The Josh Innes Show - Anniversary of MJ's Return

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

31 years ago Michael Jordan returned to the Bulls. I was a kid and this was the biggest thing that ever happened. I really, really miss being passionate about sports. Social media and my old age has ruined it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right. Let's see here. Today is the anniversary of Michael Jordan's return to the NBA after his first retirement. March 19th, 1995. Boy, that was a day, man. I remember being excited. I think it was a Saturday? I think it would have been a Saturday or a Sunday. I just remember the game being on the NBA on NBC. Obviously, the I'm back thing happened a couple days before that. And they were playing the Pacers in Indianapolis. And it was just like fucking amazing. Because there's, you know, nine-year-old. me, MJ's back, life is good. So let's do this. Because that was one of the highlights of my young sports fan life was when MJ came back and he had the chance to take the game winning shot at the end, he missed it, but it was like it was scripted.

Like the fact that the Bulls had the ball end the game, chance to win it. Like everything about it kicked ass. It was so great. But other than him missing the shot. But they're playing against the Pacers. It's on the road. Let's do this. Let's rewatch the NBA on NBC coverage.

of this and revisit this from what would have been, what, 31 years ago? 31 years ago that MJ made his return. We'll do that after these words. It's wild because things just in 1996 seemed a lot more important. 1995, 1996, all these things seemed so much more important than they are now. Like sports felt like it mattered more. Even though social media now would tell you that, you know, the way people react to sports, people are fucking lunatics and people are crazy.

But back then, man, sports mattered so much. Like, because there wasn't everything else. There was the movies. There was TV. There was radio. But obviously, there was no social media. There were no cell phones for the most part. Like, you weren't reading the internet and watching porn on your telephone.

Like, it was like Michael Jordan playing basketball again was the biggest story on the planet. Like, who's somebody, like, the only thing that could capture the imagination of people in that way in 2026 is if somebody, is if somebody either had faked their death or comes back from the dead. If we find out that Kobe Bryant is still alive and he comes back to play, that would have the impact of Michael Jordan returning to the NBA in 1995. Because you can't recreate that shit. It just doesn't happen anymore in sports because it's also kind of like how we've seen everything, right? Like I'm talking to one of the sales guys out in the office this morning.

And I don't know what brings up the conversation about the three-suits. Stooges. I don't know why he brings up the Three Stooges. Maybe I brought up the Three Stooges. I don't know. But this guy apparently is a stooge connoisseur. And he's explaining to me, like how his wife, when she was his girlfriend, he took her to a three Stooges film festival. And we start talking about the Three Stooges because I dig the Three Stooges. Jilly hates them, but Jilly's a bitch. She hates the Three Stooges. So anyway, we start talking about the different shit they used to have to do to produce the sound effects on the Three Stooges. and the different type of instruments they would use and different things they would have to clank on and bang on to create different sound effects. Like, oh, how did you create the sound of Curly getting punched in the stomach or Larry getting poked in the eyes? Like, how did you do that?

Well, in the 1920s and 1930s, 1940s, it was a different world. Now you can create everything on your computer. And it was a more impressive thing to accomplish back then, right? Just like, you know, I always used the Forrest Gump comparison. It wasn't that long ago. 32 years ago that Forrest Gump was made. 32, 33 years ago that Forrest Gump was made. And the technology that they were debuting at that time was so cutting edge.

And now it's the kind of shit that an Asian kid could do on his cell phone. But back in that era, that wasn't the case. Back in that era, you couldn't just, you know, like it was hard to make Lieutenant Dan have no legs. And it was hard to make Lieutenant Dan not only have no legs, but then have metal. legs. And it was hard, and you couldn't just put Forrest Gump on the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon. Now you can. I could do that. I can go to my phone right now and somehow put me, I can go to chat GPT and say, hey, put me on the couch on the Dick Cavett show. And we can all do it. I can talk to my chat, GBT, and do a show with me. But back then, it took more and it was a

bigger deal. And that's the same thing you see with sports now. Like, you know, if guys making a comeback now doesn't have the same impact. Like, it just, it doesn't. It doesn't capture the zeitgeist or the imaginations of people. Like even like this world baseball classic, people are blowing this world baseball classic. But like it's a brief fleeting moment than it's over. Like what captures people's imagination like it used to? It can't because there's too many options. There's too much shit to do.

