1996: The Most Iconic Year In Sports History

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Friends,

Happy Friday! Today, we’re going to do something a little different.

Jon Finkel is an award-winning author and my friend. He’s written some incredible books, with his work publicly endorsed by everyone from Mark Cuban and Tony Dungy to Spike Lee and Kevin Durant.

Now, he’s releasing a new book — 1996: A Biography ― Reliving the Legend-Packed, Dynasty-Stacked, Most Iconic Sports Year Ever.

On its 25th anniversary, Jon looks back at the cultural impact that sports teams, movies, and players from 1996 had on society — including Jordan, Shaq, Iverson, Kobe, Gretzky, Tiger, Griffey, Jeter, Tyson, the Cowboys, the Yankees, the Bulls, The Rock, Stone Cold, the Williams Sisters, Happy Gilmore, Space Jam, and more.

My copy is on the way, but in the meantime, Jon has graciously agreed to write a guest post to tease us :)

Make sure to check out his new book, and enjoy! We’ll talk Monday.

It’s like I’ve always said, “There is no better time to write a book on the greatest year in sports than the one year in the history of modern sports when sports completely stopped.”

I’ve had the idea for a project celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 1996 sports year for a long time, but little did I know that when the publishing stars would finally align to write the book, it would happen at the exact moment in 2020 when sports would be taken away from us.

The NBA season would stop short.

The NHL season would stop short.

March Madness would be canceled.

Baseball would push back and truncate their season.

The Masters would move to the fall.

For a brief moment in sports time, there was nothing.

Well…nothing new.

We did have the one thing that, in some ways, is stronger even than live sports: nostalgia. I graduated high school in 1996, which is why the idea for this book was so important to me. In many ways, our collective love of sports crystallizes around this period in our lives. It’s the last time that we’re younger than all of the professional athletes that we follow. Once you hit college, you’re no longer a kid watching pros; you’re a grown man or woman watching peers. That is a seismic shift in your sports brain. It also solidifies some things.

Since you’re only a child once, you can only have one set of childhood heroes. For those of us who graduated high school or college anywhere in or near the ’90s, the first part of the decade was filled with “our athletes,” but something magical happened when the calendar flipped to ’96: not only did many of the bona fide, single-name legends of the last 50 years create signature headlines (Jordan, Gretzky, Ali, Agassi, Griffey, Graf, Tyson, Magic, Shaq and more) and not only were the most popular pro teams nationally winning titles (the Cowboys and Bulls and Yankees) but a bumper crop of new icons and leagues joined the professional sports and pop culture landscape.

1996 is a line of demarcation.

There’s before ’96 and after ’96.

Before ’96, we lived in a pre-Kobe, pre-Iverson, pre-Tiger, pre-Tyson vs. Holyfield, pre-Jordan comeback, pre-Venus and Serena, pre-Jeter, pre-Jerry Maguire and Happy Gilmore, pre-MLS, pre-WNBA, pre-Stone Cold, and The Rock world.

Is this a sports world you can even picture? No AI? No Williams Sisters or Tiger on Sunday? No Black Mamba or People’s Elbow or Austin 3:16? No Space Jam? No “Captain.” No “Show me the money!”

I can’t picture it either.

And in 1996 they all arrived at once.

The most interesting part? (to borrow Joe’s signature line)

Athletes took up such an enormous piece of the entertainment pie that in relatively quick succession all three major sports announced historic, record-shattering contracts for their current legends that would foreshadow the bank-breaking deals these new ‘96ers would one day sign.

On February 1st, 1996, Ken Griffey Jr., the last true crossover megastar in baseball, signed the first MLB contract worth more than $8 million per year ($8.5 million over four seasons) which surpassed the roughly $7.29 million per year deal that Barry Bonds signed with San Francisco in December of 1992.

Towards the end of the summer, on August 12th of 1996, Emmitt Smith, fresh off his third Super Bowl win, signed an eight-year $48 million contract with a $15 million signing bonus.

“This is a cornerstone event for this franchise,” Jerry Jones said at the time. “Emmitt has no peer in my mind. No peer today in sports.”

The AP declared that the salary and the bonus were both the highest in league history.

Eleven days later, on August 23rd, 1996, the entire sports universe shook when the Big Diesel topped both Griffey and Smith by leaving the Orlando Magic to sign the largest contract in the history of basketball, with a seven-year $120 million deal.

The Los Angeles Times headline for the story read, Shaq-zamm! He’s a $120-Million Laker.

Five days after that, on August 28th of 1996, a young Tiger Woods held a press conference to announce that he was turning pro and it began with two words that would forever change the sport: “Hello, World.”

Nike, who had just inked Woods to an unheard-of five-year, $40 million sponsorship deal, turned the phrase into an all-time great ad campaign and launched it two days later.

Not to be outdone, Mike Tyson fought three times in 1996, generating $98 million for his rematch against Frank Bruno in February, $63 million for his fight against Bruce Seldon in September, and $94 million for his November fight with Evander Holyfield, for a total of $255 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $414 million in nine months.

It was an embarrassment of sports riches, and every day you woke up, a new generational legend was performing a new sports feat or signing a new landmark agreement.

And this is to say nothing of Iverson’s ingenious Reebok deal, Stone Cold’s contract with the WWE, Michael Johnson’s Nike sponsorship for the Olympics, and the combined sports movie box office of Space Jam, Jerry Maguire, Tin Cup, Happy Gilmore, Kingpin and more.

And it all happened in 1996, the legend-packed, dynasty-stacked, most iconic sports year ever.

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