The emblematic figure of American life in 2008 was Barack Obama, the one we had been waiting for, the hinge between eras, the basketball fan who taught America to say “yes” at the end of an awful, stupid decade of “no.” Yet such is the alienness of the world of only 15 years ago that it doesn’t feel strange that Obama isn’t mentioned and doesn’t show up on screen in The Redeem Team, the thrilling new Netflix documentary about the United States’s recovery of its rightful gold medal in men’s basketball in Beijing that year.
There is plenty of psycho-political baggage a filmmaker could heap atop that Mike Krzyzewski-coached triumph. A Larry Brown-led U.S. team captained by Allen Iverson and Tim Duncan limped to the bronze medal in Athens in 2004, a national disgrace that occurred at the nadir of the Bush administration’s Iraq debacle. War and basketball were two things at which Americans imagined themselves the undisputed global leader, but the Argentine national team and a coalition of jihadist lunatics had cast fundamental doubt on cherished myths of American superiority. Communist China, the host of the 2008 summer Games, pointed a way forward in a world shaped by rapid American decline — and yet Obama, and maybe also the Team USA alpha dogs Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, showed that decline wasn’t inevitable, that America was still dynamic enough to improve through its failures.
Director Jon Weinbach doesn’t deal with any of that stuff, at least not directly. The broader dimensions of the story he tells emerge naturally through the film’s tight focus on basketball. The movie never comes out and says it, but the 1992 Dream Team, the first U.S. Olympic squad to include NBA players, helped inaugurate a seemingly limitless post-history of American hegemony, a time when our full-spectrum dominance over the entire world was a glorious inevitability. Perhaps that mindset wasn’t so healthy, one talking head suggests. “We came to the notion that just because we’re Americans, we’re better,” says journalist Sam Smith, introducing a montage of NBA stars in red, white, and blue jerseys creaming the lesser nations of the world across the 1990s. But that notion was correct — is correct. Right? If there weren’t some ineffable link between Americanness and basketball supremacy, the 2008 team wouldn’t have been redeeming much of anything. And yet, as Smith rightly notes, “The Dream Team wasn’t about patriotism. They weren’t really doing it for America. They were doing it for the NBA” — for the money, basically. The movie keeps politics to a bare minimum, but it still becomes a story about how our national sense of purpose can become clearer, sharper, and less cynical in a time when we’re losing.
In showing how Americans became winners again, The Redeem Team becomes an unexpectedly intimate dual portrait of maybe the two leading basketball titans of the 21st century. One of them, Mike Krzyzewski, coached his last game earlier this year. The other, Kobe Bryant, died alongside his young daughter in a helicopter crash in January of 2020, an event that a large subset of the elder millennial demographic experienced as a “Day the Music Died”-type reality-bender, the spectacular end to any final delusions of youth. The film depicts the height of an era that is very recent yet also decisively over.
After the Athens disaster, USA Basketball was put under the one-man control of former Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, who made the equally risky decision of choosing a college coach to guide a team of NBA stars. At no moment does Duke University skipper Krzyzewski, a middle-aged West Point graduate and then-winner of three national championships, seem the slightest bit overmatched by Dwyane, LeBron, Kobe, or the other one-name multimillionaires under his charge. In team meetings, Coach K is unfailingly calm, even slightly monotone — he’s “a coach from the Army,” as the sportswriter Bill Plaschke describes him.
In the name of ultimate victory, Krzyzewski persuades a collection of showboats with athletic shoes named after them to adopt the high pick-and-roll style of the international game. He issues theories of basketball that could double as theories of America itself. Don’t suppress your own NBA-sized egos, he says during one team meeting. “You have to give me the egos you have … and put it under one ego umbrella.” “That made sense!” Dwyane Wade exclaims, remembering the moment 15 years later. As if to highlight the psychic connection between American basketball dominance and our deeper self-conception, Coach K has the team learn about “selfless service” from an Army colonel recently returned from Iraq, alongside an active-duty soldier who had both eyes blown out by enemy shrapnel. “Hearing these stories, our players let their hearts be opened, and as a result, they became the U.S.,” the present-day Krzyzewski recalls.
In The Redeem Team, Krzyzewski’s greatness is something the mind can comprehend: He joins a savant-like understanding of human psychology to a fittingly grandiose conception of the task at hand. In contrast to Coach K, Kobe’s greatness is in the realm of the sublime. In the film, he is remembered as being terrifyingly self-possessed, a god taunting the mortals — the “mortals,” in this case, being Pau Gasol, Dwyane Wade, and even LeBron James — from the apex of all existence, a place where only he belonged. Kobe is friendless, a “comfortable” loner, according to Carmelo Anthony. Mere superstars look frivolous alongside him: One night, during a Las Vegas training camp, the entire rest of the team comes back from a night of clubbing at 5:30 in the morning to find Kobe in their hotel lobby, drenched in sweat from an early morning workout. By the end of the week, the clubbing had ceased, and the whole squad was on the Laker guard’s schedule.
It would be a disservice to give away every great Kobe anecdote in this film. We get the full background of the notorious body check he laid on Lakers teammate Gasol during the opening minutes of an Olympic round-robin game against Spain, the still-stunning act of a truly pathological winner. That “pathological winning” is an American value is one of this film’s unspoken assumptions. Oddly enough, this insatiable will to succeed is part of why Americans are sometimes loved abroad. The documentary depicts how in Beijing, the Chinese public treated Kobe as if he were Michael Jackson or Princess Diana, with seemingly thousands of screaming and fainting admirers trailing him through the Chinese capital.
At the time, the crowds mobbing the Team USA bus looked like reassuring evidence that Chinese society was in thrall to the liberalizing influence of American culture. In retrospect, the power dynamic was nearly the opposite — LeBron James, now the chief American celebrity apologist for Beijing’s misdeeds, must have seen Kobemania as a preview of his own commercial prospects in a basketball-mad Communist dictatorship. (The one puzzling omission in this film is that there’s no mention of the U.S.’s blowout of the host country, China, in the Olympic tournament’s preliminary round, which, at the time, was believed to have had the largest television audience of any sporting event in history. LeBron James is one of the movie’s executive producers, incidentally.)
The Redeem Team is a satisfying look back at a great national victory, but even a historic sports achievement becomes bittersweet in time — and in less time than one might have hoped or expected. The film ends with Dwyane and Kobe icing a series of outlandishly angled long jump shots to stave off a late Spanish comeback in the gold medal game. Every basketball fan knows that happened. Do they remember a time when it seemed like the NBA would have a bigger impact on China than China would have on the NBA? For that matter, do they remember that Carmelo Anthony was as baby-faced as a high school freshman back in 2004, and even 2008? The Redeem Team is a record of a gold medal won in a near-distant world — and for many viewers, it will be discomforting proof that we are no longer young.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.