We have too much shit to do. It's impossible to capture people's. And we're jaded. We're jaded from all the shit we've seen. Like how often do you go to a movie now and enjoy the effects of the movie? You don't because we've seen it all. But when you saw Titanic and you saw that fucking boat sinking and it looked real and it looked like that boat was sinking, you're like, shit, this is something. But you don't get that anymore.

That's not the case anymore because we've seen it all. We've seen people fly and we've seen Avatar and we've seen like nothing impresses us anymore. But in 1995, things could still impress us like Forrest Gump, like MJ making his return. And we weren't jaded sports fans then either. I think that, and I'm guilty of it, we're all guilty of it. I'd give my left nut to go to a time before social media and sports radio and sports TV made us hate sports. And pitted us against each other, not just against each other. I know you're a Cowboys fan.

I'm an Eagles fan, whatever. I'm talking about pitting each other against each other in like political ways, right? Like I tweeted something yesterday that, you know, whether or not you, which is. whichever sport you think is healthier, baseball or basketball is determined by how you view things politically. And nobody understood it. Maybe that's my fault because it didn't make any sense. And that could be true.

But like, if you're someone that thinks basketball is dying, there's a very good possibility. You're probably some Clay Travis listener, right wing type of person. Not like saying, like, if you're someone who just doesn't really watch basketball anymore, that's one thing. If you're someone who's convinced that the NBA is the scum of the earth and that it's a Dead League, you're probably a right-wing person. And out of spite, left-wing people will then fight with MAGA people and tell you how great

the NBA is. Not even that they watch it, but it's great because they can't let the MAGA people win. And on the flip side, I guarantee there's a bunch of MAGA people out there and right-wing people, white people, that'll tell you how great baseball and how healthy baseball is right now and how healthy hockey is because they were all invested in Team USA in these sports. While you've probably got a bunch of liberal folks who thinks baseball is just an elitist white guy, sport, and hockey's a bunch of white dudes and all this shit. Like, it's real, right?

But there was a time that we were not divided politically in the sports world. That was a time before social media. It was a time before 3,000 sports podcasts. It was a time before 24-hour sports networks. It was a better time. It was a time when, like, I didn't know that people hated Michael Jordan. They existed. I didn't know they hated them.

Because in my little corner of the world, when Jordan was at his apex, I lived in two little areas. I lived in Billings, Montana. And when I say Michael Jordan was at his apex, I mean, when Michael Jordan was king of the world, but it was in a time when I could know it. Like, 92, like 90, 91, I'm five years old. I don't really know the Michael Jordan thing.

I'm living in Montana. I'm probably eight years old in 1993. I know Michael Jordan. I've got NBA Live 94 on the Sega. I've got the Michael Jordan jersey. I've got Jordans. I had various Jordans from multiple years. I had like the Jordan 8, 9, 10s.

I had all that shit. Eventually, Space Jam would come out. Like, I loved Michael Jordan. And part of that is because he was the guy you'd see on TV. You know, there's no 3,000 highlights instantly on your phone. It was, holy shit, Michael Jordan's who's on TV, and I love Michael Jordan. There was nothing that I would have or could have known about Michael Jordan being hated by other people because I never saw it. I never saw Michael Jordan.

getting hate from people in Billings, Montana? Because who the fuck cared about anything other than Michael Jordan in Billings, Montana? Now, if you were in Philadelphia, I guarantee there's a lot of people that were Sixers fans, probably hated Michael Jordan beating them all the time. And probably the Knicks hated Michael Jordan. It's not like he was just universally beloved. He was the biggest star on the planet. But like, if you were the Knicks, you fucking hated Michael Jordan.

