, because I was an Isaiah Thomas fan.

Even as a Celtics fan, I was an Isaiah Thomas fan.

There's things that I wish I had like my five minutes with some of the people who feel slighted by that.

Let's do that list.

Oh boy.

Isaiah

wasn't a fan.

I would imagine he hasn't expressed it to me, but like Isaiah Thomas, bigger than you think in person, and I'm not too psyched to be in the same room with him again.

I don't know that I would get the chance to explain myself, but he pulled me aside.

This is why I feel especially bad.

We did the interview down in Atlanta before taping.

They were doing NBA TV that night.

So we did it at Turner in Ted Turner's old office, which was like this cool, it's like a house on the campus of Turner.

So there was like historic room that we did it in.

And as we were setting up and getting him mic'd, he pulled me aside and said, who is making the decisions on the storytelling?

And I said, me.

And he said, what kind of research have you done?

Phil Jackson did the same thing.

And I told him the books that I had read.

And I told him, you know, my fandom going back as a kid.

I mean, he wasn't, I'm sure he wasn't happy to hear that I was a Celtics fan, especially during those days.

But I said, like,

essentially, I was trying to impart to him that you're in responsible hands.

And I believe that he was still.

I can see, though, how, especially the use of the iPad, these guys would be like,

what the f ⁇ ?

You also pioneered that in a sense.

I'm going to hand you a tablet with your life in video on it, react as we watch you watch yourself i've tried that technique in past docs and i've had people say no really get that get the camera off me you're not going to watch me watch this and get my reaction and it was never meant to be like i'm not twirling my mustache as they do this like it really started out as a toy for michael jordan and to a lesser extent dennis rodman taking care of my seven-week old baby and trying to keep his attention is is reminiscent of my my experience with dennis but for michael it was he had been interviewed 8 000 000 times at the outset of this thing and i feel like i've hijacked this thing from you because this shouldn't be said last dance this is retrospective this is charlotte's film what are you talking about yeah i made the movie jason i don't know what you're talking about there are ghost writers and there are ghost executive producers ghost muses oh wow so i'm gonna come out here so i'm gonna be so cocky after this i'm gonna be like well i'm the last dance you're welcome they at the outset of this they said he said all he has to say for years and you can just cull from those interviews he doesn't need to be interviewed for this and i was pretty adamant that he needed to be interviewed, that we couldn't just show old clips of him saying things.

I think that retrospect was more interesting than archival video.

But it was like, how can we keep this kid, the kid, this guy

occupied and in the chair?

And when I say kid, I thought back to when my mom, when we used to go to church as kids, my mom would have like a Matchbox car for the first 10 minutes of the Mass and then like a bag of Cheerios and like there was something to occupy us at all times so that by the time they say like the mass has ended, go in peace, her three-year-old's fine.

Like you barely knew he was there for that long.

So your strategy for handling NBA Hall of Famers was the same that I have when I'm trying to take my daughter on an airplane.

Kind of.

Yeah.

Give them the iPad.

Yeah.

Say, do you need a snack?

Would you like something to drink?

He had a snack.

He had a snack right there.

He had

a cigar and a

tumbler of tequila.

That's what I give to most three-year-olds also.

So

you You just rub a little on the gums.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Rub a little squirrel on the gums and they're right up.

So that was meant to, I had a line that I was looking at of his shoulders on the chair.

And once his shoulders sunk below that line, it was time to give him, seriously, just because that was a signal that like he needed to pep up.

And he loves games and loved that game of like,

we should put the outtakes of what.

what clips did not make it that I showed him did not make it onto there.

Right.

I'm surprised that there haven't been more creative uses on the internet of people showing him clips that he was not looking at.

You know, Fall of the Berlin Wall.

It's like, I can't believe Michael Jordan reacted to J.D.

Vance's position.

Childless cat ladies, Dennis Robin reacts.

It's hilarious.

The list is

of people that you wish you could have five minutes with to Scotty Pippen, Isaiah Thomas, the Krauss family.

The Krauss family, by the way, obviously Jerry wasn't around to interview.

And the harder we demonstrated that the team was on him, the more sympathy I thought that would garner for Krauss.

Because I thought that people would appreciate, okay, he's the one who put the pieces in place.

This poor guy is kind of a fish out of water with these NBA alpha males.

Look at how they're hazing him.

