Sure, Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders both played pro baseball and pro football, and simultaneously at that. But several other professional jocks who had what it took to make it one big league couldn’t quite cut it in another. Michael Jordan, baseball player In October 1993, shortly after winning his third straight NBA title with […]
As the NFL playoffs end and the Super Bowl is just around the corner, a few teams and players are bound to make sports history and achieve gridiron glory. That’s the opposite of what happened with these teams, who lost the magic at the worst possible time. Houston Oilers vs. Buffalo Bills, 1993 Playoffs There’s […]
You know him for his boxing prowess and remarkable way with words, but how much do you really know about Muhammad Ali? Read on to find out more about “The Greatest.” By age 18, Clay had won two Amateur Athletic Union national titles, two Golden Gloves national titles, and had amassed a record of 100 […]
Undeniable: That Michael Jordan is among the best professional basketball players of all time, if not the best. What’s a bit more debatable: the veracity of these crazy urban legends about His Airness. Did Michael Jordan have food poisoning during “The Flu Game”? Perhaps the greatest game in Jordan’s career, which was already full of […]
Do remarkable sports achievements exist in a vacuum?
The Bills are the only team to ever make it to four consecutive Super Bowls. However, that achievement is overshadowed by the fact that the Bills also lost all four of those Super Bowls.
Prepare for the opening ceremonies this Friday, with some fascinating facts about the Winter Olympics. Have an ice day.
• The 2014 games are officially known as the XXII Olympic Winter Games. It’s the 22nd edition. The first took place in Chamonix, France, in 1924, just 28 years after the first modern-day Summer Olympics took place in Athens in 1896.
After spending six hours on the pregame, the game, and the postgame, what’s the best way to unwind after a long day of watching TV? Watching more TV!
• In the early years of the Super Bowl, the game was played and broadcast earlier in the day, not in primetime. Nor was it the TV event or near-holiday it is today. Now the game coverage ends around 10:30 p.m. eastern time, and subsequently earlier in the western time zones. This gives the network airing it (it rotates among the Big 4 broadcast channels each year) an ample opportunity to present a new show or expose an existing show to a potentially huge audience. The concept began in earnest in 1984, when NBC used its post-Super Bowl advantage to help launch The A-Team.
More than 40 years after the first Super Bowl broadcast, the halftime show is no longer just something to fill TV airtime while the football players rest—it’s now a spectacle unto itself.
1967: Marching bands from the universities of Arizona and Michigan perform.
1970: The NFL experiments with big-name celebrity halftime entertainers. Their first big star: Carol Channing.
1972: “A Salute to Louis Armstrong,” with Ella Fitzgerald, Al Hirt, the U.S. Marine Corps Drill Team…and Carol Channing. Armstrong had died the previous summer. Songs included “High Society” and “Hello, Dolly.”
Admit it: You only watch the game for the ads. Here are some facts about Super Bowl commercials.
• Since 1989, USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter has tracked which of the game’s commercials most resonated with viewers. Once done with focus groups during the game, voting is now conducted online in real time. Some past winners include Diet Pepsi’s 1991 commercial with Ray Charles singing “You Got the Right One Baby,” and a 1992 Nike ad in which Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny play a basketball game on Mars against Marvin the Martian (which directly inspired the 1996 movie Space Jam). From 1999 to 2008, a commercial for Budweiser of Bud Light took the Ad meter honors.
The 2014 Winter Olympics are just around the corner. They’re sure to offer plenty of triumphs, but for every Brian Boitano, there’s a Tonya Harding. Here are some other spectacular Olympic duds.
Stuff you didn’t know about the world’s most famous basketball team.
• In late 1926, Abe Saperstein took over as coach of a touring African-American team in Chicago called the Savoy Big Five (they played their games at the Savoy Ballroom). Saperstein renamed them the Harlem Globetrotters because all the players were African-American (Harlem being a predominantly African-American neighborhood).
• The original lineup for the team’s first game in January 1927: “Toots” Wright, “Fat” Long, “Kid” Oliver, “Runt” Pullins, and Andy Washington.
• The team played hundreds of games a year and got so good that they played in a national championship in 1939 against another independent team, the New York Renaissance. The Globetrotters lost, but that same year they discovered that the crowd liked it when they did ball tricks and comic routines. Saperstein told them to do as much of that as possible…provided they’d already established a comfortable lead.
• Over the years, a few famous athletes have played for the Globetrotters. Wilt Chamberlain played for one year, between college and joining the NBA. Future Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson played in the 1950s, before his baseball career. And NBA great Magic Johnson played in a single game.
More sports statistical anomalies, this time for football.
Tallest: Being taller than 7’0” is routine in the NBA. In the NFL, there’s only been one man. Seven-foot-tall defensive tackle Richard Sligh was drafted by the Oakland Raiders in 1967. He wasn’t put to much use, playing in just eight games and sitting on the bench during Super Bowl II.
Shortest: In the early days of the NFL—when it was essentially a regional, semiprofessional league, a 5’0”-tall guy named Jack Shapiro played in just one game in 1929, as a back, for the now defunct Staten Island Stapletons.
The new NBA season has begun, so here’s a statistical survey of sports sizes.
Tallest: Romanian-born Gheorghe Muresan center, at 7’7”. He came to the NBA after playing professionally in France. Drafted by the Washington Bullets in 1993, he averaged a respectable 9.8 points over his seven-year NBA career, as well as 1.5 blocks. However, Muresan is probably best known for his of-court activities—he starred in the 1998 movie My Giant with Billy Crystal (Muresan played the giant).
