![]() ![]() It's pretty likely that Twitter would experience a shutdown as every sports outlet on the planet scrambled to react. Then, out of nowhere, Twitter melts down. The sports world talking about the playoff race, the morning shows debating if the Bulls can keep up this pace, and whether the Rockets will repeat. You can just imagine if it happened today. And while Jordan and his agency may have preferred Facebook with a longer message (and there would no doubt be a post), with Jordan's eye for the quick and powerful, there's not a better medium than Twitter. The internet allows athletes to reach their fans directly. Adande on Michael Jordan's 1995 comeback fax - ESPN.īut that was 1995, and the world has changed dramatically. "How elegant it was, and simplistic," Falk says. For news of this magnitude, she used both machines to send faxes to Chicago news outlets, the Associated Press and major national outlets such as ESPN, The Washington Post and the New York Times.įalk can't take credit for writing the fax, but he appreciates the power of the two-word statement. The office had two fax machines, one for outgoing and one for incoming. ![]() In retrospect, Sadofsky says, "It sounds like horse and carriage." It took a couple of minutes to send each fax, then she had to wait to receive a confirmation receipt. "It wasn't like sending a mass email."įax protocol meant typing up a cover sheet addressed to each recipient. "Everything had to be done individually," Sadofsky says. Sadofsky recalls going in 11 a.m., then spending the next two hours sending out the fax that upended the sports world, the first step toward what became the second half of the Bulls' 1990s dynasty. There were seven messages from Falk, each with increasing urgency, expressing the same theme: "Get to the office right now." ![]() managed by his agent David Falk, sent the following fax to the media:Īlyson Sadofsky, who was the director of media services for David Falk's agency, stepped out of the shower on the third Saturday of March in 1995 and saw the light on her answering machine blinking. Jordan announced his return to basketball after a nearly two-year retirement including a stint with the Chicago White Sox minor league system. (Getty)Ģ0 years ago, Michael Jordan changed the history of the NBA, basketball, and rocked the sports world to its core with two little words. Read the entire story at NBC Sports Chicago, which has a lot of the details and how Fehr sparked a three-peat in the NBA and made Jordan a legend.Michael Jordan returned to the NBA 20 years ago. Then on March 18, he faxed the phrase “I’m back” to the Bulls, and by the next season the three-peat Bulls were setting records as one of the greatest teams ever. Soon, he was taking part in secret early-morning practices with the Bulls at their facility. The White Sox wanted their minor leaguers to report and play. Jordan decided not to play in spring games in March, even as Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf argued that minor league players were not part of the union yet and couldn’t be scab players. If you played in a spring training game, you were a scab. “Our view is that any spring training game that is played at either the major league site or for which admission is charged is a replacement player,” union president Donald Fehr said on February 19. There was talk of playing MLB games with scabs, something Jordan would never have been willing to do. The wild card in all this was an ongoing MLB strike in 1995, one that had started in the offseason and was threatening to bleed into spring training and beyond. Scottie Pippen talked about wanting out, and Phil Jackson was ready to show him the door. Meanwhile, the Bulls had been floundering and were below. ![]()
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