And instead, people thought like

the filmmakers hate Jerry Krauss and have made him the villain.

That was not the intent.

So that's my misstep.

If you have a problem with how he was portrayed, that one, both hands up, that's on me.

The one thing that the NBA pushed back on in the entirety of this process was a clip where Scotty

in the locker room, they were joking around with

saying what they were were going to do when they won the title.

And Scotty, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically said, I'm going to stick a cattle prod

up Jerry Krause's butt and give that guy a heart attack or something like that.

And everybody laughed.

And it wasn't like, oh my God, keep the cattle prods away from Scotty.

He said it in the heat of the moment, the way it was like, you know what, I'm going to kill that guy.

So I included that in our rough cuts because I wanted people to see what this guy was going through day in and day out.

And that's the one thing that they made me take out in three or four years of doing this.

It wasn't like

Michael calling people a bitch or it wasn't that.

It was that comment from Scotty to Jerry Krause in deference to the Krause family that, all right, we've done enough to show that this guy is the butt of all the jokes.

As it were.

And I, yeah.

So I followed poor Deion Kokoros, who is a producer still for the NBA, I followed him to Grand Central and went to the platform of his train before he was as he was getting on to plead my case of why I wanted to do this.

It wasn't out of cruelty, it was out of respect.

And he didn't see it that way.

And they made me take it out.

So, yeah, the Krauss family, especially with what happened to his wife earlier this year, and all this popped up again to remind listeners, she was booed when they had an anniversary night for the Bulls back in January.

Exactly.

NBA Executive of the Year, represented by his wife, Thelma, basketball hall of famer.

And Thelma Krauss, when they spotlit her and said his name, a lot of the crowd at the United Center booed.

They had watched the last dance.

I felt terrible about that, honestly.

Like, I don't feel

responsible or guilty, but a part of me is like, you know, if we never did this, then this poor woman wouldn't have gone through what I'm sure was one of the worst moments of her life.

I cannot believe that Charlotte did that.

Yeah, it was

irresponsible of me to be standing behind her with onions that night.

You know, I will say this.

Steve Kerr was ambivalent, I think, about the doc because he was literally front and center on the poster and wasn't a starter.

You know, he's got a good case that Ron Harper deserved to be a bigger part of the dock because he was a bigger part of the team.

Luke Longley, who didn't participate and people thought that I deliberately kept him out and was too lazy to fly to Australia.

By the way, if the NBA and Netflix NESPN wanted to fly me to Australia, sure, I'm on that plane.

Like I absolutely would have done this.

I was told by multiple sources that he wasn't interested in doing it.

And we had a ton of footage on him.

And he wasn't the greatest interview from the interviews he did in 98.

And I thought, all right, what if we do force him to do this?

We get on a plane.

We go all the way there.

And he's a dud.

It wasn't a budget thing.

It was a time thing.

We were.

I've never had that kind of a tsunami crashing over my head for that many years.

It was at a certain point.

It was like after a couple of months, we're like, when is this going to calm down?

And someone was like, it's never going to calm down.

So we didn't have time to go.

To that point.

So earlier this year,

I laughed aloud when I saw this.

There's a headline.

It was

Bulls Legends going on No Bull tour to respond to the last dance.

In Australia.

In Australia, it was Scotty Pippin, Luke Longley, and Horace Grant

who were, yeah, basically going on the opposite of a public apology tour.

It's a public, we're going to talk shit about Jason Hair specifically.

Here's the thing, Jason, you have inadvertently, sure, there are things that might have happened because of certain things that, you know, like the Thelma Krauss, but also you have given a lot of people a second wind to make money off of something here.

Like, that doesn't happen if the last dance, that doesn't happen if I don't executive produce the last dance.

That's right.

If you had had told me that horace grant would be front and center at the sydney opera house talking about i don't think that he played the opera house but i do know that they went on on a mini tour of australia um people sent me this you gave them that jason

tasmania melbourne and sydney

and i heard that it was toothless when they actually did it like they did this press conference when they were like we're gonna tear the cover off this thing and show you that they're real last dance yes um the no bull tour right the no bull tour yeah Yeah.

So No Bull.

But I heard that it was actually complimentary of Mike.

I don't think they even mentioned the dock.

Like Horace Grant, that's a good example.

