PTFO - The Fax and the Furious: How One Screeching Machine Upended Sports — and Society as We Knew It

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

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.
Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.
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This studio is a time machine today. We are traveling back back in time do you remember the relic on our desk here I do I still technically own a fax machine now is this a plain paper fax or is it the thermal paper fax this is a plain paper fax this is she is well I guess he is the brother in Telefax 1570 MC.
From, I believe it's a mid-90s vintage. Ooh, the sound.
Those beeps. It sounds like the wheel on Price is Right when it's spinning around.
Yes around yes you make those sounds some more that's so satisfying it is just the tactile nature of it touching it 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 No. We don't dial.
When was the last time you pressed a button? 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 childhood memory? And also, 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, threw out the box containing like the headset.
Because they thought it was trash. They're like, this can...
It's being disposed, this relic. This must be a box containing, like, rotten fruit or some shit.

Now, the question is, can you...

Well, I'm sure it's not connected.

Whoa.

I don't know what's happening.

Must have hit a preset.

The spirit has now taken over.

It still has the presets in it.

Oh, my God.

Oh.

Oh.

Oh. Oh.
Oh.

That sound, that satisfaction.

That sound.

Because it was always this moment of suspense before you knew the connection was going to happen.

And again, you heard those high-pitched squealing and wailing from the machines making their connection.

And then when you start to hear that scanning going through.

Something was about to happen.

Quote, for all of today's needs and tomorrows.

The brother Intellifax.

Whoops.

1570MC.

Whoops.

They failed to anticipate the internet, PDFs, email, all that.

Didn't quite anticipate tomorrow.

J.A. Donde, 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. Thank you.
That's pretty cool. That was pretty cool.
The fax machine helped me get there. Did you thank the fax in your speech? I should have.
What do you feel when you're now communing at this table with this machine that I haven't seen since the 90s? 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 wailing, but just the motor whirring, the buttons, the touch tone sounds, all those things that were so important. And that air of excitement, you're about to learn, you're about to find something out.
It's been 30 years this month since the world found out about the greatest facts 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 J.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.

In New York City, actually, there was like a snowstorm, got like a 1030 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 talk 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. And this Chinese family saved your journalistic ass that night.
They did. They came through big time.
For the kids out there, this wasn't just an American phenomenon. This was global.
So, summer after I graduated college, summer of 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?

I'm in Monte Carlo.

I'm in Monte Carlo.

I say, hey, you don't know me.

It's an 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 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. Right.
Proof of your

credential. Before that, I guess you would have had to mail in the request, right? But by the late

eighties, nineties, 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. You walk in, Jordan, Barkley, Magic, they're all there.
Barkley was just on this heater that day. He used to talk about how they went to dinner with the prince of Monaco.
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. 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 we have to, like, 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 going to be a swimmer.

What?

Because I was out by the pool yesterday,

and all these women were topless.

David Rawlings from Patrick Newham.

This is like spring break in the ghetto.

And if there's going to be topless women by the pool,

like they got over here,

he's like, I'm going to be a swimmer. He says, y'all be thinking I'm Mark Spitz by the end of this.
This is a dream assignment for you to write about, in other words. 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 space.
Very 1990s problem, right? We didn't have space in our print edition newspapers. So that story never saw the light of day.
Until now, 33 years later. 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. The degree of difficulty when it came to filing something, it's truly unrelatable to people living in 2025 that you got to go through all these hoops and all of that.Fi era yeah because it was not the easiest thing to make what feels now like the most automated part of this actually happened do you have memories of fighting this machine of like struggling with the premise of this machine it could be a little finicky sometimes right you had to get them to match up they talk 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 rewatch 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. This could not be an older sounding episode.
What the hell's the matter with you guys? This thing's out of paper. Is this the fact that I mentioned Wilford Brimley? One other fact story.
So the summer of 1989, after my freshman year of college, got back to L.A., 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, 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 is 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, right? Time zone differences and all that.
So, 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 groveling.
I'm so sorry, Mr. Coppola.
But I never forget getting to witness this behind the scenes Hollywood stuff going on involving Francis Ford Coppola, which I owe to the fax machine. You saw Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather, sent his agent a fax that he could not refuse.
I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. This machine here, though, I mean, by the way, this is, for those wondering, not watching on YouTube, this is a Chekhov's fax machine situation.
We are going to 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, what we're here to do is tell the story of a machine that shaped the history we all know even if we never really appreciated how good we had it. And also, I think it's going to take us back to a time that we wish we still did.
If you're nostalgic for the 90s, you have to be nostalgic for the fax machine. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
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Not available in all states. 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 here at 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.
That was the first fax transmission. It all starts with that.
Push this button down. The paper goes in and round.
Just relax because the Thermofax 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 you're willing to pay the long distance toll do you remember remember almost famous there's that scene where rolling stone wants william uh the protagonist to send his story to the fact checker alison our fact checker needs you to transmit whatever you have the story tonight now along with notes.
There's a mojo at the Daily News that 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.

