How ‘The Last Dance’ Changed Sports Docs for Good
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A new documentary on Steph Curry debuts this week, underlining just how much the sports documentary landscape has changed since the iconic Michael Jordan series dropped
By Danny Chau Jul 21, 2023, 6:20am EDT
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The shooting form that has inspired a generation—and no doubt will inspire countless ones to come—was forged on a smooth, leveled concrete basketball court on a 16-acre estate just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, where Steph Curry spent the bulk of his childhood. It was the summer of ’04, better known by the Curry family as the summer of tears . In less than a decade, Steph would break the NBA record for most 3-pointers made in a season ( again, and again, and again ), but back then, as a rising high school junior yet to hit any discernible growth spurt, he was still dreaming of playing in college one day, never mind the pros. His father, Dell, who remains one of only 50 players in NBA history to shoot 40 percent from behind the arc over his career, knew how to make that happen. He also knew it wouldn’t be easy. Genetics had given Steph the touch, and a lifetime of watching his dad in the pros meant Steph knew the importance of a consistent, goosenecked follow-through. It was everything in between that was the issue. Young Steph literally shot from his hip, needing all the leverage he could muster for a proper trajectory. The ball would leave his fingertips at chest height. At his stature, it literally wouldn’t fly against higher competition. He would have to completely rebuild his mechanics.
For the next three months, a 16-year-old Steph would adapt to a new form that would one day lead a revolution. But for those three months, as Dell notes in Stephen Curry: Underrated , the Apple TV+ and A24 documentary that premieres Friday on Apple TV+, Steph was forbidden from shooting outside of the paint. He needed to develop the muscle, the memory, and the muscle memory to bring his release above his forehead, lest the allure of distance corrupt his form. He would shoot right around the rim, day after day, until the mechanics were burned into him. Until the exact upper-body alignment critical to his flowing, one-motion jumper was as innate as breathing. There were ample tears of frustration—Steph himself admits it was the only time in his life when he hated basketball.
The Offer Sheet
Will Portland finally give in and trade Dame Lillard? We’re keeping a close watch on all of the biggest free agents, trade targets, retirement bluffers, and more in our new offseason tracker .
The prohibition on deep shots during Steph’s training was almost a footnote in the first half of the documentary, yet it was all I could think about at the end of the screening at Toronto’s Hot Docs international festival in early May. It’s one hell of a creation myth: A long summer of tortured repetition—when he was deprived of what he’d soon become the best in the world at—established the dynamic architecture for one of the most joyous expressions of skill in all of sports. That’s what a sports documentary is for, right? To expand a mythology?
It would have been enough for the doc to dwell on the brilliance of Steph’s marksmanship. After all, the film opens with a narration of his old scouting reports, read by Hall of Famer and fellow sharpshooter Reggie Miller, with accompanying footage of a mid-December game at Madison Square Garden in 2021, in which Steph set the new all-time record for career 3-pointers made. The 3-pointer itself is central to understanding his impact on the NBA, but despite the occasional allusions and parallels drawn to the Warriors’ 2022 championship run, the documentary isn’t really about Curry’s NBA trajectory at all. (Though, from interviews that producers have done during media junkets, it seems that was more the result of a dearth of NBA access than any overriding narrative decision.) At its heart, Underrated operates as an oral history of Curry’s miraculous time at Davidson College, with the film loosely pegged to the 15th anniversary of Davidson’s iconic Cinderella run to the Elite Eight in the 2008 NCAA tournament. It’s nothing too revelatory, but it’s a pleasant reminder of the unforeseen phenomenon that Steph became at the college level—before shifting the NBA’s paradigm irrevocably. But much of that—of what Curry, now 35, means to basketball today —is found between the lines in Underrated ; I walked out of the theater with no new prevailing myth about Curry to latch onto, only the same fact that I’d entered the theater with: He’s the greatest shooter ever. It must be hard to find a perfect ending for a career still in progress. I suppose I should blame Michael Jordan for such expectations.