If you were the Sixers, you hated Jordan. If you were the Celtics, you hated Jordan. I mean, that's just the way it went. But as a kid, I didn't experience any of this stuff. I didn't experience this world of, you know, like I didn't know that people actually hated Michael Jordan. In my little neck of the woods, we all loved Michael Jordan. But anyway, so growing up, I didn't experience any of this. I was just a kid.

We were all just kids. And wouldn't we like to go back to that part of life where we're not jaded? Like, it is possible to be an adult and not be jaded about sports, right? Like you can grow up and not be as Pollyanna or idealistic. about it, but it is possible to not be jaded and just hate everything. And part of that comes from social media. And that's where most of my hate for things comes from is social media. But like, wouldn't you love it?

Wouldn't you just kill for the opportunity to go back in time to a time when you were a young kid or even as an adult? Because I wasn't jaded about sports 15 years ago. I'm 22, 23 at the time. I'm not jaded. I do go to 2011. 2011 Cardinals are playing in the World Series. Like, them winning or losing matters to me.

And I'm 26 years old at that time, or however old I was, 15 years ago. So I was 24 years old. The outcome of those games mattered to me. The outcomes of the LSU games. I've just become so jaded. And I think a lot of us have become jaded. And we don't want to be that way. Isn't that like the whole point of the movie Peter Pan?

Right? Like you become an adult and you just become more jaded and you don't live in Never, Neverland anymore. And yeah, you have to grow up at some point. Yeah, you have to, you know, like the things can't matter to you as much as they once did. And I fully get that. But it's also just like, I don't know, man. It's like, you don't want to be like, you have this naivete about you because you don't want to be a dipshit. Right.

Like, but you'd like to feel something. And I do miss feeling something about sports and that something isn't constantly. constantly going to social media and saying, oh, the right-wing people like this and left-wing people like that shit. Like, I miss that. I don't think I'm on an island here. I think I speak for a lot of us in that way. But again, it's kind of one of those, you know, the genie can't go back in the bottle type of things. And it's the same thing with politics and everything else.

The genie cannot go back in the bottle. We cannot live in a world where this stuff doesn't exist anymore because it's out there. And there's too many people that are grifting and too many people that stand to get very rich off of this and get rich off a division that we can't just sit back. can enjoy things. I'm part of the problem. We're all part of the fucking problem. But anyway, all that said, it's 1995. Michael Jordan's making this comeback. I'm nine years old. This is the coolest shit. Actually, at this point, I'm eight. If this is in March of 95, I'm eight years old going on nine years old. And when you talk about shit that you can remember from your childhood, like this vividly is etched in my mind.

Watching this in Montana, in my room, it's all there. I was in my room in Montana was interesting because we lived in like a duplex. And like the whole bottom floor is where the washroom was or like the laundry room. And there were multiple rooms downstairs as well. And there was a big room. It was basically a whole other house downstairs. There was the upstairs part of the house where my sister slept. and my mom and dad slept and was the main living room and the kitchen.

Downstairs, we had a bathroom, we had the laundry room. There was a big common area, which kind of was my bedroom. There was a fireplace and everything in there. And then there were two other bedrooms, right? So I would stay down there. I'm eight years old. That was like my area. I had posters all over the wall.

That is where my Sega was. That's where I was playing NBA Jam, NBA Live 94. I had one of these weird, and I'm sure many of you probably have these chairs that you never see anymore, but they were like these kind of wooden rocking chair things that also had like a canvas, like a team logo on a canvas. Like if I, like, it was a, I don't know why I had a Buffalo Bill's chair, but I had a Buffalo Bill's chair, even though I rooted for the chiefs. And I had a buffalo Bill's chair.

I had a bunk bed. I also had another bed. Like I had a bunch of shit in this room. This was like my domain. I had a basketball goal, like a small basketball goal that I hoop on. And I remember sitting there watching this. Because it was, it was, I remember all of it. Anyway, let me do this.

Let's get to another episode of this. Let's actually play the audio now. Now that I've set the scene for you, the scene has been set. I'm like eight and a half years old, almost nine. Jordan's coming back. It's amazing. So let's do that. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything.

Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada.