Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The Fax and the Furious: How One Screeching Machine Upended Sports — and Society as We Knew It About this episode Thirty years ago this month, Michael Jordan shocked the world with a two-word transmission: "I'm back." But the rise and fall of this especially nostalgic technology is inextricably hard-wired to the sports world, from frantic prodigies to foul-mouthed coaches and fans glued to FaxCam. Pablo communes with a relic between himself and J. A. Adande — the Hall-of-Fame sportswriter and long-suffering fax-sender — for a jam session on innovation and increasingly epic fails that plunges PTFO into the literal depths of modern communication.
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1:48 Pablo Torre? This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. And look, I've chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is 100% fresh beef cooked right when you order it with no artificial flavors, colors, fillers, or preservatives in the beef. The onions are hand-topped by someone who knows the perfect amount by memory, two slices of cheese and a star, and two pickles side by side. So every bite gets both. And every time one's ordered, a cowbell sound rings in the kitchen. That's the grill master's cue to put a fresh patty on the grill. My move?
2:30 Pablo Torre? QPC, fries and a drink after a long day of recording. That is my happy place. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California, and for delivery. Fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
3:03 Speaker 02 It came in a two-word statement, which is now just begging to have a Nike campaign built around it, quote-unquote, "I'm back."
3:10 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
3:13 Speaker 03 You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.
3:29 Pablo Torre? This studio is a time machine today. J-A-A-A. We are traveling back in time. Do you remember the relic on our desk here?
3:37 Speaker 04 I do. I still technically own a fax machine. Now, is this a plain paper fax? Or is it the thermal paper fax?
3:44 Pablo Torre? This is a plain paper fax. This is, she is, well, I guess he is, the brother in telefax 1570 MC. From, uh, I believe it's a mid-'90s vintage.
3:58 Speaker 04 Ooh, those sounds.
4:03 Speaker 04 Those beeps. It sounds like the, uh, the wheel on, on, uh, Price is Right when it's spinning around.
4:10 Pablo Torre? Yes.
4:10 Speaker 04 Can you make those sounds some more?
4:15 Speaker 04 That's so satisfying.
4:17 Pablo Torre? It is.
4:17 Speaker 04 First of all, it's just the tactile nature of it, touching it.
4:20 Pablo Torre? The haptic sensation of pressing a keypad on a... And again, this is, yeah, reach over there. Yep, it feels good. We don't do that enough.
4:30 Speaker 04 No.
4:31 Pablo Torre? As a civilization.
4:32 Speaker 04 When's the last time you? Pressed a button.
4:35 Pablo Torre? When was the last time you beheld a 15 by 15, eight and a half inch high gray device that was essential to your former life? Was instrumental in my, in my childhood memory? And also, uh, this is not a joke. We bought this on eBay. We had a box in this studio yesterday and the cleaning crew, our great cleaning crew here in our building, uh, threw out the box containing like the headset, cause they thought it was trash. They're like, this can.
5:06 Speaker 04 It's being disposed, this relic.
5:08 Pablo Torre? This must be a box containing like rotten fruit or some [BLEEP].
5:14 Speaker 04 Now, the question is, can you, well, I'm sure it's not connected. Whoa.
5:20 Pablo Torre? I don't know what's happening.
5:22 Speaker 04 Must've hit a preset.
5:23 Pablo Torre? The spirit is now, the spirit has now taken over.
5:26 Speaker 04 It still has the presets in it.
5:28 Pablo Torre? Oh my God. Oh.
5:30 Speaker 04 Ooh.
5:33 Speaker 04 Oh.
5:36 Pablo Torre? The, the.
5:37 Speaker 04 That sound, that's satisfactory because.
5:38 Pablo Torre? That sound.
5:39 Speaker 04 It was always this moment of suspense before you knew the connection was gonna happen. And then again, you heard those high pitched squealing and wailing from the, the machines making their connection. And then when you start to hear that scanning going through.
5:56 Pablo Torre? Something was about to happen. Quote, "For all of today's needs and tomorrow's." The brother in telefax.
6:06 Speaker 04 Whoops.
6:07 Pablo Torre? 1570 MC.
6:08 Speaker 04 Whoops. They failed to anticipate internet, PDFs, email, all that.
6:13 Pablo Torre? Didn't quite anticipate tomorrow.
6:33 Pablo Torre? Jay Adande, head of Northwestern's sports journalism program, my friend and colleague from ESPN, also longtime sports writer, just inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame last year. Congrats, by the way, on that.
6:46 Speaker 04 Thank you.
6:46 Pablo Torre? That's pretty cool.
6:47 Speaker 04 That was pretty cool. The fax machine helped me get there.
6:50 Pablo Torre? Did you thank the fax in your speech?
6:52 Speaker 04 I should have.
6:54 Pablo Torre? What do you feel when you're now communing at this table with this machine that I haven't seen since the 90s?
7:00 Speaker 04 A lot of nostalgia, the sounds. I didn't anticipate how much the sounds would take me back. And I was thinking ahead of time about that modem whaling. But just the motor whirring, the buttons, the touch tone sounds, all those things that were so important. And that air of excitement, you were about to learn. You were about to find something out.
7:25 Pablo Torre? It's been 30 years this month since the world found out about the greatest fax of all time, written by arguably the greatest athlete of all time. And there is nobody better, I assure you, to travel back in time with me today than Jay A. Adande, the journalist who not only reported the story behind that story, but the guy who also now spends his time surrounded by college kids, these journalism students at Northwestern, for whom the technology in question is completely unrecognizable. As is the thing you had to connect the fax machine to in order to actually send a fax, a phone jack, all of which was essential to how sports and journalism worked.