It’s been three years since The Last Dance transported the world back to 1997, to a safer space in the public imagination than what was then the present. It may very well be remembered as one of the most important documentary series of the century, if only for its unique reconstruction of time during a moment in human history when keeping track of hours and days felt like a losing battle (never mind all the footage of Michael Jordan kicking ass). The Last Dance existed in the vacuum of an indeterminable present, when the prospect of live sports had vanished instantly, and a reintroduction to the dynamics at play in Chicago acted as a surrogate. The doc , I wrote at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, was “the league’s most compelling document of the times; in our new social habitus, what we see revealed by Jordan and the Bulls is as present as it gets.” That The Last Dance inspired a cottage industry of legacy-affirming sports media isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is how quickly the form has been warped and accelerated and how modern-day athletes have begun to executive-produce their legacies concurrent with their actual play, instead of waiting for their stories to be told for them.
As influential as The Last Dance is in the current sports media landscape (it’s led to similar vanity series featuring the likes of Derek Jeter, Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain, and Bill Walton), in most respects, it is simply adhering to long-established standards of the format. ESPN’s 30 for 30 series has been a gold standard for more than a decade, but each of those films crucially had an outsider’s perspective framing the narrative, while a good lot of post- Dance profiles give the subject ultimate control over how their legacy is depicted. These documentaries are a way of reliving the primacy of an athlete, but only within the confines of selective memory—at a certain point, the spark dulls, especially if the doc starts smelling a bit like retroactive propaganda. Chasing the success of The Last Dance— or, more specifically, what made it so vital—is an impossible task.
Every sports legacy feature since has walked along a generational divide in how media ought to be consumed. When a young Mavericks fan with YouTube access can easily juxtapose the previous night’s Luka Doncic highlights with 11-year-old footage of a barely teenage Doncic playing youth tournament basketball, do documentaries have to bear the responsibility of being monolithic today? The Last Dance arrived in 10 parts, and in its leaps across time and place, it attempted to construct something approaching definitive—akin to a Ken Burns docuseries. Jordan’s aim was to deliver the final word on his greatness in an era when post-release album edits, rerecorded masters , and AI upscaling have made the concept of “final” subjective.
What I found notable about Underrated was that, beyond its austere title and flimsy NBA parallels, the documentary was pointedly not definitive. Why should it be? For Steph, whose multimedia company, Unanimous Media, produced the documentary, burdens of completionism don’t apply. A simple desire to relive his college days is a reasonable impetus—that A24 wanted to distribute the project was icing on the cake. Tracing Steph’s roots up to and including the Davidson run (the film also includes footage of student-athlete Steph fulfilling a promise to his mom by graduating in 2022) is enough—for now. Unlike Jordan’s career arc, Curry’s is still unfolding. Even 14 seasons in, Curry remains a top-five player in the NBA. Time is an adversary, but it’s one he can still elude gracefully in the present without propping up the past as a shield. There is also a self-awareness in the doc that keeps it grounded: How do you take an A24-distributed Steph Curry doc seriously when, in the same year, he has appeared in corny Subway ads that literally spoof the entire sports documentary genre? Well, counterintuitively, by including day-in-the-life footage of a zombified Curry staggering onto a Subway commercial set, groggily delivering lines on two hours of sleep.
Still, one could say Curry played it safe, opting for a more conventional route of mythmaking. Some of the league’s fellow tentpole figures have managed to transform their lives into biopics before ever hanging up their sneakers. Giannis Antetokounmpo, a Disney/Marvel character in the flesh, fittingly adapted his family’s story into a Disney film last year. Last month, LeBron James turned his halcyon years at St. Vincent–St. Mary into a teen movie. Because what’s the point in waiting?
Around the same time that The Last Dance had a hold on a captive audience in 2020, a motif had emerged on TikTok that extolled the virtues of romanticizing one’s life—a concept that bled into the very recent pop-psych term: main character syndrome . “You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character,” a disembodied voice-over, used in countless TikToks over the years, says. “Because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by. And all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed.” The league knows who its main characters are. And it’s become abundantly clear to stars like Steph, LeBron, and Giannis that, in this era that they occupy, they don’t need to finish a story to start telling it.
