Click here to view an archive of all the previous Olympic urban legends.

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OLYMPIC URBAN LEGEND: The Olympics led to a watch company becoming one of the largest printer manufacturers in the world.

STATUS: True

The development of new technologies has had a dramatic effect on the world of sports over the years. Take the development of video technology for television broadcasts of sports games. The ability to watch a play again instantly has come to affect pretty much every major U.S. sport. While some professional leagues have been slow to accept it, the usage of instant replay to decide close plays is now a part of most U.S. sports and is only becoming more important as the years go by (note the National Football League added a rule for the 2011 season that all scoring plays are now automatically reviewed on video to see if they were proper scores). While that is an example of a technology that was developed independent of sports being adapted to the world of sports, there are other technological advancements that were examples of athletes having a need that someone developed a technology to address. For instance, Dr. Frank Jobe inventing a procedure where he removes a tendon from one part of a pitcher’s body and uses it to replace a damaged one in a pitcher’s elbow (the so-called “Tommy John Surgery”) would have sounded like science fiction in the early days of baseball, but the procedure has saved countless careers that otherwise would have been lost. Current pitchers as varied as John Axford, AJ Burnett, Shawn Marcum, Stephen Strasburg, Brian Wilson and CJ Wilson all would likely not be Major Leaguers now if it were not for Jobe’s procedure.

The connection between the sports need and the development of Tommy John Surgery is a bit obvious. Much less obvious, though, is the fact that the world of sports also led to the creation of the modern day desktop printer. Read on to learn how sports turned a watch company into one of the leading manufacturers of desktop printers in the world.

Throughout much of the history of the Olympic Games, the Olympics’ time-keeping needs had been met mostly by Swiss watch companies, mostly famously the Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère (SSIH) Group, manufacturers of the Omega timepiece. Now part of the Swatch Group, the makers of the Omega timepiece were the official timekeepers for the most recent Olympics. Of course, things have changed a little bit since their first Olympics in 1932. Back then, they sent over a watchmaker and three dozen or so stopwatches. For the 2010 Olympics, they provided over 200 timekeeping personnel and over 200 tons of timing equipment. The major difference in those days as opposed to now is that electronic timekeeping was not used. In fact, electronic scores were not officially used for all Olympic events until the 1968 Games. Before then, it literally was a person with a stopwatch keeping time. This slowly began to change in the late 1950s/early 1960s with the advent of using computers to track time. For the 1964 Olympics held in Tokyo, Japan, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) selected a Japanese company, Suwa Seikosha Co., Ltd, manufacturers of Seiko watches, to be the official timekeeper of the Olympics. The corporation had formed a subsidiary called Shinshu Seiki Co. to develop precision parts for their watches. It was this subsidiary that was taxed with an important duty for the 1964 Games. You see, if they were going to track some of the events with electronic timekeeping, they would need to have access to those scores right away. So they were forced to come up with a way to print out the scores on to paper. Therefore, the company developed a portable electronic printer that they could use to print out their times. This was not the only innovation debuted by the company at the 1964 Games. They also introduced new quartz timing technology and advanced liquid crystal displays (LCD) that were major success for the company in their products for years to come. However, the quartz and LCD technology were natural evolutions of their timekeeping products. Their new printing technology, though, was very much an offshoot.

After the Games, though, the company realized the utility of the printing device that they had just invented. Electronic printers had certainly existed at this point (Xerox and IBM both made them), but they tended to be quite larger. So Shinshu Seiki began manufacturing their compact electronic printer in 1968. It was called the EP-101.

By 1975, they had a new subsidiary called Epson America (“son” of the EP printer) that specialized in micro-computer parts like their small electronic printers. Initially, they sold their printers to other companies who included them with their products, but soon Epson began selling their own printers and devices. Their dot matrix printer released in 1978 was a smash success.

Their printing technology became a major part of calculators of the era, allowing print calculators and cash registers to get smaller and smaller. Obviously, over the years, the technology that made them so avant garde in the 1960s and 1970s became out-of-date, but by this time they had already become one of the world’s largest printer companies (and had adapted to the new printer technologies, like inkjet printing). In 1982, Shinshu Seiki re-named itself the Epson Corporation and eventually it merged with Suwa Seikosha Co. in 1985 to form Seiko Epson, which the company remains known as to this day.

And all because they needed a way to print out their scores for the Olympics. Pretty darn cool.

OLYMPIC URBAN LEGEND: Athletes during the Ancient Greek Olympic Games were amateurs.

