The Last Dance: Luc Longley relishing quiet life thousands of miles away from documentary attention
It’s not just Aussies who are bemused by Luc Longley’s absence from the most compelling sports documentary you may ever see. But he’s happy. He’s where he wants to be. He’s in … cognito.
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The chant of Luc Longley. It comes throughout The Last Dance. It comes when a leviathan Australian with laid-back sensibilities joins Michael Jordan in the Chicago Bulls huddle. It comes when Scottie Pippen or someone hollers: “What time is it?” It comes when they all grimace and groan and grunt: “Game time! Ooph!”
It comes and it goes and so does Longley. The camera won’t go near him again — it won’t go within a Bulls’ roar of him — until he walks into another huddle to do another chant before another game.
Curious. It’s not just Australians who are bemused by Longley’s absence from the most compelling sports documentary you may ever wish to see.
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The New York Post has written: “After Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Denis Rodman, Luc Longley was as significant as any Bull to the second three-peat, the team’s starting centre and a key piece in the final season of Jordan’s time with the Bulls. But the 7-foot Australian is not heard from in The Last Dance, the 10-part ESPN documentary on that final season. He hasn’t been heard from in any non-documentary interviews either, having reportedly changed his number to avoid interviews.”
Where is Longley in the doco? Cutting room floor. Edited, almost entirely, out of the game and locker room footage.
Get all the The Last Dance gossip right here
Where is he now? He’s where he wants to be. He’s in … cognito.
He’s living in a tiny dot on the map called Denmark, Western Australia. Five hours south of Perth. On the road to Esperance. The end of the Earth. It’s as close as a famous athlete can go to literally falling off the map.
“I’ve always loved the area,” he says.
“I used the money from a bubblegum trading card contract to buy this place. It has a lot of things I value. The ocean. I can grow my own vegetables down here. It’s not too hot. I can fish. The people down here are cool. I love it.
“When our kids all grew up and left, my wife and I were sitting in a big empty house in the city, fighting the traffic every day, wondering what we were doing.
“My wife writes cook books, so her work travels. My work sort of travels.
“We decided to base ourselves down here and we’ve never regretted it. It’s been wonderful. I mean yesterday, I worked in the garden, had a surf on a ten-foot stand-up paddleboard — it’s a great place to live.
“I do more paddleboarding than actual surfing. I’d rather be standing on the ocean rather than dangling in it. Bit sharky down here.”
Longley is talking after his Queen’s Birthday honour last year. He’s been Australia’s first NBA player. The first Australian to win the championship.
He’s won three rings with the Bulls; the achievement has never been more topical than now.
His silence in and around The Last Dance has brought to mind our last interview, an interview in which he’s given a pretty decent sense of who he is.
Where’s your rings? All your Bulls’ memorabilia?
“I don’t need that stuff,” he says.
“I don’t value it. I’ve given most of it away. I had a house fire in 2007. A lot of stuff burned in the fire. The rings were in a safe, which was lucky. Two of them are in a museum somewhere. I don’t actually know where they are. I should try to track them down because I wouldn’t mind them back.
“One of them is in my safe at home. They don’t come out very often. Now and again I bring them out to impress little kids, but they’re not the kind of things you wear around the street, particularly not in Denmark. A couple of diamonds in there. They’re very Liberace.”
Longley has taken the phone call by saying, “What’s going on?” He’s been congratulated on his AM and said: “Thank you!” He’s a terrific interviewee but he won’t be photographed.
Newspaper pictures come out too corny, he says. He ain’t especially talkative to start with. Yep. Nup. Cheers. But he warms to the task.
Longley on his memories of being the first Australian to join the NBA.
“Do you do any off-road four-wheel driving at all? Well, it was a little bit like taking off down a track you know nothing about. You don’t know how much fuel you have in the tank. Or how long the track is. Or what any of it is going to look like. It’s a total adventure. A mystery adventure. There ended up being some scary moments, obviously. I got my arse kicked a little bit. But I figured it out.”