I think he had a beef with it because Michael said Horace Grant was

the source that Sam Smith used primarily for the Jordan Rules, the book that he wrote in 91.

Right.

Kind of tore the lid off of Michael's like pristine.

squeaky clean image

and horse and sam are adamant that it wasn't them all of those people that I just mentioned to you expressed those sentiments in the dock.

It wasn't like we said, Michael said, he did it, and we just left it at that.

That's the funny thing about the iPad is like a lot of people pushed back at him laughing at Gary Payton, and they brought up.

I mean, my Twitter mentions as we were trying to finish this thing were just like people, Michael Jordan haters, just furious and throwing stats at me as if we were going to recut and make like an episode 11 and 12

and pull a stat boy to talk about your right yeah to reference your world so

what was i supposed to do though is let give gary payton

an ipad of michael looking at an ipad of him and then we get into this vortex of ipads and the next thing you know like like it's a house of mirrors of people just looking at ipads of each other looking at ipads it was a trick that we use that in the moment

um seemed to work in the edit room.

And so many decisions, when you're working on that kind of a schedule, are like, okay, it's like going to the eye eye doctor like this one or this one that one okay go this one or this one that one go it was decisions made in the moment and you just got to kind of white knuckle it and hope for the best so

I understand why there are some people who are upset with it

and if they are upset like again

don't be upset with Jordan don't be upset with

the NBA be upset with me

And let's come on Pablo's show and talk about it.

No, I love this.

There is a funny thing that's been happening, though, where the The Last Dance as this phrase

becoming an industry unto itself.

So like the new Venom movie is called Venom, The Last Dance.

But that's not deliberate.

The funny part to me is when I see like

Madeline's fifth grade soccer team, The Last Dance, and they show like pictures of this girl's last dance.

Like the JV field hockey team, last dance.

Yeah, which is more or less what Aaron Rodgers did with Devontae Adams when they went on Instagram and basically did the fifth grade girls soccer team.

But that makes sense because it would have have been their last season and blah, blah, blah.

I've been told by many people, some who have the capacity to make a doc and some who don't, you need to do a doc about Messi's last dance.

Sure, I was playing for an interview.

I'd scribble that on my hand and go back and research it.

I'm watching Novak Djokovic and Rafa Nadal go back and forth during the Olympics this week.

I hope we get to meet because there'll probably be one last dance for both of us.

Is this their last dance or whose last dance is it?

And Rafa's fighting it and Novak's leaning into it and i'm like this is this is because of you guys here's the thing i can't take credit for that title my worst

my biggest blind spot in this business is titles you're talking to someone who did a documentary about the fab five the 85 bears and andre the giant and the titles were the fab five the 85 bears and andre the giant because that's how i refer to these things anyway Like

we know Ezra, OJ Made in America.

I don't say, hey, remember that part in OJ Made in America?

I say the OJ dock.

We weren't going to call this the Jordan dock.

We weren't going to call it Jordan.

We weren't going to call it Bull.

But that's why it's amazing is that it's not called that.

People say the last dance.

Yeah.

They actually break the rule because of what you apparently did not even name it yourself.

Do you know

they made the last dance in like 2003?

It was a one-off 90-minute.

100-minute movie.

No, I knew nothing about this.

And this was like urban legend, but I've since verified this.

It was on a DVD that's probably still floating around ESPN offices somewhere.

The doc world had not yet proliferated enough for there to be a market for 10 hours.

And you can thank Making a Murderer and other series for that.

But at the time, five years after Michael retired from the Bulls,

they made a 90-minute version that called these 500 hours of footage into 90 minutes instead of into 10 hours.

And it was voiced by John Cusack Cusack in the first person.

Whoa.

What?

As a Bulls fan.

I haven't thought about John Cuzak.

My first comment is, a little too much Cusak.

Yeah, he was apparently is a massive Chicago sports fan and Bulls fan.

And it was, I, the rough cut that I saw was a scratch track.

So it was someone who sounded nothing like John Cusak saying, hi, I'm John Cusak.

Here's the story of the 1997, 98 Bulls.

And it was just that season.

So that lived on a shelf for a while.

And they still hadn't had Michael's, you know, infamous permission to do this, which, which the reason any of this gets greenlit is that he says, okay, you can show the footage.

But yeah, it started as that.