STATUS: False

Until the 1970s, competition in the Olympic Games were reserved for amateur athletes, which in this sense is defined strictly as “athletes who do not get paid to perform their sport.” Slowly but surely various Olympic sports relaxed their rules to allow for professionals to compete in the Olympics and today, there are few Olympic events that only allow amateurs to compete in them (boxing is a notable exception). The rules perserving the Olympics as an “amateurs only” event were quite strict during the early days of the modern Olympics. Not only could you have never received any monetary prizes for your athletic achievements, but you would be barred (in theory, at least) for working as a sports teacher or if you had ever performed against professional athletes, even if you yourself were not paid for the event. The most famous example of this rule being enforced is Olympic legend Jim Thorpe, who had his medals from the 1912 Olympic Games revoked in 1913 because it was discovered that he had played some semi-professional baseball during the summer while in college (a fairly common practice for college athletes, although unlike Thorpe, most thought to use pseudonyms). When these rules were devised for the Olympics, it was the tradition of the Ancient Greek Olympics that were cited. Avery Brundage, longtime President of the International Olympic Committe (IOC), once wrote, “The amateur code, coming to us from antiquity, contributed to and strengthed by the noblest aspirations of great men of each generation, embraces the highest moral laws. No philosophy, no religion, preaches loftier sentiments.” Was Brundage correct? Did the the amateur code come from the Ancient Greek Games? Or were its origins slightly less noble in nature?

First off, the term “amateur” did not exist in the days of the Greeks. The word comes from a French derivation of a Latin word (amator, meaning “lover”). It is defined as “lover of” and in practice, it means someone who does something because they love it, not because of money. Someone who does something because of money would be a “professional.” Therefore, the term is a bit difficult to apply to sports because pretty much every notable athlete out there does, indeed, compete because of a love for the sport. If Kobe Bryant were not getting paid $25,000,000 a year to play basketball, he would still play basketball. If there were no such thing as a professional basketball league, guys like Bryant and other NBA stars would simply play basketball as amateurs. We already saw it happen in the United States before professional leagues began – people just played in amateur leagues. So if you are going strictly by the “lover of” definition of amateur, then yes, the Ancient Greek athletes were, indeed, amateurs. However, that is not the definition people like Avery Brundage were going by when they established strict rules about monetary rewards for athletes. They were referring to the notion that getting paid for your sport means that you are not an amateur.

And here, there is no support in Olympic history. Olympic athletes during the Ancient Olympic Games were well compensated for their efforts.

Victories in the Olympic Games were cause for what we would call today “bragging rights” between the various Greek city-states, and this heated competition soon resulted in increasing levels of compensation for the participants. In 600 B.C., a winning athlete from Athens was given 500 drachma, an enormous sum – enough that he could theoretically live off of it for the rest of his life. By 200 B.C., Greek athletes had formed professional athletic guilds similar to today’s Players Associations for the various professional sports. In fact, professionalism in the Olympic Games were so widespread that they even drew criticism back then from observers who noted that the financial rewards of the Games were causing young Greek men to shirk their other studies to concentrate on athletics, resulting in these men becoming worse soldiers and scholars.

So no, the idea of extolling the virtues of athletes who are not compensated for their performances was not an Ancient Greek idea. In fact, the notion was developed far more recently, in Victorian England, by men like Dr William Penny Brookes, founder of the Much Wenlock Olympian Games in 1850. Brookes’ attempt to resurrect the Olympic Games inspired similar efforts, like John Hulley and Charles Melly’s Liverpool Olympics in 1862 (organized with input from Brookes). These games caused a movement that eventually led to Pierre de Coubertin’s successful attempt to start the Modern Olympics in 1896 in Athens. Brookes’ ideas regarding amateurism (which was “athletes should not be paid for their efforts”) remained the standard for all the other games of the era and ultimately became the standard adopted by the Olympics. However, this standard seemed less interested in celebrating the nobility of “playing for the love of the game” so much as they were celebrating the nobility of, well, the nobility. As who in the world could afford to pursue such unpaid athletic endeavors? Why, the wealthy of course. This led to such arduous rules such as competitors being barred from amateur competitions if they were or ever had been employed as “a mechanic, artisan or labourer.” As an example, I wrote in an old Sports Legend about the difficulties the great British rower Bobby Pearce went through to be able to compete in British’s Diamond Challenge Sculls amateur rowing competition because he worked as a carpenter.

Eventually, these standards were relaxed and we reached the point today where we can watch the actual best athletes in the world compete against each other in most Olympic events. And whether they are millionaires or Home Depot workers, rest assured that they are all competing for the love of sport, and the noble aspirations Brundage talked about in the past are being met.

Thanks to John A. Davis’ The Olympic Games Effect and Kristine Toohey and Anthony J. Veal’s The Olympic Games for their work on this topic.

OLYMPIC URBAN LEGEND: The first Olympian banned for using illegal substances was an athlete who drank two beers before an event.

STATUS: True

In 1967, the the International Olympic Committee (IOC) finally decided to begin to crack down on athletes using illegal substances at the Olympic Games. They did not have to wait long before they had their first infraction. At the 1968 Olympics, Swedish pentathlete Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall was disqualified.

Liljenwall was competing in the 1968 Olympics as part of Sweden’s team in the team pentathlon (they came in fourth in 1964). The group finished third and won the bronze. However, they were all stripped of their medals because their teammate, Liljenwall, was discovered to have an illegal substance in his blood.

Amazingly enough, it turned out that Liljenwall’s illegal substance was alcohol! He drank two beers before the pistol shooting part of the competition to steady his nerves. Fourteen other athletes tested positive for tranquilizers in the 1968 Olympics, but they were not banned at the time, while alcohol was. Alcohol, meanwhile, is no longer on the list of banned substances at the Olympics (except for some select sports, and even then, only during the actual event).

