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

Part one checked six comebacks. In the three that held up, the turn came from a skill the person already had, not from keeping going alone. This part looks at seven more.

Three hold up. Four are real stories carrying a detail that was added or changed along the way.

01The verdicts

01 Michael Jordan was cut from his high school team ◐Partly He did not make the varsity as a sophomore; he was not dropped from basketball.

02 Colonel Sanders was rejected 1,009 times before anyone bought his recipe ◐Partly The rejections and the late start are real; we found no source for the number.

03 Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination ◐Partly We could not find the quotation; the setbacks are real.

04 Fred Astaire's screen test said "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." ◐Partly A dismissive note probably existed; the famous wording grew.

05 Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony while deaf ✓Holds up True; how much he could still hear is argued.

06 Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple, then came back ✓Holds up True, and the way he came back matters.

07 James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes before his vacuum worked ✓Holds up True by his own count, and the count is his own.

02What got added to the partly true stories

Look at what changed in the four that are partly true:

• Jordan is “cut” from basketball, when the cut was from the varsity and he spent that season on the junior varsity.
• Sanders gets an exact number: 1,009 rejections.
• Disney gets an exact insult (“lacked imagination”), and a newspaper in place of the art studio that actually laid him off.
• Astaire gets a longer, funnier screen-test note.

The additions rarely change the outline of what happened. Mostly they make it quotable. Our reading is that a number and a put-down are the two things a motivational post needs, and the record rarely supplies either.

JordanCut from the team, when the cut was from the varsity and he played junior varsity

SandersAn exact number: 1,009 rejections

DisneyAn exact insult, “lacked imagination”, and a newspaper

AstaireA longer, funnier screen-test note

Our reading: a number and a put-down are what a motivational post needs.

03The Jordan story is the most instructive

It has been told for decades, including in an NBA Entertainment film, and the part that changed is the part that makes it a story.

Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina, started with the 10th grade. In 1978 Jordan arrived for his sophomore year at “a skinny 5 feet, 9 inches”, according to a 1998 newspaper account by Kevin Sherrington of The Dallas Morning News. The varsity coach, Clifton “Pop” Herring, almost never carried sophomores, and that year he had one opening for a sophomore. His team lacked height, so the place went to Leroy Smith, who was 6ft 7in.

Jordan felt it. “It was embarrassing, not making that team,” he said in 1991. “They posted the roster and it was there for a long, long time without my name on it.” He became the centerpiece of the junior varsity, scoring more than 40 points in a couple of games, grew from 5ft 9in to 6ft 3in before his junior season, and spent his last two years on the varsity.

For a sophomore at that school, missing the varsity was the normal outcome, not a talent being written off. The anger was real, and he used it. That is still a useful story.

04The pattern from part one, again

Jobs is the clearest case of what part one found. He founded NeXT in 1985 after he resigned from Apple, “ousted as chairman by a boardroom coup”, in the Computer History Museum’s words. By 1996 Apple needed a modern operating system and had failed to produce one of its own, so it bought NeXT “in order to make NeXTSTEP the basis for what eventually became Mac OS X”. Jobs came back with it, and was firmly in charge by August 1997. He returned carrying the software Apple needed.

Beethoven fits in a different way. His hearing had been failing since his late twenties, and from 1818 friends wrote their side of conversations in books. He went on composing through all of it, including the Ninth Symphony. Our reading is that what carried him was decades of training that the hearing loss could not take away.

This is our reading of the cases, not a law: keeping going kept them in the game, and something they had already built won it.

JobsNeXTSTEP, which became the basis for Mac OS X

BeethovenDecades of training, carried on through his hearing loss

Keeping going kept them in the game. Something they had already built won it.

How we checked this · Last checked September 2026

• Each story was checked against the newspaper accounts, museum and archive pages, letters and studies listed below.

Checked September 2026.

How we check every article →

05Sources