I've wondered, like,

because the derivation of this was that The Last Waltz, which is Scorsese's concert film about the band,

that inspired Phil Jackson to call that season The Last Dance.

The Last Dance then becomes the name of that one-off dock, which then grows into a 10-part dock.

Do you think that Phil Jackson thought that The Last Waltz was called The Last Dance?

Yes, absolutely.

Oh, 100%.

And if so, if this was called The Last Waltz, would it have had the cultural impact that it did?

No.

I agree.

Absolutely.

The last dance,

there's something approachable and romantic.

And the last dance, I feel like the reason that that is something that has proliferated or that people gravitate towards is because they're like well what happened i do think that

phil jackson's uh foggy memory of those days

which i i'm willing to bet that there's a reason why he doesn't remember everything about the last waltz when he saw it back then um yeah phil jackson was

called the last dance and he was going to as an homage to scorsese and the band in that film name it the same thing and now here we are.

You are 100% right.

Phil Jackson got the name of a movie wrong.

My favorite Phil Jackson piece of trivia from this movie,

two, they both happened on the same day.

One is that he slammed the door, literally slammed the door in my face when we showed up to this remote location in Montana.

It was one of the only 106 interviews that my producer and one of my best friends, Jake Rogal, who is right now in Paris

documenting the Olympic basketball project.

It's one of the only ones that he wasn't allowed to book himself.

We had to go through other parties.

And he was like, I don't like this.

I don't like this because

he's for good reason a control freak.

We showed up to, I think it was Flathead Lake in Montana, beautiful place, very remote location.

And we show up at the house, knock on the door the morning of the interview.

I have 11 pages of questions, each of which is an hour of questions.

So I need Phil Jackson to to sit there for 11 hours, which I knew wasn't going to happen.

But I didn't think that he would slam the door in my, he opened the door and said, hello.

And I said, hey, coach, Jason Hare with the documentary crew.

And he said, can I help you?

And I said, yeah, we're here to shoot your interview today.

And he said, I don't know anything about this and literally slammed the door in my face.

So he called his daughter, who I think used to work for the NBA or was NBA adjacent.

And she somehow verified that, yes, this is a legitimate project and they're there to interview you.

And that was it.

So we interviewed him in his backyard for five and a half hours that day.

Oh, my God.

But this is the piece of trivia: the house behind Phil Jackson that you see, he built with his bare hands.

That log cabin, that feels right, he built with his bare hands with his brother back in the 60s and 70s.

And he doesn't remember that either.

At the end of every show, as you both realize,

we go around the table and say what it is that we found out today.

And what I found out today is pretty simple, which is that

Phil Jackson on ayahuasca and Charlotte Wilder are both responsible for the success of The Last Thance.

No, no, no.

No, no, no, no.

I'm not responsible for that.

I found out a major piece of of information, which is that I helped Jason get his now wife's number.

I'm sure it would have happened without that article.

I'm not sure.

Yeah, I don't know about that.

I don't know.

Really?

He was doing a lot of SEC trivia studying, and he didn't seem to be going anywhere.

This felt like...

Who's this Sony Michelle guy?

That's just like, I feel like when I'm working in sports, there sometimes can be this feeling of, is what I'm doing

getting anywhere?

I think sometimes I forget that anybody can hear what I say or read what I write, and it is not brain surgery.

It is not, you know, the,

it can feel

not trivial because I truly believe that it is important and that it's an amazing cultural gateway and a way to get people into all sorts of different conversations.

But like going to a bar to watch people be sad, you're like, well, you know,

there's some beautiful human takeaway, but the fact that the fact that anything I've done in my life has made someone's life better inadvertently is just like the most delightful thing.

So thank you so much for telling me that.

You're welcome.

And I've been waiting for six years to tell you that.

And every year that passes, there's a bigger reason to tell you the story.

But what I've learned or has been reiterated to me is that you never know who is watching and you never know the connections that you're making that you're completely unaware of.

I try and tell our editors all the time time that you never know, like take every shot really seriously because you never know which shot people are going to take away from this dock and be like, oh, I love that doc.

So you never know.

Just try and be a good person, keep your head down, do good work, and you never know what connections are made that you never even were aware of.

Wow.

So again, to the Pippin family, we're available for the reconciliation tour that I want to put on.

And yeah, Jason, Charlotte, thank you both for

taking this personally.

Thanks for having us.

Week the shrug.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.