So two beers led to the first disqualification over illegal substances in Olympic history. I don’t mean to suggest that what Liljenwall did was not foolish, as it was (and I am sure he would admit to that, as well – and you could make the argument that while the beer almost certainly did NOT help him, he THOUGHT that it did, which is the issue), but it just seems funny that the first disqualification did not come for steroids or amphetamines or anything like that, but just for two beers. So for using something that would not even get him banned today, Liljenwall forever has to be known as the first Olympic athlete to ever be disqualified for using a banned substance. Rough stuff.

Okay, that’s it for this edition of Olympic Urban Legends Revealed!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin

Click here to view an archive of all the previous football urban legends.

Let’s begin!

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: The owner of the New York Giants once purchased an entire franchise just to get their star quarterback.

STATUS: True

Earlier this year, Eli Manning won his second Super Bowl MVP after leading the New York Giants to their second Super Bowl victory in four years. While the Giants are surely pleased with their star quarterback, he cost the Giants plenty to acquire. Manning was drafted by the San Diego Chargers with the #1 overall pick in the 2004 National Football League (NFL) Draft. After informing the Chargers that he would refuse to play in San Diego (a tactic that John Elway famously used in the 1983 NFL Draft to get the Baltimore Colts to trade his rights to the Denver Broncos), the Chargers agreed to trade him to the Giants for quite a haul – the Giants 2004 first round pick (#4 overall), the Giants’ 2004 third round pick, the Giants’ 2005 first round pick and the Giants’ 2005 fifth round pick. San Diego used the picks respectively on Phillip Rivers, Nate Kaeding, Shawne Merriman (all three would go on to make the Pro-Bowl) and in a trade with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for Roman Oben. That is a lot to give up for one player. However, amazingly enough, the Giants once spent a whole lot more to acquire a star quarterback. In fact, they once purchased an entire franchise just to get a quarterback!

Tim Mara was a successful businessman (much of his fortune was built on his bookmaking business, which was legal at the time) when he purchased a New York franchise for the still-new NFL in 1925. Mara, a consummate marketer, was confident that he could eventually turn his professional football team into a success, even though he was not a football fan himself before he founded the franchise. Mara barely made a profit in his first season (due entirely to a single game against the Chicago Bears and their famed player, Red Grange – that one game made enough money to clear Mara of the $40,000 worth of debts he ran up for the Giants that first year) and the Giants followed their inaugural season with three more seasons where the Giants continued to lose money hand over fist.

In 1926, the Giants finished 8-4-1 but lost somewhere in the vicinity of $50,000. Mara felt that an outstanding team would draw a bigger crowd, so he spared no expense in putting out a great tram in 1927. The Giants did, in fact, go 11-1-1 in capturing their first NFL Championship. However, their great success led to them only barely breaking even. So Mara ordered the team to cut costs for the 1928 season. The Giants went 4-7-2 and Mara lost another $40,000. However, two games from that failed season caught Mara’s attention. A 28-0 rout of the Giants by the Detroit Wolverines in Detroit and a dramatic 19-19 tie against the Wolverines later in the season in New York. More than the scores in the games, Mara was enthralled with the star quarterback for the Wolverines, Benny Friedman.

Benny Friedman was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended the University of Michigan where he became a star athlete, leading the Michigan Wolverines to consecutive first place finished in the Big Ten Conference in 1925 and 1926. In his senior year, he was a consensus first-team All-American and was named Most Valuable Player of the Big Ten. Friedman was a clear star coming out of college (not quite Red Grange, but close). He decided to join the NFL franchise in his native Cleveland, the Cleveland Bulldogs. Friedman was a rarity in that he was a passing quarterback during a time when players rarely passed (the ball was rounder than it is today and not conducive to throwing). While Friedman played well for the Bulldogs as the team finished a respectable third in the NFL in 1927 with an 8-4-1 record, the team was having trouble financially and 1927 was its last season. It appears likely that Detroit businessman Eddie Fisher purchased the team since many of the Bulldogs played for Fisher’s brand new NFL franchise the following year, including Friedman and the coach of the Bulldogs, LeRoy Andrews. In an attempt to cash in on Friedman’s popularity in Michigan, the team was dubbed the Detroit Wolverines.

The Wolverines went 7-2, finishing third in the league. The aforementioned 19-19 tie against the Giants in New York showed Mara something other than the effectiveness of Friedman (who drove his team back from a 19-7 fourth quarter deficit), it also showed him that Friedman could work as an attendance draw as the game drew the second-most fans that the Giants had seen at the time (the most being the aforementioned game against Grange and the Bears). Mara felt that the Jewish Friedman would appeal to New York’s large Jewish population. Also, of course, he felt that Friedman would help improve the team and make it a winner and winning tends to attract crowds, as well.

