INQUIRER Top 3 Comeback Stories

AT 34, Bjorn Borg returned to professional tennis with a wooden racket after a 10-year hiatus. He couldn't hack it, although Serena Williams and Martina Hingis are doing a lot better.

At 66, Bobby Robson returned to England after nine years abroad to manage relegation-threatened Newcastle United and took the club to successive top-four finishes.

Brian Wilson had a breakdown but completed the magical album Smile a full four decades after he had started it.

Bill Clinton overcame scandals involving interns and real-estate deals to earn the soubriquet of The Comeback Kid.

The great race jockey Lester Piggott retired at 50, was imprisoned for tax evasion at 51, and came out of retirement at 55 to show the 'Long Fellow' was still a brilliant horseman. He quit again at 59, tired of making the necessary weights to compete in this hardest of sports. In 2000, he told reporters he was considering another crack at the game - at the age of 64.

Call it bouncebackability. It's the quality of reversing prevailing conditions and riding back to one's domain to be triumphant again. F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives and Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again, but the temptation to return and prove the buggers wrong is only human.

Can Michael Dell do it again as returns as CEO of the company he founded?

To find out what to do and what to avoid, maybe he should be reading The INQUIRER's Top Three Comeback Stories.

3. Commodore Like the poor, Commodore is always with us, it seems. Incorporated in 1962, the company had huge home computer success with the PET and VIC-20 and trumped them both with the Commodore 64 in 1982. In the mid-1980s the company was hit by internal politics but bounced back with the purchase of Amiga only to become embroiled in a sales battle with former management at Atari. The PC and Mac stole much of its thunder in the 1980s and Commodore struggled to compete with the big boys, despite producing its own IBM-compatibles. In 1994 it declared itself bankrupt but the brand name has survived thanks to the interest of Escom, Gateway and Tulip, among others.

2. Jerry Sanders Walter Jeremiah Sanders III, or plain old Jerry Sanders, has seen more ups and downs than a lift attendant. Legend has it that he was beaten up so badly as a child that a priest was called to administer the last rites. At AMD, he created a company that has been on the floor more times than Rocky but always stepped back into the ring. Lawsuits, losses and failures to execute almost delivered knockout blows but the company came back with 386, K6 and Opteron processors and to this day remains the hair shirt on Intel's back.

1. Steve Jobs Some people, often employed by The INQUIRER, mock Apple and its champions, characterising them as humourless, surface-obsessed cult followers. But nobody can doubt the magnificent achievements of Steve Jobs on his return to the company he founded. Jobs came back to his old stamping ground in late-1996, 20 years after co-founding the firm. In between he had a small hit with Next and a big hit with Pixar. Apple was on its knees when Jobs came back and in a Faustian pact, secured a brilliant funding and development pact with old sparring partner Bill Gates. He went on to transform Apple with gorgeous-looking products that made millions of users overlook gaping design faults. Is he Faust, PT Barnum or God? Nope, but he is probably the most valuable CEO on the planet. µ