8:08 Speaker 04 In New York City, actually, there was like a snowstorm. Got like a 10:30 deadline. I'm in Penn Station, can't find any phone jacks. I run out in the cold. It's like desolate around Penn Station. It's huge. There's like a foot of snow on the ground. There's no taxis, no nothing anywhere. I find a Chinese restaurant and I talked to the guy in front. He has to convince his dad, who doesn't speak English and runs the place. I said, I need to use your phone jack. It was a dedicated modem line that we would send our stories in back to the LA Times. Toll-free number. I'll buy something, you know, just please let me use your fax machine phone jack.
8:46 Pablo Torre? And this Chinese family saved your journalistic ass that night.
8:51 Speaker 04 They did. They came through big time.
8:54 Pablo Torre? For the kids out there, this wasn't just an American phenomenon. This was global.
9:00 Speaker 04 So summer after I graduated college, summer in 1992, I wind up in Monte Carlo. As the Dream Team arrives in Monte Carlo to have their last little prep session before the Olympics in Barcelona that summer, Mike Wilbon had tipped me off to it. I was going on vacation, post-graduation vacation with my buddy. So I flew over to Europe. We met up, hung out in France. And then I find out, hey, we can slip into practice. So I was getting ready to start my internship at the Miami Herald. So I called the Miami Herald. I say, can you fax over a request?
9:36 Pablo Torre? I'm in Monte Carlo.
9:37 Speaker 04 I'm in Monte Carlo. I say, hey, you don't know me. It's all-time introduction. You don't know me. My name is Jay Adana. I'm going to be the intern starting next month. I'm in Monte Carlo right now. Do you want to start on the Dream Team? They're like, yeah. It's all right. You got to fax something on letterhead. So it was so big. You understand, the entryway to cover anything was you would need to fax something on the company letterhead.
10:00 Pablo Torre? Right. Proof of your credential.
10:02 Speaker 04 Before that, I guess you would have had to mail in the request, right? But by the late 80s, 90s, you could fax in your request and that's how you would get access. I get credentialed. I still have that credential. I have pretty much every credential I ever had. That is my number one credential. Green construction paper, Dream Team, USA Basketball, men's basketball, training camp, Monte Carlo. So I go in.
10:27 Speaker 04 You walk in, Jordan, Barkley, Magic, Bird, they're all there. Barkley was just on this heater that day. He was talking about how they went to dinner with the prince of Monaco.
10:42 Speaker 05 I think Chuck Daly was a little nervous when they had the dinner in Monte Carlo. And the prince arrived and tried to keep Charles as far away from the prince as possible.
10:51 Speaker 04 And they had all these rules, like when the prince is done eating, you have to stop eating. He says, well, what if I'm hungrier than him? What if he ate beforehand and he wants to stop early? But do we have to hurry up? Like, hey, the prince is almost done. Hurry up, get it done. And then he announces, guys, I'm retiring from basketball. I'm gonna be a swimmer. What? Because I was out by the pool yesterday and all these women were topless.
11:17 Speaker 06 David, Robles, and Pat Newell, this is like us. Spring break in the ghetto.
11:26 Speaker 04 And if there's gonna be topless women by the pool, like they got over here? He's like, I'm gonna be a swimmer. He says, y'all be thinking I'm Mark Spitz by the end of this.
11:37 Pablo Torre? This is a dream assignment for you to write about, in other words.
11:40 Speaker 04 It was incredible. But right afterward, I had to get back to Paris. I had a plane leaving from Paris the next day. So I had to take a train back to Paris and get ready to get back home. My only option was to handwrite it out on the train. You know, I'm playing the, transcribing everything off all the interviews. I'm handwriting it. The train stopped in Lyon. I get out, I wander around, I find a hotel near the train station. Do you have a fax machine? Can I send my story in through your fax machine? And fortunately, they did. And I faxed my story into the Miami Herald, only to find out several weeks later that they didn't run it because they didn't have a space. Very 1990s problem, right?
12:25 Speaker 04 We didn't have space in our print edition of newspapers. So that story never saw the light of day.
12:30 Pablo Torre? Until now, 33 years later.
12:33 Speaker 04 Now it can be told. I was really proud of that story. I was most proud, I had a Monte Carlo Dateline and I didn't get my Monte Carlo Dateline in.
12:42 Pablo Torre? The degree of difficulty when it came to filing something, it's truly unrelatable to people living in 2025, that you had to go through all of these hoops and all of that.
12:50 Speaker 04 In the Wi-Fi era, yeah.
12:51 Pablo Torre? Because it was not the easiest thing to make what feels now like the most automated part of this actually happen. Do you have memories of fighting this machine? Of like struggling with the premise of this machine?
13:06 Speaker 04 It could be a little finicky sometimes, right? You had to get them to match up. They talked to each other. When you hear that screeching, that was it talking to each other. You know, the other problem with the early editions was the thermal papers. It would roll, it would curl up, you know, when it came off. It's funny, that was actually a plot point. I just happened to re-watch The Firm with Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman. That's what caught my attention was that Gene Hackman was in it. And there's a key plot point where a fax comes in that's somewhat incriminating. And because it's that thermal paper, it rolls off the tray and it curls up and it rolls under the desk. So it takes a while before Wilford Brimley, who's one of the bad guys.
