Crying Jordan

Origin: the Hall of Fame speech¶

The photograph was taken by Associated Press photographer Stephan Savoia at Springfield Symphony Hall in Massachusetts on September 11, 2009, during Michael Jordan’s induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Jordan wept early in his acceptance speech, and Savoia’s frame — a tight, tear-streaked close-up — went out on the wire with a standard AP credit. For several years nothing happened with it.

A six-year fuse¶

The image became a meme in stages rather than all at once.

• April 23, 2012 — a macro titled “Sad Michael Jordan” was submitted to MemeCrunch, using the unedited photo with the caption “Why / Did I buy the Bobcats?”, a reference to Jordan’s purchase of the struggling Charlotte franchise. This is the first known meme use, and it still treated the photo as a whole image.
• 2014 — posters on the message board Boxden.com began cutting the face out of its background and pasting it onto other people’s heads. That single edit created the template.
• Early 2015 — the cut-out spread to Twitter, where sports fandom gave it a permanent supply of losers to apply it to.

Peak: 2016¶

The meme’s high-water mark came in a single sporting year. In January 2016, after losing the NFC Championship game, the Arizona Cardinals’ own account pre-emptively posted a Crying Jordan of itself with the line “Is this what you want, Internet?!”; it reportedly drew around 40,000 retweets. At Super Bowl 50 on February 7, 2016, Denver beat Carolina 24-10 and the Panthers were flooded with versions — Stephen Curry posted one to his own millions of followers. That April, North Carolina, Jordan’s alma mater, lost the NCAA final to Villanova on a buzzer-beater, and the meme covered that too. A dedicated mobile Crying Jordan generator app made producing new ones trivial.

Jordan’s own response¶

Jordan has treated the meme with visible good humour. A representative told TMZ in 2016 that he was fine with it and that everyone seemed to be having fun. On November 22, 2016, presenting Jordan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, President Barack Obama joked that he is “more than just an internet meme.” And at Kobe Bryant’s memorial on February 24, 2020, Jordan — visibly crying while speaking about his friend — acknowledged from the stage that his tears would hand the internet another crying meme to work with. It was a rare instance of a meme subject defusing the joke in real time.

Meaning and legacy¶

The face works as a shorthand for defeat: pasted onto a losing player, coach, logo or public figure to mark the moment things went wrong. Its power comes from the contrast — one of the most dominant competitors in sport, caught in an unguarded moment — which is also why writers have argued it endured longer than any comparable template. ESPN devoted a 2016 piece to the question of whether sharing a copyrighted AP photograph this widely carried legal risk.

It is now largely a period artefact. Sports Twitter moved on to video clips and reaction GIFs, and by the 2020s Crying Jordan mostly appears as a deliberate throwback. For a stretch of the mid-2010s, though, it was the internet’s default response to any loss at all, and it remains one of the most widely reproduced photo-edit templates ever made.