Mara approached Fisher about acquiring Friedman. Each time Mara made an offer, Fisher turned him down. This went on for awhile before Mara finally reached a solution. The Wolverines weren’t doing particularly well, either (not many NFL franchises were flush during the 1920s), so Mara just offered to purchase the entire franchise from Fisher. Unlike most other NFL owners, Mara was still quite well off (he took a big hit in the 1929 Stock Market Crash, but that was still a year away) so his attitude was that he would use his wealth to make the Giants as attractive an option for fans as possible. Fisher agreed and Mara purchased the Wolverines franchise and promptly disbanded it (I have not been able to find the terms of the purchase – I’ve seen some extremely small figures thrown out there, like $3,500, but I find them hard to believe, as Friedman alone would be worth that much).

Besides Friedman (who Mara paid $10,000 for the 1929 season), a number of other Wolverines joined the Giants for the 1929 season. In fact, Coach Andrews also took over as the coach of the Giants. After also adding future Hall of Famer Ray Flaherty from another defunct NFL franchise (NFL franchises dropped like flies during the 1920s), the Giants went on to a 13-1-1 season, losing only to the undefeated Green Bay Packers. The Giants turned a small profit in 1929. Friedman, for his part, threw 20 touchdown passes. It would be nearly fifteen years before another NFL team threw 20 touchdown passes, let alone a single player.

While the Giants never won a championship under Friedman (who took over coaching the team in 1930), they continued to be profitable despite the start of the Great Depression, buoyed in part by a highly-publicized charity game in 1930 where they defeated Knute Rockne’s famed Notre Dame Fighting Irish (thereby demonstrating the superiority of the professional game from a talent standpoint, something that was somehow still in doubt in 1930). Friedman left the Giants after the 1931 season because Mara refused to give Friedman a piece of the team, insisting that the team was always to be a family business, that it was for his sons (Mara actually had transferred ownership of the team to his sons John and Wellington following the Stock Market Crash, to insulate the team from any creditors. Each brother received a 50% share in the team). The Giants continued to become one of the wealthiest franchises in the NFL and it remains to this day owned by the Mara family, as Tim Mara’s grandson John Mara (son of Wellington) was the first person to receive the Vince Lombardi Trophy from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell this past Sunday (Bob Tisch purchased half of the Giants from the son of the elder John Mara in 1991 and Tisch’s son, Steve, received the trophy right after John).

Benny Friedman retired from the NFL in 1934. He served as the Athletic Director of Brandeis University from 1949-1961 and Head Football Coach from 1951-1959. He lost his job when the University cut its football program. Late in his life, Friedman was angry that he was not inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He felt that he was a deserving candidate and was quite vocal with his displeasure. In 1982, after losing a leg to complications from diabetes, Friedman took his own life. In 2005, one hundred years after he was born, Benny Friedman was finally inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: OThe nickname and the logo of the Florida Gators football team was created and developed at the University of Virginia.

STATUS: Going with a False

When it comes to the origination of college football team’s nicknames and mascots, they typically come from one of two sources. One would be a school newspaper (sometimes even newspapers outside the school), like the Stanford Cardinal (who got their name from the coverage of the first “Big Game” against Cal, where the headlines read “Cardinal Triumphs O’er Blue and Gold”) and the other would be the student populace itself (like the Yale students who decided to name their football team the Bulldogs after their self-adopted mascot “Handsome Dan”). In the case of the University of Florida and the Gators, however, not only did their name and mascot not come from a newspaper or a Florida student, it may not even have originated in Florida!

Read on to discover how the famed Florida Gators of the University of Florida may have been born in Charlottesville, Virginia at the University of Virginia.

What we know today as the University of Florida was formed in an odd manner in the early 20th Century. Florida legislator Henry Holland Buckman pushed a piece of legislation through the Florida legislature in 1905. The legislation, known as the Buckman Act, reorganized the universities in Florida into three distinct major universities – one for Caucasian men, one for Caucasian women and one for African-Americans, regardless of gender. As a result of the Buckman Act, four separate schools; the University of Florida at Lake City, the East Florida Seminary (in Gainesville), the St. Petersburg Normal and Industrial School and the South Florida Military College (in Bartow) were merged into the new University of the State of Florida.

Football had begun at a number of Florida universities beginning in the late 1890s (two of the schools merged into the University of Florida had even played against each other), so it was no surprise that the newly merged University also had a football team. Florida State College’s football coach, Jack Forsythe, became the first head coach of the new school’s football program, which began play in 1906, the first year that the University opened their Gainesville campus (for the first year of the University’s existence, classes were held in Lake City).

When the school opened the Gainesville campus, one businessman that greatly benefited from the new university was local store owner Phillip Miller. Miller (born 1857) had opened the very first wholesale and retail grocery store in Gainesville in 1875. After moving to Jacksonsville to open a similar operation at the tail end of the 19th Century, he returned to Gainesville around the turn of the century to open a stationery office supply and soda fountain business known as Miller’s that he would run for the next three decades. Upon the opening of the new consolidated university in Gainesville, Miller’s became a popular sport for students to pass the time (drinking their malts, or whatever college students did for fun in 1906).

Miller’s son, Austin, enrolled in the University of Virginia’s School of Law in 1907 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Phillip went to go visit with his son at the school in the fall of 1907. While in Charlottesville, Miller decided to do a little business during his visit with his son by also paying a visit to the Michie Company, which was a company (founded in 1897) that was best known for producing law books (they were purchased by LexisNexis in the 1980s) but also produced school pennants and various other school regalia (banners and the like). Miller thought that it would be a smart idea to get some pennants for the new school that he could sell in his store. However, in the Fall of 1907, the school had not yet come up with a nickname or a mascot. In the early years of the football program, the team was simply called “Florida.” Austin Miller later recalled that he and his father determined to change this.

After consulting with the Michie manager over what animals were used by other schools, the younger Miller suggested an alligator for the Florida mascot. After all, alligators did live in Florida and no other school was using an alligator as their mascot. Their endeavor hit a bit of a snag when the Michie manager explained to the men that he did not know what an alligator looked like. So Austin went to the University of Virginia’s library and returned to Michie with a drawing of an alligator.

The orange and blue pennants and the banners went on sale at Miller’s store in time for the beginning of the 1908 school year. They proved popular. The 1911 football team (coached by George E. Pyle, who had taken over as head coach from Forsythe in 1909, the same year that the school shortened their rather cumbersome name “University of the State of Florida” to simply “University of Florida”) was the first Florida football team to be known as the Florida Gators. That team finished 5-0-1, the first (and so far the only) Florida Gators team to finish the season undefeated.

Austin Miller graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1910. He moved to Jacksonsville where he practiced law for decades, including a two decade stint at Jacksonsville’s City Attorney. His father, Phillip, passed away in 1939.

However, while the University of Florida has essentially accepted this story as the origin of the Florida Gators nickname (they list it on their history section here), Carl Van Ness, the Curator of Manuscripts & Archives Department for the University of Florida, wrote in to posit that the story is likely untrue. Here is Carl on the story:

The most likely source for the nickname is Neal “Bo Gator” Storter and a quasi-mythical student organization called the Bo Gator Club. The Bo Gators were founded in 1907 with Storter as the Club’s Chief Bo Gator. Fictionalized accounts of the Bo Gators were featured in the student paper and the yearbook from 1907 to 1910. (The original name of the yearbook was The Seminole. How weird is that?) Storter captained the 1911 football team which, as you note, was the first team to be called the Alligators. Alligators and Gators were used interchangeably for about five years and then everyone agreed it was the Gators. The problem with the Bo Gator explanation is that Storter denied the honor when it was first offered in 1928.

Instead, Storter pinned the name to a 1910 football game with the Mercer Bears in Macon. The day before the game a headline in the Macon Telegraph declared “Macon to be invaded by a bunch of alligators from Florida.” The Bo Gator explanation resurfaced in 1962 and this time Storter remarked that the story “bordered on the truth.” However, he stuck with the headline explanation throughout his life although he later placed the headline in South Carolina in 1911.This version actually jibes with the naming of the team during a road trip to South Carolina in October of that year.

Finally, there is the explanation offered by Klein Graham who served as the university’s business manager from 1905 to 1950. When asked, he stated that there was no real explanation other than it was a good name for a Florida team and pointed to the existence of alligators in Lake Alice, one of our signature campus landmarks.

The Miller explanation has a problem. We have a number of photographs of people holding pennants from that time period and I have never seen a Gator on a pennant. I have also never seen a wolverine on a vintage Michigan pennant or a yellow jacket on a Georgia Tech pennant, etc. In fact, it was very rare to place graphic elements on sports pennants in 1907. Austin Miller probably confused the school colors with the mascot. In 1907, most people thought the school colors were Blue and Gold, and they may well have been. Others thought the colors were Blue and Orange. If Miller ordered Blue and Orange pennants in 1907, he may have influenced the decision to gowith orange over gold in 1910. He told the mascot tale in 1948 and, in the space of forty years, he may have simply mixed up the story.

Carl convinced me! Thanks to the late Austin Miller and the Florida Times-Union for his version about the formation of the “Gator” name (plus thanks to the Times-Union for information about the elder Miller from his obituary). And, of course, thanks to Carl for the amazing information. You rock, Carl!

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: A waived player once pulled a gun on his general manager.

STATUS: True (but there is more to the story than just “he was waived”)

In November of 1968, Houston Oilers general manager Dan Klosterman was at the Oilers team complex when a former player, Charles Lockhart, entered. Lockhart had been waived by the Oilers before the season.

Lockhart had suffered a shoulder injury while in training camp with the Oilers. He had an operation. According to NFL rules, if a player was still injured, he would be owed his full salary. The Oilers claimed that the surgery fixed Lockhart. Lockhart disagreed. He talked to the NFL Commissioner’s Office about the issue and they said he had to talk to the Oilers about it.

He talked, all right, but after Klosterman refused to give him his money, the 23-year-old former Texas State standout (younger brother of New York Giant Pro-Bowler Carl “Spider” Lockhart) pulled a gun on Klosterman. Tom Williams, an Oiler scout, saw the incident occurring and shouted to Lockhart to stop. He jumped on Lockhart and disarmed him. Klosterman amusingly stated about Williams, “He’s not only a great talent scout but he saves general manager’s lives!”

Lockhart later stated that he never would have actually used the gun. Klosterman did not pursue an assault or attempted murder charge. Lockhart ended up serving three months in jail for carrying a pistol.

Crazy stuff.

Okay, that’s it for this edition!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin

Click here to view an archive of all the previous baseball urban legends.

Let’s begin!

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: Notable deaf ballplayer William “Dummy” Hoy led to the institution of hand signals by umpires.

STATUS: I’m Going With False

As loud as baseball fans can be at times, it comes as no surprise to see that there exists an elaborate system of silent signals between the various participants of any given baseball game. Whether it be a third base coach signaling a bunt to the batter, a coach signaling the infield to play in on the corners to guard against the bunt or a catcher signaling a high strike to the pitcher to make the batter’s bunt attempt more difficult, the so-called “hidden language” of baseball is in full effect each and every game. One of the most notable examples of this “language” are the hand signals used by baseball umpires. There are few sights more dramatic in baseball than an umpire spreading his arms out wide to signal a player is safe on a close play at the plate. Similarly, many umpires have taken to turning their strike three hand signal into practically a piece of performance theater. Today we examine the history of umpire hand signals and try to determine whether a great deaf player from the early days of professional baseball, William “Dummy” Hoy, was responsible for their creation.

William Hoy was not born deaf but lost his hearing as a child due to meningitis. He attended the Ohio State School for the Deaf where he was the class valedictorian. He followed in his father’s footsteps and became a cobbler. After working as a cobbler for a number of years, Hoy began to draw attention as a semi-pro baseball player. He signed his first professional contract in 1886 and made the Major Leagues in 1888. He played in the Majors from 1888 through 1902 for a variety of teams (he spent the most time with the Cincinnati Reds). A speedy player who, at five feet four inches, was a hard man to strike out, Hoy was a star player for years. He was especially known for his strong defensive play in center field. One of his most noted achievements was the day in 1889 when he threw out three runners at home plate in a single game (still a Major League record). Still, he was a fine batter, as well, retiring with over 2,000 hits and a .288 lifetime batting average.

In the early days of baseball, there was a certain sense of uniformity when it came to nicknames. If you wore eyeglasses, your nickname was “Specs.” If you were at all Native American in your ancestry, your nickname was “Chief.” If you were short, your nickname was “Stump.” And if you were deaf, your nickname was “Dummy.” This is not to say that many of these terms were not intended as derogatory, but they were so ubiquitous that players tended not to chafe under them. Hoy, for his part, accepted his nickname completely, even correcting people who addressed him as William. Hoy was not mute, though. He could speak, although his voice was low and a bit squeaky. He could read lips, but also used sign language. Hoy is not a member of Baseball’s Hall of Fame, and among the reasons people often give in support of his case for induction is that he was responsible for umpire hand signals – that umpire’s had to begin using their hands to denote “strike” or “ball” so that Hoy could understand the call. These signals then became a standard part of umpiring.

First off, it seems clear that Hoy did not lead to the creation of hand signals, as there is a newspaper account of Ed “Dummy” Dundon, a deaf pitcher in the American Association from 1883-84, using hand signals in a game that he umpired in 1886. There are also some accounts that when Dundon was pitching, he also had the umpires provide him hand signals on balls and strikes.

But even if Hoy did not create hand signals in the Majors, it is possible that he was responsible for them becoming prevalent. After all, Dundon’s career was brief while Hoy’s was not. In addition, Hoy played in three separates leagues, the National League, the short-lived Player’s League and the slightly longer lived American League, so he would be able to spread the use of hand signals to many different places. Here is where it gets a bit trickier. There are no contemporary accounts of Hoy receiving hand signals from umpires during his playing days. In addition, Hoy lived until he was 99 and never in that time did he claim to have developed hand signals with the umpires. Hoy was a very intelligent man who was always glad to talk about baseball history – his correspondence is a baseball historian’s dream. And it never came up in any of his letters. It was only around the 1950s that Hoy began to receive credit for being the person who developed hand signals and even then, with Hoy still alive (he died in 1961, less than two months after throwing out the first pitch at one of the games of the 1961 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Cincinnati Reds), no one had any quotes from Hoy on the subject. Surely Hoy would have mentioned this at some point in his various correspondences. Hoy did use hand signals to communicate with his teammates, and it appears as though that communication has been expanded into the realm of umpire communication, as well. I would not be surprised at all if umpires did occasionally communicate with Hoy through signals, but it does not appear to be as widespread as often claimed.

In addition, in 1901, the Chicago White Sox attempted to use colored sleeves on the umpires to denote whether a pitch was a ball or a strike. On a ball, the umpire would raise his left arm, which would be a white sleeve. On a strike, the umpire would raise his right arm, which would be a red sleeve. Newspaper accounts discussed this novel approach and they explained how it was designed so that fans could easily discern the call. Hoy actually was on the White Sox that year, and no mention of Hoy was given. This certainly suggests that the umpires were not giving Hoy hand signals if the White Sox felt the need to develop signals for the umpires (and, again, no mention of Hoy was given in the discussion of the hand signals).