13:49 Pablo Torre? This could not be an older sounding episode.
13:52 Speaker 02 What the hell's the matter with you guys? This thing's out of paper.
13:55 Speaker 04 Just the fact I mentioned Wilford Brimley? One other fax story. So the summer of 1989, after my freshman year of college, got back to LA, didn't really have anything lined up. So I took a job at a temp agency. They would send me out to different jobs around LA. So one week I wound up working in the mailroom at United Talent. But back then, there was only one or two fax machines in the building and the main one was in the mailroom. So you would... Receive the incoming faxes and then you'd go around, you'd make your rounds and drop them off at the different agents' offices at their desks. As you went around the building, you'd also pick up the outgoing faxes. And you had to send those out through the mailroom fax machine,
14:40 Speaker 04 which again was the only one in the building. Maybe like the top, top agent had his own fax machine. But for the most part, everything had to come and go through the fax machine. Not a very private means of communication, right? So like you send a letter, it's in the envelope, nobody can see. But the faxes, even the lowly temp mailroom person could see them. And so one time I caught this exchange of the agent and Francis Ford Coppola. So Coppola's working on a movie like in Italy, or maybe he's just over there. So the fax is the most efficient way to communicate with somebody who's on the other side of the world.
15:18 Pablo Torre? Right.
15:19 Speaker 04 Time zone differences and all that. So, uh, you know, this was one way where the fax machine really helped speed up communication. And this guy had done something to piss off Francis Ford Coppola to no end. And Coppola just let him have it and just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I had to send a reply from the agent who was just grovelling, "I'm so sorry, Mr. Coppola." But I'll never forget getting to witness this, you know, behind the scenes Hollywood stuff going on, involving Francis Ford Coppola, which I owed to the fax machine.
15:51 Pablo Torre? You saw Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather, send his agent a fax that he could not refuse.
15:58 Speaker 07 I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.
16:01 Pablo Torre? This machine here though, I mean, by the way, this is, for those wondering, not watching on YouTube, um, this is a Chekhov's fax machine situation. We are gonna fire off a fax by the end of this episode. I promise to do that. So from Francis Ford Coppola to Michael Jordan down the line, um, what we're here to do is tell the story of a machine that shaped the history we all know, even if we'd never really appreciated how good we had it. And also, I think it's gonna take us back to a time that we wish we still did.
16:33 Speaker 04 If you're nostalgic for the 90s, you have to be nostalgic for the fax machine.
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20:17 Pablo Torre? The history of the fax machine, I don't know if you've become familiar with the deep dive that we have personally been doing, Gira Pablo Torre finds out. But you can trace a line back to 1924, and there's this guy, an American, named Richard Ranger. And Richard Ranger invented the photo radiogram. And what he did with this photo radiogram was wirelessly send a photo from New York to London of Calvin Coolidge.
20:45 Speaker 04 That was the first fax transmission?
20:49 Pablo Torre? It all starts with that.
20:56 Pablo Torre? Relax, cause the thermal fax does the work for you. And then 1966, to fast forward, it's Xerox. And they introduced the MagnaFax telecopier. And this is the thing that connects to any telephone line within merely six minutes. And there is that scene-
21:12 Speaker 04 And you're willing to pay the long-distance toll.
21:15 Pablo Torre? Do you remember Almost Famous? There's that scene where Rolling Stone wants William, the protagonist, to send his story to the fact checker.
21:24 Speaker 02 Allison, our fact checker needs you to transmit whatever you have of the story tonight, now, along with your notes. There's a mojo at the Daily News that'll let us use. A mojo? A mojo. It's a very modern machine that transmits pages over the telephone. It only takes 18 minutes a page.
21:41 Pablo Torre? It only takes 18 minutes a page.
21:44 Speaker 04 Oh, my god.
21:46 Pablo Torre? That is now the mark that people are trying to improve on. So 1974, we're down to three minutes a page. By 1980, and this is, I think, the big globalized revolution. The Japanese make this commercially viable. And at this point, by 1980, there are approximately 250,000 fax machines in the US. And they're being advertised, there are commercials.
22:09 Speaker 04 With Sharp's choice of fax machines, you can send documents in as little as 12 seconds to any place in the world you can phone.
22:21 Speaker 04 And that will change the way you do business forever.
22:25 Pablo Torre? By 85, that number had doubled, now half a million fax machines. And now it's journalists, it's doctors, it's lawyers. It's that scene in Back to the Future 2 where old Marty McFly gets fired via fax. I was setting him up! Read my fax! No, please, no, I cannot be fired, I'm fired!
22:51 Pablo Torre? And so, in the era before the internet, before DocuSign, before all of this, there was this question, which I did not appreciate, because I was a little kid at the time, but everyone seemed to be asking, which was, "What's your fax number?" What's your fax number? Has become one of the most- Most frequently asked questions in the business community.
23:08 Speaker 04 Your business card would have your office number and your fax number. I used it so much, I had my own at home in the mid 1990s. And I had a separate line at home for my fax slash modem. When I would go online, I would use that line to access the internet. And/or I would use that line for incoming faxes. One of the cases for why you can't get, like here in New York, for example, right? Why we never, no longer have the 212.
23:39 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
23:39 Speaker 04 Area code.
23:41 Speaker 04 Some people blame the fax machine.
23:42 Pablo Torre? Wait, I don't know this.
23:43 Speaker 04 Because, yeah, because there was.
23:45 Pablo Torre? I had a 212 growing up. That was our home number.
