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Shortly after the death of Prince Rogers Nelson (the musician known solely as Prince) in April 2016, an image macro exaggerating the musician's role in the commercial success of NBA superstar Michael Jordan began circulating online: The claim about Prince's bringing Michael Jordan to Nike in 1983 is possible in a temporal sense (Jordan first signed with the company in 1984), but we found no evidence that events actually transpired in the manner described by this macro. Contemporaneous news articles from 1984 also failed to mention any connection between Prince, Jordan and Nike. An article published by ESPN in February 2013 gave a detailed history about how Michael Jordan landed with Nike, and while ESPN identified several people involved in getting Jordan to meet with Nike (Jordan wore Converse shoes rather than Nikes and was reluctant to switch), Prince was not among them: The claim that Prince designed the Air Jordan 1 is also based on fantasy, as the first Air Jordan sneakers were created by Peter Moore: The statements made in the above-displayed macro appear to be an exaggeration of a comment issued by Jordan shortly after Prince's death: Although Michael Jordan praised Prince as having inspired him throughout his career, the musician apparently had no direct impact on Jordan's commercial success with Nike.
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