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Filed under: NBA. Movies. Pop Culture. A new documentary on Steph Curry debuts this week, underlining just how much the sports documentary landscape has changed since the iconic Michael Jordan series dropped. By Danny Chau Jul 21, 2023, 6:20am EDT. Share this story. Share this on Facebook. Share this on Twitter. Share All sharing options. Share All sharing options for: How ‘The Last Dance’ Changed Sports Docs for Good. Flipboard. Email. Getty Images/Ringer illustration. The shooting form that has inspired a generation—and no doubt will inspire countless ones to come—was forged on a smooth, leveled concrete basketball court on a 16-acre estate just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, where Steph Curry spent the bulk of his childhood. It was the summer of ’04, better known by the Curry family as the summer of tears . In less than a decade, Steph would break the NBA record for most 3-pointers made in a season ( again, and again, and again ), but back then, as a rising high school junior yet to hit any discernible growth spurt, he was still dreaming of playing in college one day, never mind the pros. His father, Dell, who remains one of only 50 players in NBA history to shoot 40 percent from behind the arc over his career, knew how to make that happen. He also knew it wouldn’t be easy. Genetics had given Steph the touch, and a lifetime of watching his dad in the pros meant Steph knew the importance of a consistent, goosenecked follow-through. It was everything in between that was the issue. Young Steph literally shot from his hip, needing all the leverage he could muster for a proper trajectory. The ball would leave his fingertips at chest height. At his stature, it literally wouldn’t fly against higher competition. He would have to completely rebuild his mechanics. For the next three months, a 16-year-old Steph would adapt to a new form that would one day lead a revolution. But for those three months, as Dell notes in Stephen Curry: Underrated , the Apple TV+ and A24 documentary that premieres Friday on Apple TV+, Steph was forbidden from shooting outside of the paint. He needed to develop the muscle, the memory, and the muscle memory to bring his release above his forehead, lest the allure of distance corrupt his form. He would shoot right around the rim, day after day, until the mechanics were burned into him. Until the exact upper-body alignment critical to his flowing, one-motion jumper was as innate as breathing. There were ample tears of frustration—Steph himself admits it was the only time in his life when he hated basketball. The Offer Sheet. Will Portland finally give in and trade Dame Lillard? We’re keeping a close watch on all of the biggest free agents, trade targets, retirement bluffers, and more in our new offseason tracker . The prohibition on deep shots during Steph’s training was almost a footnote in the first half of the documentary, yet it was all I could think about at the end of the screening at Toronto’s Hot Docs international festival in early May. It’s one hell of a creation myth: A long summer of tortured repetition—when he was deprived of what he’d soon become the best in the world at—established the dynamic architecture for one of the most joyous expressions of skill in all of sports. That’s what a sports documentary is for, right? To expand a mythology? It would have been enough for the doc to dwell on the brilliance of Steph’s marksmanship. After all, the film opens with a narration of his old scouting reports, read by Hall of Famer and fellow sharpshooter Reggie Miller, with accompanying footage of a mid-December game at Madison Square Garden in 2021, in which Steph set the new all-time record for career 3-pointers made. The 3-pointer itself is central to understanding his impact on the NBA, but despite the occasional allusions and parallels drawn to the Warriors’ 2022 championship run, the documentary isn’t really about Curry’s NBA trajectory at all. (Though, from interviews that producers have done during media junkets, it seems that was more the result of a dearth of NBA access than any overriding narrative decision.) At its heart, Underrated operates as an oral history of Curry’s miraculous time at Davidson College, with the film loosely pegged to the 15th anniversary of Davidson’s iconic Cinderella run to the Elite Eight in the 2008 NCAA tournament. It’s nothing too revelatory, but it’s a pleasant reminder of the unforeseen phenomenon that Steph became at the college level—before shifting the NBA’s paradigm irrevocably. But much of that—of what Curry, now 35, means to basketball today —is found between the lines in Underrated ; I walked out of the theater with no new prevailing myth about Curry to latch onto, only the same fact that I’d entered the theater with: He’s the greatest shooter ever. It must be hard to find a perfect ending for a career still in progress. I suppose I should blame Michael Jordan for such expectations. It’s been three years since The Last Dance transported the world back to 1997, to a safer space in the public imagination than what was then the present. It may very well be remembered as one of the most important documentary series of the century, if only for its unique reconstruction of time during a moment in human history when keeping track of hours and days felt like a losing battle (never mind all the footage of Michael Jordan kicking ass). The Last Dance existed in the vacuum of an indeterminable present, when the prospect of live sports had vanished instantly, and a reintroduction to the dynamics at play in Chicago acted as a surrogate. The doc , I