Moreover, another knock on the “Hoy created the custom of hand signals” claim is the simple fact that hand signals were not prevalent during the turn of the century. Even if you were to concede that umpires would give signals to Hoy, they did not use them with anyone else. It was not until 1907 that the hand signal became standard for umpires. Baseball’s Hall of Fame officially credits umpire Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem (who began umpiring in the Majors in 1905) as the originator of umpire hand signals. Klem, himself, never took credit (only for using hand signals in the minors in 1904 for fair or foul calls), and it seems more likely that it was a mixture of people that led to the creation of the signals, mostly based on the common sense idea that as crowds grew bigger and louder, hand signals were necessary for the outfielders and the fans to understand the calls of the umpire. When the hand signal became mandatory in 1907, there were plenty of umpires who protested, as they felt silly using hand signals. This certainly would suggest that it was a recent innovation.

There are a number of accounts of other people who claim to have been involved in the creation of the umpire hand signal, including an interesting account from Brigadier General R.J. Butt who claimed that his father, also a Brigadier General (during the Civil War) had written to American League president Ban Johnson in 1902 suggesting that they use hand signals and that Johnson had written back to say that he agreed.

In any event, I think that it is clear that Hoy did not invent hand signals (as Durndon used them, and even Durndon might not have been the first) and I think that there is enough evidence to suggest that it is likely that Hoy was also not responsible for hand signals becoming a standard part of the game. This does not mean that Hoy should not be celebrated – his career was very impressive and he was a great ambassador for the game. I think that he is a worthy addition to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I just don’t think that he is responsible for the hand signals that we see today from umpires.

Thanks to Paul Dickson’s brilliant The Hidden Language of Baseball and a great essay from Stephen Jay Gould in the collection of his baseball essays, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball. Both men (especially Dickson) provided a lot of great information.

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: The Yankees had a costumed mascot during the 1970s.

STATUS: True

On July 10, 1979, the famous costumed mascot the San Diego Chicken (who was working for the Seattle Mariners that day), put a hex on New York Yankees pitcher Ron Guidry during a Mariners/Yankees game in Seattle. This upset Yankee outfielder Lou Piniella, who then chased the mascot and even threw his glove at the giant costumed bird. After the game, Piniella remarked regarding his irritation at the mascot trend, “If people want to pay to see a chicken, they should dress the players up in chicken suits.” New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner supported his player, deriding the then-nascent trend of baseball teams having costumed mascots (a trend started in large part by the San Diego Chicken). Steinbrenner noted, “These characters don’t belong in the ballpark.” This was an especially notable statement by Steinbrenner since two weeks later the Yankees debuted their own costumed mascot. Thus began the short-lived and ultimately quite forgettable career of Dandy, the only costume mascot in Yankees history.

The first notable interactive mascot in baseball was the New York Mets’ Mr. Met, who first showed up at games in 1964. Mr. Met was just a guy in a Mets uniform back then, though, not the giant-head costumed mascot that the Mets have today. In the mid-70s, the radio station KGB-FM Radio in San Diego debuted a commercial with a chicken mascot. They then designed a costumed version of the bird and this giant chicken became popular in San Diego, ultimately appearing at over 500 San Diego Padres games (although never becoming the official mascot of the Padres, which is why he was available to be the mascot at the Seattle Mariners’ game against the Yankees in 1979). The Chicken’s fame perhaps peaked in 1977. That winter, the Philadelphia Phillies decided to get their own mascot for the 1978 season. They hired husband and wife designers Wayde Harrison and Bonnie Erickson to design a costumed mascot like the Chicken and the result, the Phillie Phanatic, was such an instant success that teams all over baseball began falling over themselves to come up with their own costumed mascots. Today, only four teams in Major League Baseball do not have a costumed mascot. Those teams are the Chicago Cubs, both Los Angeles teams and the New York Yankees. That was not always the case for the Yankees, however.

After seeing how successful the Phanatic was, the Yankees also hired Harrison and Erickson to create a costumed mascot for them for the 1979 season. The result was an anthropomorphic bird named Dandy (a play on the song “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) who had a mustache similar to Yankee closer Sparky Lyle (and somewhat similar to Yankee captain Thurman Munson).

The Yankees leased the use of the mascot for three years at a total cost of $30,000. While the debut of the mascot was originally intended to be a big occasion, Steinbrenner’s comments squelched that. There was a theme song for the mascot that was never used. Ultimately, the mascot was confined only to the upper deck region of Yankee Stadium (complete with a bodyguard to make sure no one attacked the mascot). If the mascot’s timing already seemed bad, it seemed even worse when less than a month after it debuted, the great Thurman Munson died in a plane crash. Due to Dandy’s resemblance to Munson, the Yankees pulled the mascot from the stadium entirely for a little while.

The mascot served out its full three-year lease, but at the end of it, Harrison and Erickson chose not to renew, feeling that the Yankees were not giving proper promotion to the mascot (after all, part of the appeal to Harrison and Erickson in creating mascots was the marketing opportunities outside of baseball – the Phillie Phanatic makes countless public appearances at various events). I can’t say whether it was an example of them dumping the Yankees before the Yankees could dump them, but whatever the case, Dandy was clearly not a good fit and the Yankees have not had a mascot since.

Thanks to Erin St. John Kelly for an article in the New York Times about Dandy that was informative.

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: Rube Waddell once sent all his fielders off of the field during a game.

