90s Spring Sports

The spring sports calendar of the 1990s—encompassing the NBA playoffs from April through June and Major League Baseball's season from April through the World Series—provided a sustained narrative of athletic drama that dominated the decade's sports culture. The NBA's spring was defined above all by Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls, who claimed six championships in eight years between 1991 and 1998, with Jordan's two retirements providing the decade's most jarring sports-narrative interruptions. The 1993-94 and 1994-95 seasons without Jordan created space for the emergence of Hakeem Olajuwon's Houston Rockets and, briefly, Shaquille O'Neal's Orlando Magic before Jordan's March 1995 return—announced via a two-word fax reading 'I'm back'—recaptured the sports world's full attention. Major League Baseball's spring was shadowed by the catastrophic 1994 players' strike, which cancelled the World Series for the first time in 90 years and alienated a portion of the sport's fan base permanently. The recovery was staged largely through the 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, in which both players surpassed Roger Maris's single-season record, drawing audiences back to ballparks and generating the kind of sustained narrative tension that commissioners dream of.