Comeback Stories, Part 2
Sanders, Jordan, Disney, Beethoven and Jobs

He did not make the varsity as a sophomore; he was not dropped from basketball. In 1978 Laney High School's varsity coach, Clifton "Pop" Herring, had one opening for a sophomore and gave it to the 6ft 7in Leroy Smith, because the team needed height. Jordan, "a skinny 5 feet, 9 inches" in one 1998 account, went to the junior varsity, became its centerpiece, and spent his last two years on the varsity. He took it personally and has said so: in 1991 he called it "embarrassing, not making that team".

SOURCE Kevin Sherrington, The Dallas Morning News, in The Seattle Times, 11 January 1998.

The rejections and the late start are real; we found no source for the number. In the Rosenberg Center's account he was rejected again and again, and signed up only five restaurants in the first two years. His first franchised restaurant, run by Pete Harman, opened in South Salt Lake, Utah, in 1952. The rerouting of US 25 away from Corbin then drained his café's trade, and in 1956 he sold it at auction, at a loss, for $75,000. He went on the road selling franchises, and in 1964, with more than 600 franchises, sold the company for $2 million. The 1,009 figure is widely repeated; none of the histories we opened mention it.

SOURCE Smithsonian Magazine; Rosenberg International Franchise Center, University of New Hampshire.

We could not find the quotation; the setbacks are real. The "lacked imagination" line and a newspaper firing are not in the accounts we opened from D23, the Walt Disney Family Museum or the National Archives. What is documented: Disney and Ub Iwerks were laid off from the Pesmen-Rubin commercial art studio in Kansas City after the holiday rush, and started their own firm, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists, which lasted about a month. His later studio, Laugh-O-Gram Films, formed in May 1922, was forced into bankruptcy by a creditor's petition that Iwerks filed on 4 October 1923; the first meeting of creditors was set for 30 October 1923. Disney had already left Kansas City for California in late July 1923, for a new start.

SOURCE D23; the Walt Disney Family Museum; American Bankruptcy Institute; National Archives at Kansas City.

A dismissive note probably existed; the famous wording grew. Quote Investigator found good support for a studio evaluation written during an early screen test in the 1930s. The earliest printed version it found, from 1937, reads Slightly bald and can dance a little; a 1939 Fortune article gives Can't act; slightly bald; can dance a little. "Can't sing" came later: it is found by 1973.

SOURCE Quote Investigator.

True; how much he could still hear is argued. In June 1801 he wrote that his hearing had been "getting weaker and weaker for 3 years", and from 1818 he used conversation books, in which people wrote their side. The Ninth premiered at the Kärntnertor Theatre in Vienna on 7 May 1824; the contralto soloist later told George Grove that she turned him round to face the applause. The usual view is that he was profoundly deaf by then. The musicologist Theodore Albrecht has argued that he still had some hearing in his left ear until shortly before his death.

SOURCE Beethoven-Haus Bonn; Grove (1898); Thomas et al. (2021); Theodore Albrecht, as reported by uDiscover Music.

True, and the way he came back matters. He resigned from Apple in 1985, ousted as chairman, and founded NeXT; in 1986 he bought the computer division that became Pixar. Apple then acquired NeXT to make its operating system, NeXTSTEP, the basis for what became Mac OS X, released in March 2001. Jobs was firmly in charge again by August 1997. He returned with the product Apple needed.

SOURCE Computer History Museum; Pixar.

True by his own count, and the count is his own. In a 2011 column he described the 5,127 prototypes it took before the first model, the DC01, went on sale in 1993, some 15 years after he started (14, in another account). Licensing deals largely failed along the way, and in the end he made the machine himself.

SOURCE Dyson's 2011 column, as reported by Gizmodo; London Business School.