The Last Dance, the remarkable documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, offers plenty of insights on how a sporting dynasty was created. The Bulls won six National Basketball Association (NBA) titles between 1991 and 1998, but the most revealing snippet comes in the aftermath of all that success.
“It’s maddening because I think we could’ve won seven,” says Jordan of the team management’s decision to break up that legendary side. “I really believe that. We may not have, but man, to not be able to try, that’s something that I just can’t accept. For whatever reason, I just can’t accept it.”
Jordan was 35 at the time, and his place in the annals as basketball’s first global superstar was already assured. But that one quote gives so much insight into the mind of a winner. Instead of basking in the glory of the six titles he won, Jordan is more bothered by the one that perhaps got away.
You see the same fierce focus at times with MS Dhoni. He lasted played an international game at the 2019 World Cup. Had he walked away after masterminding a fourth IPL win for Chennai Super Kings during the pandemic years in 2021, there would not have been one murmur of complaint.
Dhoni had already turned 40 a few months before the 2021 final. And the bio-secure bubbles and isolation were asking a lot of a man who had a small daughter to think of, and no regular game-play to fall back on. Walking away was surely the sensible option?
He is also a man with absolutely nothing to prove. Whatever was there to be won, he did. The World Cup, the World T20, the Champions Trophy, the IPL (four times), and the Champions League T20 (twice). And for all the talk of how he wasn’t a great red-ball captain, Dhoni was the first to lead India to the top of the Test rankings and stay there for over 18 months.
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So, why has he kept playing? He turns 42 in July, and has played most of this season with a dodgy left knee. Why suffer through such things? For what? Could it be that this is about gratitude? To a franchise and a fanbase that have kept the faith and showered him with respect and affection for a decade and a half?
Chennai’s last two titles, in 2018 and 2021, came far from home, at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai and in Dubai. In 2018, CSK played just one home game in Chennai before switching base to Pune. And since his last match for India in 2019, the 2023 IPL season marked the first time that Dhoni and his team came home.
With the pandemic having denied him a proper international swansong, Dhoni seems determined to leave the IPL on his own terms, without the sort of regrets that still consume Jordan. Every CSK game this season, home or away, has been a celebration of the man. If you looked at the stands, you wouldn’t easily be able to tell if you were in Chennai or Kolkata or Ahmedabad. Those Chennai fans, recognising that the grains of sand have almost all reached the bottom of the timer, have followed him everywhere.
Those fans, as much as his teammates and a supportive team management are his strength, the reason to keep pushing when he no longer has any need to. It’s what gets him back into training in the middle of a north Indian winter, and what propels him through an exhausting two-month and 16-game campaign in the hideously hot summer months.
It was the great Muhammad Ali that once said: “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’”
That attitude has got Dhoni to this point. A tenth IPL final with CSK (an 11th for him as an individual). The chance of a fifth title. Last dance or not, Dhoni will be ready. He will be switched on, and conscious of every little sub-plot. Just like the hardwood floors were Jordan’s domain, that vantage point a dozen yards or more behind the stumps is Dhoni’s happy place. The hair may be flecked with grey and the knee may ache, but once the umpire calls “Play”, he will be in his element.
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