Shortest: Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues played in the NBA from 1987 to 2001, despite being just 5’3” tall. Being small in the NBA means being fast, and Bogues was adept at assists and steals—he’s the Charlotte Hornets’ all-time leader in both categories.
Biggest: Featuring players who are routinely more than seven feet tall, the NBA is naturally going to have players who weigh a lot. However, only 12 players in league history have ever weighed more than 300 pounds. Among that group are Jerome “Big Snacks” James, Robert “Tractor” Traylor, and Charles Barkley. The heaviest player in NBA history: Oliver Miller, who played for five teams in the 1990s and weighed 375 pounds.
Sometimes creative accounting pays off. Here are a few examples of
weird sports contracts throughout history.
Heir Jordan
Unlike their counterparts in the big leagues, the average first-year minor league baseball players is paid about $1,100 a month. But not Michael Jordan. After retiring from a spectacular basketball career in 1993 to give pro baseball a try, Jordan signed with the farm system of the Chicago White Sox. At the time, the White Sox organization was owned by Jerry Reinsdorf, who also owned Jordan’s old basketball team, the Chicago Bulls. Sensing that Jordan might come back to the NBA some day if baseball didn’t work out (it didn’t), Reinsdorf paid Jordan $4 million in 1994 and 1995 to play minor league baseball, the same he would’ve been paid had he stayed in the NBA.
Women in sports: Here are the stories of a few who attempted to join
in men’s sports and how far they got.
Manon Rhéaume
Rhéaume was one of the best goalies in Canadian minor league hockey in the late 1980s. The Trois-Rivieres Draveurs, a Quebec team in a league that was just a step below the NHL, signed her in 1991—the first woman to play at that level. It was logical she’d try out for the NHL after that, another first. In 1992, Rhéaume was signed by the Tampa Bay Lightning as a free agent. She hit the ice for one period each in two exhibition games, and that was that. She was scored on twice, so she wasn’t the best goalie, but at any rate, she won a silver medal in the 1998 Olympics…for the Canadian national women’s team.
Brittney Griner
In 2013, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made headlines when he publicly stated that he was considering drafting Griner, the top prospect in women’s college basketball. During her college career at Baylor University, the center scored 2,000 points and blocked 500 shots—a college basketball first for any player, male or female. Griner is 6’8” and the right size for the NBA, and a woman playing in the NBA would certainly be historic. But then the Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA drafted Griner with the #1 pick. The ongoing success and high play level of the WNBA will probably prevent many women from ever joining the NBA.
A look at the teams in major sports that probably won’t be
playing for the league title this year…
TEAM: Detroit Lions
LOSING STREAK: This team is a perpetual cellar-dweller. The Lions have made the playoffs just twice in the last 15 years. In 2008, they set a dubious record with a record of 0-16, the first NFL team to have a perfect imperfect season. (And the next season they went 2-14.)
ALMOST: Before the NFL and AFL merged into one league in the 1960s, the Lions won four NFL championships. But post-merger, the farthest they’ve ever got was the 1991 NFC conference title game. They were steamrolled by the Washington Redskins 41 to 10.
TEAM: Cleveland Browns
LOSING STREAK: Like the Lions, the Browns were very successful in the pre-merger days, with four NFL titles in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Ever since, the Browns have made the playoffs 11 times in 41 seasons.
ALMOST: Of those 11 postseason appearances, the Browns made it to the conference finals three times, in 1986, 1987, and 1989. All three times they were defeated by the Denver Broncos.
So Tim Horton founded Canada’s most successful franchise. Big deal—did he ever record a disco album? Here are some hockey palyers and their other jobs from the brand-new Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Canada.
WAYNE GRETZKY. In 1991, NBC TV briefly aired ProStars, a Saturday morning cartoon starring three big sports stars of the era: Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and Gretzky. The cartoon versions of the sports stars had superpowers and a distinct personality, and in every episode the trio would defeat a supervillain, mad scientist, or as they did in one case, recover the stolen Stanley Cup. Gretzky, for some reason, was the jokester of the group and was obsessed with eating. The real Gretzky appeared in live-action bumpers at the beginning and end of the show—voice actor Townsend Coleman performed Gretzky’s voice in the animated sequences.
GUY LAFLEUER. At the height of Lafleuer’s career and popularity in 1979—he’d just won four straight Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens—Lafleuer recorded an album called Lafleuer. It’s where Lafleuer’s strengths and the trappings of the era collide. It’s an album of hockey-themed songs by anonymous studio musicians, as well as monologues of hockey instructional tips from LaFleuer…set to a thumping disco beat. Side one contains six songs: “Skating,” “Checking,” “Power Play,” an extended dance version of “Power Play,” “Shooting,” and “Scoring. Side two: all of the same songs, but in French.
To celebrate the launch of a new NFL season, here is a sneak peek into our newest title with a sports-themed story about team name changes throughout history. Story will soon appear in Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.
Meet the new team, same as the old team—just with a different name.
New York Titans
The Tennessee Titans weren’t the first Titans in pro football. the first were the New York Titans, a charter member of the American Football League (later absorbed by the NFL) in 1960. The name was a wry reference to the New York Giants of the NFL—in mythology, titans are bigger, stronger, and tougher than giants. the name only lasted for three years. By then the team was playing in brand-new Shea Stadium, located directly beneath the flight paths of two major airports, LaGuardia and JFK, hence the new Jets. (It also rhymed with the name of Shea Stadium’s other team, baseball’s New York Mets.)