23:47 Speaker 04 Right. And you know, the 212 was covered. There's old Seinfeld episode, right?
23:50 Pablo Torre? Absolutely.
23:52 Speaker 03 Hello?
23:57 Speaker 04 There was a subplot about it, right? The lack of the 212.
23:59 Pablo Torre? 646?
24:01 Speaker 03 It's a new area code.
24:02 Pablo Torre? What area? New Jersey?
24:05 Speaker 03 No, no, it's right here in the city. It's the same as 212. They just multiplied it by three.
24:13 Speaker 03 And then they added one to the middle number. It's the same.
24:18 Pablo Torre? According to this book, Fax: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine. Americans were faxing, quote, pizza orders, song requests, party invitations, greeting cards, ski reports, amniocentesis results, baby footprints, children's drawings, vows of eternal love. I had forgotten that this was not merely a business machine. This was people enjoying the novelty of communication. It is magical. You send a piece of paper in one room and across the world, it shows up in another. It is pretty [bleep] cool.
24:47 Speaker 04 I only use it for business. There's something cold about it and impersonal.
24:55 Speaker 04 So I never sent a love letter by fax or anything like that. Your love interest wasn't likely to have their own fax machine.
25:05 Pablo Torre? You've Got Fax is a very different rom-com. Agreed. Yeah, yeah.
25:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, wouldn't work at all.
25:11 Pablo Torre? Now, in sports, though, the business that you worked in, there was one national holiday that, to me, is the encapsulation of the centrality of the fax machine.
25:22 Speaker 04 Signing Day.
25:23 Pablo Torre? National Signing Day.
25:25 Speaker 04 Letters of Intent.
25:28 Speaker 02 The first Wednesday in February always marks the national signing day for high school players to sign their college grant and aids. Coaches, hover over the fax machine if you can believe it. Somebody still uses fax machines, hoping that the top recruits sign.
25:40 Speaker 04 That is the first day in which college recruits can formally notify their schools, send their letter of intent. And again, schools weren't even allowed to talk about these players. Even if everyone knew they were recruiting them and everyone knew that they had their heart set on bringing this player to good old State U, you weren't allowed to talk to them until you had the signed letter of intent in hand. Even if they had, you know, made an announcement at their high school where they're gonna go, until you had that signed letter of intent in hand, they were not yours.
26:16 Pablo Torre? And so, National Sports Fax Day was a thing where Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike, would sit in the football office at Oregon, his alma mater, on signing day and just stare at the fax machine.
26:29 Speaker 04 So... Deliver us.
26:32 Pablo Torre? Deliver us our next great star. It got to the point, I mean, Ole Miss, they were obsessed with this. They had a Canon IRC 3080 and they had a play in their playbook called "FAX." The Wall Street Journal reported that at the University of Miami, "The fax technician," this is a quote, "didn't show up until the morning of signing day. Sure enough, the machine broke down after the first couple of letters, causing the staff to scramble to get recruits to send their letters elsewhere." End quote. It was not merely ceremonial. This was actually like the legal procedure to actually register your commitment.
27:08 Speaker 04 And to build your team.
27:09 Pablo Torre? And if you didn't have it, if the machine was broken, you got [bleeped]. And to be very clear, this is not a hypothetical scenario, because our journey into the history of faxes and letters of intent led us to this guy. My name is Duro Price and who I was three decades ago was...
27:33 Speaker 04 Running back out of Silmar High School in the San Fernando Valley in California.
27:40 Pablo Torre? In 1996, Darrell Price was a blue chip running back who had verbally committed to the Ohio State University. And all he had to do was fax his letter of intent from his home in California to Ohio.
27:53 Speaker 04 I want to say that it was CVS. I don't know if it was Sprouts Ritz, one of those kind of stores, you know. And this is when the fax machine was literally behind the counter. So if you had to go into that store, you would give the clerk your paperwork and she would fax it for you and then you would pay for it like that. So my mom and I would go to the to the local convenience store to fax off my letter of intent to Ohio State Buckeyes. And I handed it to the lady. She turns around, fax it, boom, gives it back to us. We get our receipt. We pay for it. That's fine.
28:30 Pablo Torre? Fax'd, delivered, paid, done. That lady at that convenience store had officially turned the page on Darrell's life. But after he left the convenience store, something felt kind of off. Ohio State's coach, John Cooper, at the time, had personally recruited Darrell. And, by the way, OSU, a powerhouse, had finished top three in the nation five years in a row, which was awesome. But now, as Darrell headed home, he was thinking about how far Columbus was from his neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. He started thinking about how nearby UCLA had also been recruiting him. And then...
29:11 Speaker 04 We get back to the house and on our answering machine, John Cooper says, hey, this is John Cooper. We did not get your signature side of your intent letter. We need that letter so we officially have you here at our school. We only got the backside of it. And I go, well, Coach, I mean, I went to the store, the lady sent it off. Well, we didn't get that. And I looked at that as an omen right there. I looked at that as, you know what, maybe this isn't the move for me. I think that I need to stay home and I'm going to be a UCLA Bruin.
29:46 Pablo Torre? And that is how Darrell Price wound up at UCLA.
29:51 Speaker 04 Wow, faulty fax machine. I also like the fact that he mentioned another relic of the 80s and 90s, the answering machine.
29:57 Pablo Torre? Oh, God.
29:57 Speaker 04 That's a whole other episode, probably.
29:59 Pablo Torre? A whole other. A whole other episode in our ongoing series of technology. Can you imagine losing out on that prospect because you're [BLEEP] because the fax machine? He couldn't figure it out?