It only takes 18 minutes a page.

Oh my God.

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 U.S. And they're being advertised.
There are commercials. 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.
The photo goes round and round. Whoa, and it comes out here.
And that will change the way you do business forever. 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! and so in the era before the internet before 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 frequently asked questions in the business community.
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 for why you can't get like here in new york for example right why we never no longer have the the the 212 yeah area code some people blame the fax machine well i don't know this because yeah because there was i had a 212 growing up that was our home number right and you know the 212 was covered.
There's an old Seinfeld episode, right? Absolutely.

Hello?

Or a subplot about it,

right? The lack of the 212.

646? It's a new area code.

What area?

New Jersey? No, no.

It's right here in the city.

It's the same as 212. They just multiplied it by three.
And then they added one to the middle number. It's the same.
According to this book, faxed 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 cool.
I only use it for business. There's something cold about it and impersonal.
So I never send a love letter by fax or anything like that. Your love interest wasn't likely to have their own fax machine.
You've got fax. It's a very different rom-com.
Agreed. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, wouldn't work at all. 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.
Signing day. National signing day.
Letters of intent. The first Wednesday in February always marks the national signing day for high school players to sign their college grant needs.
Coaches hover over the fax machine, if you can believe it. Somebody still uses fax machines, hoping that the top recruits sign.
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 made an announcement at their high school where they're going to go, until you had that signed letter of intent in hand, they were not yours.
And so National Sports Facts 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. deliver us deliver us our next great star it got to the point i mean old 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, 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.
And to build your team. And if you didn't have it, if the machine was broken, you got f***ed.
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 Darrell Price.
And who I was three decades ago was a running back out of Sylmar High School in the San Fernando Valley in California. 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. 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 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 it. That's fine.
Faxed, delivered, paid, done.

That lady at that convenience store had officially turned the page on Durrell'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 Durrell.

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 Durrell 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 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.
And that is how Darrell Price wound up at UCLA. Wow.
Faulty fax machine. I also like the fact that he mentioned another relic of the 80s and 90s, the answering machine.
Oh, God. That's a whole other episode, probably.
A whole other episode in our ongoing series of technology. Can you imagine losing out on that prospect because you're f***ing, he's the fax machine? He couldn't figure it out? There were ways that things could get lost in the transmission.
Ohio State was not pleased with me. 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 things like that.
I was really upset. I'm like, mom, the coaches are mad at me and this and that.
She goes, it's not the first time that it's happened to them, and it won't be the last. One addendum to that story, Jay, as we both are laughing at John Cooper and Ohio State, is that his mom was right.
Apparently, it was not the last time this happened to Ohio State because 20 years later, National Signing Day 2016, 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.
Wow. So one thing 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, your thing would print out a confirmation, right? The other thing was that you had to do this cover page, right? That was a big thing.
And it was very formal, right? So you'd print out, you know, two fax number from this fax number, right? 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. Right.
Etiquette. Fax etiquette.
Communications etiquette back. And now it's just like, here's a JPEG out of

nowhere, right into your brain that I didn't ask for. 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 fact spam because it would auto dial, right? So sometimes you would pick up the phone and you would just hear that. And it was just some random, you know, junk mailer, basically, hoping that they that you were a fax machine.

I didn't know.

Yeah, you could get junk faxes.

Yeah, there was there was there was junk faxes was a big thing.

Like someone just faxed me an ASCII picture of a d**k.

It just showed up in my kitchen.

