Michael Jordan: That Afternoon in Orlando

If you’re reading this, you’re too early.

As this is the first issue of The Bounce Back, it’s not great.

Yet.

Everything good takes time to find its final form, true especially with human beings.

So I present to you the first of what will be a continuing reminder that success isn’t linear and that greatness is self-defined.

Every other week, we will gather here as an exercise in pulling on our armor so we may once more head unto the breach. Because it’s the only choice we have.

Our contemplation begins with MJ as a collective acknowledgment that nobody is immune from falling short. From wanting a do-over. From having to get up again. Not even His Airness.

Rooting for you,

6 NBA Championships, 6 Finals MVPs, 5 Regular Season MVPs, widely considered the greatest basketball player of all time.

The fingertips told the story. Before the turnover, before the questions, there was just Nick Anderson's knocking free a basketball that Michael Jordan had always kept under control.

It was game one, fourth quarter. The Bulls are up one with the ball, :12 seconds remaining – a moment when Jordan had built his legend by imposing his will. But this version of Jordan, the one wearing 45, was operating on old instincts with new muscles.

Anderson doesn't need much of a lunge. It’s just barely a gamble. Mostly, he waits as Jordan brings the ball low on the crossover, times his swipe perfectly, and touches what everyone thought was untouchable. Jordan sprawls on the floor in a desperate attempt to recover the ball – a micro-expression of mortality.

A baseball player had come back. A basketball god had to start over.

In the visiting locker room at Orlando Arena, Michael Jordan spoke in a language he'd forgotten existed: fallibility.

On the surface, it was a standard post-game admission of blame. But listen closer to those last three words: "It's been a while." Not "It won't happen again" or "This isn't who I am" – the usual Jordan responses to failure. Instead, an acknowledgment of time passing. Of things changing.

Here was Jordan, architect of perfection, speaking not as a myth but as a man relearning his own limits. The same voice that once proclaimed "I'm back" was now quietly admitting he'd never really left – he'd just been away long enough to become someone else.

"It's been a while" wasn't just about a stolen basketball. It was about the distance between who he was and who he needed to become again.

The statistics said Michael Jordan had never lost in these moments. His fingertips said he wasn't that Michael Jordan anymore.

In his first decade, Jordan had answered every question about his greatness with an exclamation point. But watching that ball slip away, he confronted a truth that every person who's tried to reclaim their past eventually faces: muscle memory isn't really memory at all. It's daily practice, daily proof, daily certainty – and he'd spent the last 21 months building different muscles.

Everyone knows what it's like to return to something they once mastered, only to find their body refusing to cooperate. The difference was Jordan had to relearn in front of the world, with no place to hide the gap between who he was and who he'd been.

The most confident man in sports had to admit he wasn't sure anymore.

The number change came first. Immediately after the steal, Jordan was back in 23. But that was just the surface.

Despite moments of brilliance and flashes of the old dominance, the Magic took the series. It marked the only time between 1991 and 1998 that a Jordan-led Bulls team lost in the playoffs. But what looked like an ending was really a beginning.

That summer became the laboratory. Warner Bros famously constructed the "Jordan Dome," a full-length NBA court with weight room attached, on the Space Jam set. MJ turned a movie shoot into basketball's most intensive training camp. After filming, NBA and college stars would pack the court for marathon pickup games that often lasted past midnight.

The deeper shift came in his relationship with dominance itself. Pre-baseball Jordan had made greatness look inevitable. Post-steal Jordan made it look like work – timed by stopwatch, measured in reps, logged in training notebooks. His approach suddenly felt more methodical, more studied.

The result? An NBA-record 72 wins. Another scoring title. Another MVP. Another championship. What started as a stolen ball ended up stealing something else: the myth of effortless excellence. In its place, Jordan gave us something better – a blueprint for starting over.

We think this is about a stolen basketball. It's really about what happens when memory meets reality.

Everyone who's ever been great at something knows the hardest comeback isn't from injury or failure – it's from time away. The hands that once flew over piano keys now pause between notes. The voice that commanded boardrooms searches for words that used to come naturally. The mind remembers the way things should feel, but the body hesitates, caught between memory and present moment.

This truth plays out every time someone returns to an old passion, an old skill, an old dream. Excellence isn't stored in some vault we can return to whenever we want. It lives in the daily doing, in the thousand small moments of practice that build to mastery. The path back requires just as much work as the path there.

Starting over isn't failure. It's the price of having somewhere to return to.

📹: #OTD in 1995 "Nick Anderson stole the ball from Michael Jordan!" (Orlando Magic)

📰: It’s Err Jordan--No Bull : MJ loses ball to set up Magic’s winning basket, then flubs last chance (Los Angeles Times)

🗓️: 25 Years Ago Today: Nick Anderson Pokes Ball Away From Michael Jordan (NBA.com)

Penn State volleyball coach Katie Schumacher-Cawley, who last month shattered one of volleyball's highest glass ceilings by becoming the first woman ever to coach a Division I championship team - and did it while fighting Stage 2 breast cancer, never missing a single practice during chemo treatments.

Her Penn State squad not only won the program's eighth national title; they dominated their way to a 35-2 record, rewriting both program and NCAA history with a championship run that will forever be remembered not just for breaking barriers, but for demonstrating that the greatest victories happen far from the spotlight, in those quiet moments when someone like Coach Schumacher-Cawley decides that neither cancer nor history's weight will define what's possible.

'Undeniable': The remarkable season of Cam Skattebo and Arizona State comes to a close (Yahoo! Sports)

Texans’ Azeez Al-Shaair says he was in a ‘really dark place’ after suspension for hit on Lawrence (AP)

Denver Group Secures NWSL Team at Record $110M Expansion Fee (Sportico)