30:11 Speaker 04 There were ways that things could get lost in the transmission.
30:15 Speaker 07 Ohio State was not pleased with me. And, and they expressed that multiple times. John Cooper, he got on the phone and he had some choice words with me as far as, "Hey, you don't do this. Don't mess around." And, "Hey, we're, you know, we're Ohio State." And, and things like that. I was really upset, you know, like, "Mom, you know, the coaches are mad at me." And this and that. She goes, "It's not the first time that it's happened to him and it won't be the last."
30:41 Pablo Torre? One addendum to that story, Jay, as we both are laughing at, at John Cooper and Ohio State, is that his mom was right. Apparently, uh, it was not the last time this happened to Ohio State because 20 years later, National Signing Day, 2016, uh, coaches were waiting on their final commitment. This was a big time recruit at wide receiver and the Buckeyes fax machine ran out of paper.
31:04 Speaker 04 Wow. So, one thing that, that was big was that because things could get lost, because you couldn't be sure, when you had the successful connection and you successfully transmitted, right, it would send a, it would, your thing would print out a confirmation, right? The other thing was that, um, you had to do this cover page, right? That was a big thing and it was very formal, right? So, you, so you, you'd, you'd print out, you know, two fax number from, from this fax number, right? And it would be very rude to just send a fax without sending a fax cover page. Because you could just get something and you would have no idea who it was coming from.
31:45 Pablo Torre? Right. Etiquette.
31:47 Speaker 04 Fax etiquette.
31:48 Pablo Torre? Communications etiquette back, and now it's just like, here's a, here's a JPG out of nowhere right into your brain that I didn't ask for.
31:56 Speaker 04 The other thing, though, you could get stuff you didn't ask for. So, just like we have spam in the email era, it was basically fax spam because it would auto dial, right? So, sometimes you would pick up the phone and you would just hear that.
32:11 Speaker 04 And it was just some random, you know, junk mailer, basically, hoping that they, that you were a fax machine.
32:19 Pablo Torre? Oh, I didn't know there was fax spam.
32:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, you could get junk faxes. Yeah, there was, there was, there was junk faxes was a big thing.
32:24 Pablo Torre? Like, someone just faxed me an ASCII picture of a [BLEEP]. It just showed up in my kitchen.
32:30 Speaker 04 Low res.
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36:00 Pablo Torre? The reason I brought you here really is because of the most famous fax in the history of faxes. Certainly sports faxes, I would argue faxes in general, and it happened 30 years ago this month.
36:10 Speaker 02 Hey Mikey, we like it. Not a huge surprise, but clearly one of the great comebacks since Burt Reynolds hairline. It came in a two-word statement which is now just begging to have a Nike campaign built around it, quote-unquote, "I'm back."
36:25 Speaker 04 So he had retired after the 1993 championship, his first repeat, in the wake of the death of his father shortly thereafter as well. And so on the eve of training camp that next year, the 93-94 season, he announces that he's gonna retire from basketball.
36:41 Speaker 06 I just feel that at this particular time in my career, I've reached the pinnacle of my career. I've achieved a lot in that short amount of time, if you wanna call it short. But I just feel that I don't have anything else for myself to prove.
36:58 Speaker 04 A few months after that, he decides he wants to give baseball a shot. It happened at the owner of the Bulls, Jerry Reinsdorf, also owned the Chicago White Sox organization, and so he facilitates the opportunity for Michael to play double-A baseball. And so that's throughout the 1994 baseball season. And then Michael intends to keep playing baseball, and he's at Winter League in Arizona, and baseball goes on strike.
37:27 Speaker 02 Well, it is now official. No more regular season, no extended version of the playoffs, and for the first time since 1904, no World Series, by the way.
37:36 Speaker 04 And so he says, "Well, I kinda miss basketball."
37:41 Pablo Torre? This was the same thought that everybody from Bulls fans to Bill Clinton in the White House was talking about and thinking about aloud.
37:51 Speaker 06 As of today... The economy has produced 6.1 million jobs since I became president. And if Michael Jordan goes back to the Bulls, it'll be 6,101,001 new jobs.
38:07 Pablo Torre? And there's just this one clip from The Last Dance, of course, the docu-series made by our friend Jason Hare, which was about 500 minutes long. But there's this 30-second chunk of this specific moment in which we hear from David Falk, Michael Jordan's longtime agent. So finally, after all this stuff, he called me and he said, "I think I'm ready to come back." So I wrote three or four different versions, you know, a press release for him to announce that he was coming back. But he just didn't feel comfortable that it captured what he wanted to say. So I said, "Well, why don't you freaking write one?" So the behind-the-scenes of just the crafting of this document,
38:52 Pablo Torre? when it comes to the call that David Falk's office is going to make, paint the picture there. What's happening from their side of the transmission?
39:01 Speaker 04 The funny thing is, I'd wanted to write about the FACS, capital letters. For a long time, I put in a call to David Falk and I figured he would be able to tell me everything that I wanted and needed to know about the FACS. But what he actually told me was, "Well, you really need to talk to Alison Sodowsky, who ran his office and was the one that really sent it out there." So remember, it's a Saturday, right? So people aren't in offices. You know, the news media never takes a day off, so they're there. And Alison Sodowsky runs his office. At home, just worked out, gets out of the shower, there's seven messages on her machine. They're all from Falk and they're all with increasing urgency.