wrote at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, was “the league’s most compelling document of the times; in our new social habitus, what we see revealed by Jordan and the Bulls is as present as it gets.” That The Last Dance inspired a cottage industry of legacy-affirming sports media isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is how quickly the form has been warped and accelerated and how modern-day athletes have begun to executive-produce their legacies concurrent with their actual play, instead of waiting for their stories to be told for them. As influential as The Last Dance is in the current sports media landscape (it’s led to similar vanity series featuring the likes of Derek Jeter, Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain, and Bill Walton), in most respects, it is simply adhering to long-established standards of the format. ESPN’s 30 for 30 series has been a gold standard for more than a decade, but each of those films crucially had an outsider’s perspective framing the narrative, while a good lot of post- Dance profiles give the subject ultimate control over how their legacy is depicted. These documentaries are a way of reliving the primacy of an athlete, but only within the confines of selective memory—at a certain point, the spark dulls, especially if the doc starts smelling a bit like retroactive propaganda. Chasing the success of The Last Dance— or, more specifically, what made it so vital—is an impossible task. Every sports legacy feature since has walked along a generational divide in how media ought to be consumed. When a young Mavericks fan with YouTube access can easily juxtapose the previous night’s Luka Doncic highlights with 11-year-old footage of a barely teenage Doncic playing youth tournament basketball, do documentaries have to bear the responsibility of being monolithic today? The Last Dance arrived in 10 parts, and in its leaps across time and place, it attempted to construct something approaching definitive—akin to a Ken Burns docuseries. Jordan’s aim was to deliver the final word on his greatness in an era when post-release album edits, rerecorded masters , and AI upscaling have made the concept of “final” subjective. What I found notable about Underrated was that, beyond its austere title and flimsy NBA parallels, the documentary was pointedly not definitive. Why should it be? For Steph, whose multimedia company, Unanimous Media, produced the documentary, burdens of completionism don’t apply. A simple desire to relive his college days is a reasonable impetus—that A24 wanted to distribute the project was icing on the cake. Tracing Steph’s roots up to and including the Davidson run (the film also includes footage of student-athlete Steph fulfilling a promise to his mom by graduating in 2022) is enough—for now. Unlike Jordan’s career arc, Curry’s is still unfolding. Even 14 seasons in, Curry remains a top-five player in the NBA. Time is an adversary, but it’s one he can still elude gracefully in the present without propping up the past as a shield. There is also a self-awareness in the doc that keeps it grounded: How do you take an A24-distributed Steph Curry doc seriously when, in the same year, he has appeared in corny Subway ads that literally spoof the entire sports documentary genre? Well, counterintuitively, by including day-in-the-life footage of a zombified Curry staggering onto a Subway commercial set, groggily delivering lines on two hours of sleep. Still, one could say Curry played it safe, opting for a more conventional route of mythmaking. Some of the league’s fellow tentpole figures have managed to transform their lives into biopics before ever hanging up their sneakers. Giannis Antetokounmpo, a Disney/Marvel character in the flesh, fittingly adapted his family’s story into a Disney film last year. Last month, LeBron James turned his halcyon years at St. Vincent–St. Mary into a teen movie. Because what’s the point in waiting? Around the same time that The Last Dance had a hold on a captive audience in 2020, a motif had emerged on TikTok that extolled the virtues of romanticizing one’s life—a concept that bled into the very recent pop-psych term: main character syndrome . “You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character,” a disembodied voice-over, used in countless TikToks over the years, says. “Because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by. And all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed.” The league knows who its main characters are. And it’s become abundantly clear to stars like Steph, LeBron, and Giannis that, in this era that they occupy, they don’t need to finish a story to start telling it. Sign up for the The Ringer Newsletter. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email (required) Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again. Terms. Privacy Notice. Privacy Policy. Terms of Service. Next Up In NBA. The Battle of the Blue Bloods, the Curry Doc, and the Return of SlamBall With J. Kyle Mann. Wish You Had That Second-Round Pick Now, Don’t You? Stephen Curry on ‘Underrated,’ the Chris Paul–Jordan Poole Trade, and His Relationship With Kevin Durant. The Complete Timeline of the Draymond Green–Jordan Poole Beef. Trading Joel Embiid, and the Saquon Standoff. Why Is the Draymond-Poole Drama Still Going? Plus, What It Was Like to See Wemby In Person. Sign up for the The Ringer Newsletter. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email (required) Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again. Terms. Privacy Notice. Privacy Policy. Terms of Service. The Latest.
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