Biography | Steve Jobs — The Stadium Speech That Was the Closest He Came to Graduating

People remember the four words at the end. They forget the bowl.

On 12 June 2005 Jobs gave the keynote at Stanford's 114th commencement in this stadium. He wore jeans and sandals under a black robe. He told the crowd it was the closest he had ever come to a college graduation.

The prepared text, published the same day by the university, is three stories: Reed calligraphy and dropping in; being fired from Apple in 1985; a pancreatic-cancer diagnosis he had been told would kill him within months.

About 23,000 people sat in the heat while graduates did the Wacky Walk. A plane towed a banner about electronic waste.

The closing line was not his. He credited the back cover of the last Whole Earth Catalog: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The speech later became the recording most people meet him through. The stadium they sat in is not the stadium a visitor finds.

The 1921 bowl that held the 2005 ceremony was demolished that autumn. Construction of the present Stanford Stadium began on 26 November 2005. The new bowl opened on 16 September 2006 on the same Nelson Road footprint.

Pin the site. Do not expect the old concrete.

He died six years later. The church memorial is a separate pin, a few hundred metres west on the Main Quad.

Photo: Stanford Stadium, via Wikimedia Commons