"You've Never Won Anything" (1998, 2014, 2020)

Michael Jordan, Whiplash, and Winners and Losers in America

Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics.

I. “Not Quite My Tempo”

The best sports movie of the 21st century is Damien Chazzelle’s Whiplash (2014), which may seem like an odd proclamation for the writer of a sports-history newsletter to make, given that Whiplash isn’t technically a sports movie at all. Whiplash is about a jazz drummer’s relationship to his tyrannical mentor; it is a film that plumbs the dark relationship between ambition and beauty, between brutality and greatness. The central question at the heart of Whiplash is the central question at the heart of so many sports stories: Whether sacrificing your humanity in pursuit of artistic transcendence is a Faustian bargain, or whether it’s actually the only way to achieve transcendence.

I think about that movie all the time, both within the narrow context of sports and within the larger context of the American dream. I’ve thought about it again these past few week…