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the reason I brought you here really is because of the most famous facts in the history of faxes. Certainly sports faxes, I would argue, faxes in general.
And it happened 30 years ago this month. 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. So he had retired after the 1993 championship, his first three-peat, 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 going to retire from basketball. 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 want to call it short. But I just feel that I don't have anything else for myself to prove.
A few months after that, he decides he wants to give baseball a shot. It happened that 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. 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, Brennan. And he says, well, I kind of miss basketball.
This was the same thought that everybody from Bulls fans to Bill Clinton in the White House was talking about and thinking about aloud. 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 6,100,001 new jobs. And there's just this one clip from The Last Dance, of course, the docuseries made by our friend Jason Herr, 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 think I said, well, why don't you freaking write one? So the behind the scenes of just the crafting of this document, when it comes to the call that David Fox's office is going to make, paint the picture there. What's

happening from their side of the

transmission? The funny thing is I

wanted to write about the

facts, capital letters,

for a long time. I put

in a call to David Fox and I figured

he would be able to tell me everything that I

wanted and needed to know about the facts.

But what he actually told me was, well, you really need to

talk to Allison Sadowski, 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.
The news media never takes a day off, so they're there. And Alison Sadowski runs his office at home, just worked out.
It's out of the shadow.

There's seven messages on her machine.

They're all from Falk and they're all with increasing urgency.

Call me back.

You got to call me.

You got to get in the office.

And so she gets the word.

We got to put out Michael Jordan's coming back.

And they had two fax machines, very fancy.

They had one that they use for incoming faxes, one that they use 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.
Yes. The following statement was released today by Michael Jordan through his personal attorney and business manager, David B.
Falk, chairman of Falk Associates Management Enterprises, Inc. FAME, in parentheses, located in Washington, D.C., in response to questions about his future career plans.
You know, I spoke to Allison for the story, and then in the years since, almost every year, someone imitates that exact format.

Jimmy Butler most recently did it.

He and his agent Bernie Lee

just did it as their whole squabble

with the heat was unfolding this year.

When Colorado came back to the Big 12,

the Big 12 set something up.

Oh, that's right.

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, it's... And she cannot believe that this has endured so long, three decades now, basically.
This is one of those historical sports stories to quote now Marshall McLuhan, where the medium was the message. Like, these are pale imitations, J.A., because what Allison had to do, individually sending it to every outlet one at a time that arrived in their offices unbidden, shockingly.
Right, so she spent her whole Saturday afternoon in the office sending out facts after facts after facts. The quote that she gave you in your reporting, it wasn't like sending a mass email.
Yeah, you can't just copy and send it all out at once. There's no BCC.
It sounds like a horse in carriage is what Alison 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. And I remember for years the washington post they had a copy of that i'm sure you know they copied it off the thermal fax and it was hanging up on the wall by the fax machine was the jordan i'm 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 and And artifacts.
The Sports Illustrated cover that week. Oh, yeah.
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 facts. And this is a 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? You worked there for a long time. Do you remember? 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. Today, it's the Chicago Bulls versus the Indiana Pacers.
God, I miss this. Because it was March, all the leading sports columnists were scattered around the country covering the NCAA tournament.
Oh, right. And so they all had to flock to Indianapolis.
The Avengers of sports columnists. Mike Wolbein, I think he was out at Denver, actually, at 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. Today, an artist returns to his true canvas, the hardboard courts of the NBA.
Michael Jordan is back. But it wasn't even the end.
Like the lesser, the undercard, Jay, which is the story that I didn't remember until we here, Apopla Torrey 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? Pat Riley saying, I'm gone.
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.
He had a whole list of demands. In real time, there was a feeling, there was a sense from people in the know that Pat Riley was going to be gone for the Knicks that season.
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 the Miami Heat.
So it was an open secret. And it was so open that the Heat wound up paying a million dollar fine and sending a first round draft pick to the Knicks because they had been tampering to get Pat Riley while he was still under contract.
There was never, ever any contact on my behalf or anybody who represented me legally to make a deal with anybody until after I resigned. The fact is, Pat Riley was lying.
There was contact. The Knicks say as early as February.
$1 million on a draft pick tells you tampering was committed. 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? Oh, we talked to the former head lawyer at MSG at the time, this guy Ken Munoz, because his office had the fax machine that received the resignation, the breakup fax. So it didn't go to MSG, it went to the legal offices.
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. 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.
Right. But New York went crazy.

Billy's a turncoat and a traitor.

He's a traitor.

He went for the money, went for the bucks.

I think he should be in jail.

All the columnists called him Pat the Rat, all this stuff.

And so, you know.

His return.

He goes out into Miami when he comes back to play his first game in the Garden.