39:44 Speaker 04 "Call me back. You gotta come in. You gotta get in the office." And so... She gets the word, we gotta put out, Michael Jordan's coming back. And they had two fax machines, very fancy. They had one that they used for incoming faxes, one that they used for outgoing faxes. But because they had such a high volume of faxes that they needed to churn out, she uses both. But first she preps them in what's become now the famous introductory setup paragraph. Really, it was just her standard boilerplate language that they used every time they had an announcement to fax out.
40:17 Pablo Torre? Yes, the following statement was released today by Michael Jordan through his personal attorney and business manager, David B. Fock, chairman of Fock Associates Management Enterprises Incorporated, FAME, in parentheses, located in Washington DC, in response to questions about his future career plans.
40:30 Speaker 04 You know, I spoke to Allison for this story, and then in the years since, almost every year, someone imitates that exact format, Jimmy Butler, most recently.
40:40 Pablo Torre? Yep, he and his agent Bernie Lee just did it as their whole squabble with the Heat was unfolding this year.
40:46 Speaker 04 When Colorado came back to the Big 12, the Big 12 set something up.
40:50 Pablo Torre? Oh, that's right.
40:51 Speaker 04 And, you know, imitated the same setup, they're back. So every time we come across one of them, I'll send a message to Allison, like, look, and she cannot believe that this has endured so long, three decades now, basically.
41:06 Pablo Torre? This is one of those historical sports stories, to quote now Marshall McLuhan, where the medium was the message? Like, these are pale imitations, JA, because what Allison had to do, individually sending it to every outlet, one at a time, that arrived in their offices unbidden, shockingly.
41:27 Speaker 04 Right, so she spent her whole Saturday afternoon in the office, sending out fax after fax after fax.
41:33 Pablo Torre? The quote that she gave you in your reporting, it wasn't like sending a mass email.
41:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, you can't just copy and, and send it all out at once.
41:43 Pablo Torre? There's no BCC. It sounds like a horse in carriage is what Allison Zdowski told you about her memory of what happened when she got out of the shower to realize, oh my God, I'm about to become a historical character they talk about 30 years later this month.
41:55 Speaker 04 And I remember for years at the Washington Post, they had a copy of that. I'm sure, you know, they copied it off the thermal fax and it, it was hanging up on the wall by the fax machine was the Jordan on back fax. It was like, you know, an artifact that, that was a part of the Washington Post sports section for a long time when I was there.
42:16 Pablo Torre? And artifacts.
42:17 Speaker 04 The Sports Illustrated cover that week.
42:19 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah.
42:19 Speaker 04 I'm back. Jordan, you know, in the number 45 in Market Square Arena going in for a layup. The cover of Sports Illustrated was quoting from the fax. And this is the time when the cover of Sports Illustrated is the most precious real estate in sports. How many other people got to write their own cover headline, right? I mean, you worked there for a long time. Do you remember?
42:39 Pablo Torre? I cannot remember. But what happens on Sunday, again, you said it was Saturday, setting the scene again. It's Sunday, March 19th, 1995. And conveniently, it's the NBA on NBC.
42:57 Pablo Torre? God, I miss this.
43:00 Speaker 04 Because it was March, all the leading sports columnists were scattered around the country covering the NCAA tournament.
43:07 Pablo Torre? Oh, right.
43:07 Speaker 04 And so they all had to flock to Indianapolis.
43:11 Pablo Torre? The Avengers of sports columnists.
43:13 Speaker 04 Mike Wilbon, I think he was out at Denver, actually, at the, the regional out there. I was covering Georgetown at that point. So I was in Tallahassee, Florida with Allen Iverson. That was his first foray into the NCAA tournament. And so I remember going in the back and watching this game.
43:33 Speaker 02 The hardboard courts of the NBA. Michael Jordan is back.
43:38 Pablo Torre? But it wasn't even the end. Like the lesser, the undercard, Jay.
43:44 Pablo Torre? Which is the story that I didn't remember until we here at Popple Torre finds out relived this. And this is a story that you are personally, you were around covering. Because it wasn't just Michael Jordan saying, I'm back. It was who?
43:58 Speaker 04 Pat Riley saying, I'm gone.
44:00 Pablo Torre? This is June 95, end of that postseason. Knicks lose to the Pacers. A bunch of this coming from Chris Herring's really good book, Blood in the Garden. But Riley had been meeting in secret with the Heat. Uh, he had a whole list of demands.
44:12 Speaker 04 In real time, there was a feeling, there was a sense from people in to know that Pat Riley was going to be gone from the Knicks that season. They, they had an offer on the table for him. He had yet to sign it. I remember someone whose opinion I valued very highly telling me, he's gone. He's going to Miami Heat. So it was an open secret and it was so open that the, the Heat wound up paying a million dollar fine and sending a, a first round draft pick to the Knicks. Because they had been tampering to get Pat Riley while he was still under contract.
44:42 Speaker 04 There was never, ever any contact on my behalf or anybody who represented me legally
44:48 Speaker 02 to, uh, to make a deal with anybody until after I resigned. Fact is, Pat Riley was lying. There was contact. The Knicks say as early as February, $1 million and a draft pick tells you tampering was committed.
45:00 Speaker 04 And the fact was that he announced his separation to them via fax, not via face to face meeting. The equivalent I can draw from today that I think people can relate to and how it went over in New York, it'd be like breaking up with someone via text message today, right?
45:18 Pablo Torre? Oh, we talked to the former head lawyer at MSG at the time, this guy Ken Munoz. Uh, because his office had the fax machine that received the resignation, the breakup fax.