What did you have to figure out?
“Absolutely everything, is the short answer,” he says.
“I had to get serious about my body and the way I prepared for games. The biggest problem for me was learning how to defend at a high level. Coaches can’t put you on the court if you can’t defend. If you’re not on the court, you can’t show how good you are at scoring. I always felt comfortable to score, I just needed to get on the court, so I worked really hard on defending. On strength. On speed. My application to it all.
“I had to become a student of the game, watch a lot of video. Get smart on player tendencies. Just preparing a lot more diligently. Professional sport was young then, in a lot of ways, so there weren’t the role models there are now.
“You had MJ, of course, but it wasn’t the norm. What I had to figure out was how to be a full-time professional athlete.”
Longley on being traded from Minnesota to the Bulls in 1994.
“In the NBA, your rights are transferable,” he says.
“The teams just have to match values. They’re only allowed to trade until the All-Star break, which is the middle of February. I can’t give you an exact date, it varies. Let’s call it the 20th of February, for the sake of the argument. On the 19th of February, the last day of the trading deadline, when a lot of trades happen, I was the last guy on our team who was sort of tradeable. Hadn’t been brought in by the new coach, et cetera.
“I figured I was on the chopping block. I hoped I was on the chopping block because I was playing for Minnesota, which I didn’t enjoy at the time.
“I was taking my wife out to dinner that night. As I walked out the door, I got a call from the general manager saying, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that I’ve traded you’. I was quietly thinking to myself, well, that’s good news, so you got that wrong. And he said: ‘The good news is, it’s Chicago’.”
Longley says: “As far as I was concerned, that was good and good. I was excited. My wife was pregnant.
“I had 24 hours to report to Chicago. I got there in about eight. That’s how much of a hurry I was in to get there. I was out the door.
“My wife stayed behind, packed up the house and came down a month or two later. Straight away I realised I was in a different league. Well, not a different league. It was the same league.
“But the Bulls were in a different league in the way they went about practice. They had their own practice facility. Their own car park. That was new. In Minnesota, we were practising in a public gym, public car park, all that.
“There was a lot more media in Chicago. A lot more. Their strength and conditioning guys — there was five of them instead of one, and they were all over it. It just felt like a whole other level of professionalism in Chicago.
“The on-court stuff was very different, as well. At Minnesota it was everyone to themselves. In Chicago it was very much about sharing the ball, movement, spacing — all the things I hold dear in basketball. They were all back on the table in Chicago. (Coach) Phil Jackson was immediately engaged. I felt like I had arrived at my basketball home. I did everything I could, for as long as I could, to make that stick.”
The 218cm Longley was at the Bulls from 1994-98. The last three seasons, alongside Jordan, earned him NBA championship rings, the first by an Australian.
“The first championship, we were in Chicago, we were up against Seattle,” he says.
“I don’t remember the numbers, but there was only a minute or two on the clock. The score was all in our favour. I was on the bench. The game was over, basically, and the crowd started to build into this roar. We had to play the game out but mathematically, we’d won.
“Scottie (Pippen) or maybe MJ (Jordan) was off the floor as well. It was over and people started partying in the stands. I remember everything went into slow-mo for me. I was on the sidelines thinking this last two minutes of basketball might last an hour. I was feeling fantastic. All the work was validated.
“Once you’ve won the championship together, you’re champions for the rest of your life.
“No matter what happens in life, you feel like at least once you’ve reached that plateau or peak of — it was a really tangible thing to have accomplished. I felt just immense pride at doing it as an Australian.
“Having children is not to be compared with anything but beyond anything else I’ve ever done, that moment was the most powerful. Some people wanted to jump up and down. Some people wanted to hug and high-five everyone. I just wanted to stand still and soak it all up.
“Getting traded to the Bulls was the best thing that ever happened to me.”