Pat Riley has returned to New York as coach of the NBA's Miami Heat wasn't welcomed by everyone. I was up there covering it from the Washington Post.
The boos, you know, just the animosity, the taunting. Spike Lee was furious.
I don't know, I just think that maybe he should have just stood up and faced the fire and instead of it by facts. They're gonna be kinda hard on Pat Riley.
He's gonna get to meet 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 postgame scene

is something I'll never forget.

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.

Part of the key thing here is that

Pat Riley had not addressed the public

Thank you. to show my appreciation back to them regardless of what is being said.
Part of the key thing here is that Pat Riley had not addressed the public.

It was only via facts that he said anything.

Yeah.

And so everyone's waiting for this.

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 facts?

Why did you send in the facts?

And so finally, as close as you're going to come to seeing pat riley lose his cool in a situation like that he just unloads this 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 because i was ordered to send the fax by the commissioner otherwise i wouldn't have sent the goddamn facts. He's basically saying, uh,

I'm not the guy who made everybody fax this s***. 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. 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 were kind of tracking the trajectory of the facts. 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, and it's the story of defensive end Elvis Dumerville, if you recall this gentleman. So pro bowler three times over.
Wait for the Broncos? Denver Broncos, exactly right. Five-man pressure.
Brady's going to be hit hard and sacked. He took a wicked shot from Elvis Dumerville.
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, 4pm. Elvis Dumerville 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 p.m. And the Denver Broncos, faced with a $13 million salary cap hit, cut Elvis Dumerville, 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. Wow.
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? A lot of times I just talk about the evolution of how LeBron James told the world of his free agency decisions.
Yeah. 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.

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.

Right, right.

I think they're going to be listening to this episode and thinking to themselves, God, these two motherfuckers are so old. 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 going to send a fax to? So I suppose this is where your reporting here has revealed a problem. I don't know if we have a phone jack here.

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 got to take our Intellifax and hit the streets.

Good luck.

Hope you found a Chinese restaurant that accommodates you.

Uh-oh.

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All right, 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.

And... Anton Chekhov, the guy who once said something along the lines of, quote, if a gun is shown in act one, 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.
And what David Falk wrote me back was this, quote, hey, Pablo, do you still have your cell phone 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 in Telefax 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.E. Hedande did in that snowstorm, searching around Penn Station in order to finally fire off a message.
A message on behalf of the fax machine itself. So I think the plan is to find a phone jack for our fax machine in Manhattan in 2025.
Let's go this way. You guys have any idea what this is?

It's a printer.

You think it's a printer?

It's a fax machine.

Excuse me, do you know what this is?

No? Fair enough?

Do you guys recognize this?

No.

It's a 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'm probably 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? 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.
Question, do you guys have a phone jack? That's a very clear and, again, understandable 0 for 2. Another stop is a hair salon? You're not alone.
Nobody has a phone jack anymore. Trying to plug in a fax machine.
Does anyone know where I can find a phone jack for this fax machine? A landline. So far, it's zero.
Zero takers. Hi.
Hello. My name is Pablo.
I host a show called Pablo Torre Finds Out. I'm a neighbor.

This is a fax machine. We were looking for a phone jack.

Do you guys have a phone jack that we could just borrow for a minute?

Yeah, we do. But it's downstairs, below ground.

Okay. Below ground.
Yeah, absolutely. What was your name?

Thank you. for a minute depending on...
Yeah, I do, but it's downstairs, below ground. Okay, below ground.
Yeah, absolutely. What was your name? Nikki.
Nikki Pavlo. Okay, great.
Do I just follow you below ground? Yeah. Amazing.
This is Manhattan's only brewery? It is. We are going to get into our brewery cellar.
You'll be able to see. There's tanks over here.
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. How's it going? I'm Pablo.
We have a fax machine that, your name again? Nicky.

Nicky said we could plug into a phone jack here.

What's some of the fax?

Yeah.

Who are we faxing to?

We're faxing a guy named David Falk.

Okay.

This incredible hospitality from Torch and Crown Brewery.

Holy shit.

John, you're a mensch. The machine is telling me to please wait.
Just in case you were wondering what this fax said, quote, for immediate release, contact Pablo S. Torre, 513-85-Pablo, New York, New York, March 27, 2025.
The following statement was released today by Pablo S. Torre, 513-85-PABLO, 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.

It's alive.

It's alive.

It's beautiful.

God.

Quote,

we are so back

End quote

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out

A Metal Ark Media production

And I'll talk to you next time has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metal Ark Media production.