45:29 Speaker 04 So it didn't go to MSG, it went to the, the legal office.
45:31 Pablo Torre? Yeah, it was a fax machine at his office, apparently. And what he remembers most clearly, quote, is that we were very upset with that. I was frankly shocked, end quote.
45:44 Speaker 04 And Pat Riley claimed that the league mandated that there had to be some sort of formal notification, right? And so the easiest, most efficient way to get a formal notification done, again, at the time was the fax machine.
45:55 Pablo Torre? Right.
45:56 Speaker 04 But New York went crazy.
45:59 Speaker 05 He's a traitor.
46:00 Speaker 02 He's a traitor. He went for the money, he went for the bucks.
46:04 Speaker 03 I think he should be in jail.
46:06 Speaker 04 All the columnists called him Pat the Rat. All this stuff. And so.
46:11 Pablo Torre? His return.
46:12 Speaker 04 He goes out to Miami when he comes back to play his first game in the Garden. Pat Riley's return to New York as coach of the NBA's Miami Heat wasn't welcomed by everyone.
46:23 Speaker 04 I was up there covering it from the Washington Post.
46:27 Speaker 04 The boos, you know, the, just the animosity, the taunting.
46:32 Pablo Torre? Spike Lee was furious. I don't know, I just think that maybe he should have just stood up and faced the fire instead of doing it by fax.
46:38 Speaker 04 They're gonna be kinda hard on Pat Riley. He's gonna smear him for a rough night. People chanting, Pat the Rat, Pat the Rat. A very interesting scene unfolding here at Madison Square Garden. He really milked it. He basically walks out onto the court when they announce him. He's egging on the crowd, let me hear it, and he blows them a kiss. And then the post-game scene is something I'll never forget.
47:02 Speaker 05 I've always embraced the fan in New York as being one of the very best. And of what they had to offer to me, I would just take it for what it is. But I wanted to show my appreciation back to them regardless of what is being said.
47:16 Pablo Torre? Part of the key thing here is that Pat Riley had not addressed the public. It was only via fax that he said anything.
47:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
47:25 Pablo Torre? And so everyone's waiting for this.
47:27 Speaker 04 He has to face the New York media, right? And so they're just badgering him and pestering him about, why'd you do the fax? Why did you send in the fax? And so finally, he, as close as you're gonna come to seeing Pat Riley lose his cool in a situation like that, he just unloads his quote. Didn't make any difference whether I faxed it in, conferences it in, phoned it in, had a satellite delivery of it in. I resigned two weeks before the fax. The only reason why the fax has become fashionable is because I was ordered to send the fax by the commissioner. Otherwise, I wouldn't have sent the goddamn fax.
47:59 Pablo Torre? He's basically saying, uh, I'm not the guy who made everybody fax this [BLEEP].
48:06 Speaker 04 But also, he's like, why the hell are you so damn fixated on the fax? But you're right, Pablo, the medium was the message.
48:14 Pablo Torre? I have this theory that I'm developing. The more that we dive into the rabbit hole of the fax machine. And it's that not only did sports have the greatest fax of all time, maybe two of the greatest in the stories we just shared, but I think sports may have also killed the fax machine. And I want to explain just some of the math here, Jay, because we're kind of tracking the trajectory of the fax. And apparently, around the time of Pat Riley's return to the Garden, fall of 95, there were 80 fax machines for every thousand Americans. But the sports world, of course, it was clinging to the machine, to the point where in 2013, there was a story about NFL free agency now.
49:00 Pablo Torre? And it's the story of defensive end Elvis Dumervil. If you recall, this gentleman, so pro bowler, three times over. Denver Broncos, exactly right. Five man pressure, Brady's gonna be hit hard and sacked. He took a wicked shot from Elvis Dumervil. He was going to take a pay cut in order to re-sign with the Broncos for another Super Bowl run. They had just lost to the Ravens in the playoffs. NFL extension deadline, 4:00 PM. Elvis Dumervil is in Miami, looking around, needs a fax machine, as is a recurring theme in this story, to send back his signed contract. He did not hit send at Kinko's until 4:06 PM. And the Denver Broncos, faced with a $13 million salary cap hit, cut Elvis Dumervil.
49:45 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
49:46 Pablo Torre? Who then signs with the Ravens, the aforementioned team that had just knocked them out of the playoffs. And you could argue, some have argued, that this fax gate made the Broncos lose the Super Bowl, that this was a key, just sliding doors, maybe literally Kinko's sliding doors moment, that cost them a trophy. And so, a month later, the NFLPA, the Players Association, signs a deal with DocuSign.
50:16 Speaker 04 Wow.
50:16 Pablo Torre? Quote, "Enabling them to sign anything, anywhere," end quote. Bringing us, I believe, to the end of faxing contracts in sports. I mean, Jay, again, you teach at Northwestern, you speak and are around young people, way more than me at this point. What do you think their reaction to this whole thing would be?
50:38 Speaker 04 A lot of times, I just talk about the evolution of how LeBron James told the world of his free agency decisions.
50:44 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
50:44 Speaker 04 Right? From going on ESPN and having a show to the next time he gave an exclusive to Sports Illustrated, which seems even more antiquated than going on ESPN. But then, when he went from Cleveland to the Lakers, it was an Instagram post from his agency.
51:00 Pablo Torre? Right.
