But Jordan halted those plans and kept one sixtyblue open, saying at the time he wanted a more visible downtown location near hotels for the steakhouse. In 2004, the Tribune reported that Zadikoff planned to close one sixtyblue on West Randolph Street, in which Jordan is a partner, and replace it with one of the steakhouses. The Bulls' twitter account would just be the praying hands emoji over and over again.Zadikoff, Cornerstone's chief executive, has a relationship with Jordan dating to Michael Jordan's Restaurant on North LaSalle Street, which closed in 1999 amid a legal dispute that Jordan won, allowing him to launch the steakhouse chain in Chicago. Gary Payton would be tweeting trash talk. Would Karl Malone have a Twitter account in this situation? He probably wouldn't. Vines and Instagram videos would go crazy within hours of people's reactions, especially kids', to the news that the GOAT was coming back.Īthletes would all be tweeting their welcome back messages to MJ. Airlines would be slammed with reporters booking flights to Chicago. Their servers would spontaneously combust into smoke and fire as Buzzfeed started to prep a "Top 10 Things People Thought When Jordan Came Back," and every sports website threw out their coverage plans for the next 48 hours. 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. Michael Jordan returned to the NBA 20 years ago.
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