51:00 Speaker 04 And just seeing that evolution from 2010 to 2018, I think it was, you know, just in eight years, how much that changed? So, we're looking back into the 1990s, and so, it's an exponential amount of change.
51:15 Pablo Torre? Right, right. I think they're gonna be listening to this episode and thinking to themselves, "God, these two mother**** are so old."
51:22 Speaker 04 Thanks for having me. Very old school to do it in person, and I can't believe I get to see a fax again. This is awesome. Who are you gonna send a fax to?
51:29 Pablo Torre? So, I suppose this is where your reporting here has revealed a problem. I don't know if we have a phone jack here.
51:40 Pablo Torre? In this fancy studio we built for podcasting, there are so many jacks and ports and wires and cords and cameras and all sorts of things. I think we have some finding out to do, and I think I gotta take our intel facts and hit the streets.
51:55 Speaker 04 Good luck. Hope you found a Chinese restaurant that accommodates you.
52:16 Pablo Torre? Alright, so you may remember that reference I made earlier to Chekhov's gun, which was in honor of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. The guy who once said something along the lines of, quote, "If a gun is shown in Act 1, by the last act it must be fired." End, approximate quote. Well, we're now in the last act of the show, and I suppose it is time for me to admit that I started this entire adventure, actually, by trying to acquire someone else's gun. Because in February, I had asked Michael Jordan's agent, David Falk, if there was any chance he still had the fax machine. The same one used to send the fax. Because, of course, it's a museum piece, to me. A genuine treasure.
53:01 Pablo Torre? And what David Falk wrote me back was this, quote, "Hey Pablo, do you still have your cellphone from 1995?" End quote, and then three crying laughing emojis. And then David Falk refused to elaborate any further. Which, you know, seemed unnecessary to me. But now, we here at Pablo Torre Finds Out have our own fax machine, our own Brother Intellfax 1570 MC from 1995-ish. And all I gotta do now, if you're not yet watching on our YouTube channel, which you obviously should, is make like J. Ahedande did in that snowstorm, searching around Penn Station
53:46 Pablo Torre? in order to finally fire off a message. A message on behalf of the fax machine itself.
53:55 Pablo Torre? So I think the plan is to find a phone jack for our fax machine in Manhattan in 2025.
54:05 Pablo Torre? Let's go this way.
54:07 Pablo Torre? You guys have any idea what this is?
54:11 Pablo Torre? You think it's a printer?
54:14 Pablo Torre? Excuse me, do you know what this is? No? Fair enough.
54:19 Pablo Torre? Do you guys recognize this? No.
54:22 Pablo Torre? Fax machine, right? A fax machine? It's a fax machine. Trying to figure out where to find a phone jack. I'm guessing I'll try like a deli or something. Go to like a Starbucks or something, maybe. That's a good idea. Alright, here's Starbucks. Let's see. Hi. You guys don't have a phone jack, do you, at Starbucks?
54:42 Pablo Torre? A phone jack? No? In case you were wondering how heavy this fax machine is, the answer is, it is extremely heavy. So... I know this deli. This deli knows me. How's it going? I'm good. Uh, question. Do you guys have a phone jack? So that's a very clear and, again, understandable 0 for 2. Other stop is... a hair salon? You're not alone. Nobody has a phone jack anymore. Um, trying to plug in a fax machine.
55:14 Pablo Torre? Does anyone know where I can find a phone jack for this fax machine?
55:21 Pablo Torre? A landline? So far, it's zero. Zero takers. Hi, um, hello. Uh, my name is Pablo. I host a show called Pablo Torre Finds Out. I'm a neighbor.
55:35 Pablo Torre? This is a fax machine. We, we are looking for a phone jack. Do you guys have a phone jack that we could just borrow for a minute?
55:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think we do. But it's downstairs, below ground.
55:47 Pablo Torre? Okay. Below ground. Yeah, absolutely. What was your name?
55:52 Speaker 03 Nikki.
55:52 Pablo Torre? Nikki Pablo. Okay, great. Um, do I just follow you?
55:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:55 Pablo Torre? Below ground?
55:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:57 Pablo Torre? Amazing. This is Manhattan's only brewery?
56:00 Speaker 03 It is. We are headed into our pillar cellar. You'll be able to see the tanks over here.
56:06 Pablo Torre? Just like the visuals on this. We are inside of the underbelly of a brewery. There's a giant... Is that... what kind of metal is this? Just like very... Big aluminum sounding? Hi. Uh, I'm Pablo. We have a fax machine that, uh... your name again?
56:27 Speaker 03 Nikki.
56:27 Pablo Torre? Nikki said we could plug into a phone jack here.
56:32 Pablo Torre? Yeah? Who are we faxing to? We're faxing a guy named David Falk. Okay. Just incredible hospitality from Torch and Crown Brewery. Holy shit. John, you're a mensch. The machine is telling me to please wait.
56:55 Pablo Torre? Just in case you were wondering what this fax said. Quote, "For immediate release. Contact Pablo S. Torre, 513-85PABLO. New York, New York, March 27, 2025." The following statement was released today by Pablo S. Torre through his personal friend and business manager, Pablo S. Torre. Host of Pablo Torre Finds Out, also known as PTFO, located in New York, New York, in response to questions about the future of fax machines. I think it's working. Oh, it's working.
57:29 Pablo Torre? It's alive.
57:32 Pablo Torre? It's alive. It's beautiful.
57:41 Pablo Torre? God. Quote.
57:46 Pablo Torre? "We are so back."
57:49 Pablo Torre? End quote.
58:01 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
58:07 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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