STATUS: True

George Edward “Rube” Waddell was one of the premier power pitchers of the early 1900s. He has strikeout records that still stand to this day (he has the most strikeouts in a single season by a lefthanded pitcher in American League history). He was one of Cy Young’s chief rivals during each of their respective heydays.

Sadly, alcoholism and perhaps a personality disorder (it is extremely difficult to know what the problem was with players of the early 20th Century as mental illness often went undiagnosed and when a person was a drinker, alcohol was pretty much blamed for everything).

Personality conflicts hurt Waddell early in his career and he was drummed out of the National League around 1900. Luckily, he eventually signed on with the Philadelphia Athletics and resurrected his career. For six seasons from 1902-1907, Waddell was the Athletics’ best pitcher, as he led the American League in strikeouts in all six seasons. Ultimately, the personality problems also led to him leaving Philadelphia, as well (he was out of baseball entirely by 1910, when he was still in his early 30s). But in those early years, life was good for Waddell. He loved Philly and Philly loved him.

After leading Philadelphia to an American League pennant in his first year with the team in 1902 (this was before there was a World Series between the American League and the National League champions), Waddell came to Spring Training in 1903 on top of the world. His happiness also led to some awfully strange behavior in the Spring of 1903. Waddell was always a fierce competitor (he often was involved in a war of words with his rivals, chiefly Cy Young). This was made especially evident during preseason games in 1903 where Waddell performed some in-game stunts that sound ridiculous but they actually happened.

During one game, Waddell intentionally walked the bases loaded in the ninth inning with two outs. He then ordered all of his teammates save his catcher off of the field, showing his utter confidence that he would strike out the final batter. And you know what? He did do just that. He performed cartwheels back to the Athletics club house as the crowd chanted his name.

The next game, he upped the ante even further. He repeated the trick, only this time he started the ninth inning with no fielders. Again, his cockiness was backed up by his performance as he struck out the side to end the game.

Waddell never tried these tricks in an actual regular season game, but I bet he would have loved to have done so.

Waddell passed away from tuberculosis in 1914 at the age of 37. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Thanks to Alan Howard Levy’s Rube Waddell: The Zany, Brilliant Life of a Strikeout Artist for the information of Waddell’s crazy feats.

Okay, that’s it for this installment!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin

Click here to view an archive of all the previous Olympic urban legends.

Let’s begin!

OLYMPIC URBAN LEGEND: Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller took on a fake identity so he could represent the United States in the 1924 Olympics.

STATUS: True

Followers of U.S. politics surely know of the controversy that surrounded President Barack Obama and his birth certificate throughout his pursuit (and attainment) of the highest elected office in the United States. “Prove you were born in America” was a common refrain from certain circles (heck, even after the President did reveal his birth certificate that has not stopped some folks who still believe he was born outside the United States). Eighty-eight years ago, there was another political “birther” topic, only it was about Chicago swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. In the days leading up to the qualification tournament for the 1924 United States Olympic swimming team, Illinois Representative Henry Riggs Rathbone expressed his doubts that Weissmuller, the swimming sensation (who later went on to become a film superstar as the portrayer of Tarzan on the screen), was born in the United States. Why won’t he produce a birth certificate? Was he eligible for the U.S. Olympic team? Obviously, the U.S. Olympic swimming team allowed Weissmuller to compete, since he won five Gold Medals for the U.S. in 1924 and 1928. But was Weissmuller a U.S. citizen when he won Olympic gold?

After becoming one of the most famous swimmers in the world, Weissmuller translated his success into being a spokesperson for BVD. He then turned that into a long series of hit films playing first Tarzan, King of the Jungle (it was Weissmuller’s films that debuted the legendary “Tarzan yell”) then Jungle Jim and finally just playing himself.

When Johnny Weissmuller died, his obituary listed Winber, Pennsylvania as his birthplace and that’s the answer Weissmuller gave everyone, including his five wives, three children and even his official biographer. At the height of his fame, the town celebrated their hometown hero in 1950 with a special day for Weissmuller (schools even closed for the day) and the Rev. Father MacKowiak presented Weissmuller with his church birth records, the same records that secured him a spot in the 1924 Olympic Games. But were they actually Johnny’s records?

Nope, they were not.

Weissmuller was actually born in 1904 in Freidorf (as Jonas/Johann), a suburb of the city Timişoara within the Banat region of what was then Hungary and is now Romania. When Weissmuller was an infant (not even a year old) his family emigrated to the United States. They settled in Pennsylvania where their second son, Petrus (Peter) was born in 1905 (in Windber).

The Weissmullers eventually moved to Chicago, where Johnny took up swimming. He dropped out of high school and was working odd jobs when swimming coach WIlliam Bachrach discovered him at the Illinois Athletic Club. He began training Johnny and eventually “debuted” Johnny in August 1921 when Weissmuller became a dominant swimmer. He actually had an undefeated record in official competition.

As his records and accolades began piling up in 1922 and 1923 (including breaking Duke Kahanamoku’s record in the 100 meter freestyle), attention naturally began to turn to the 1924 Olympics in Paris, France. Weissmuller’s grandmother made a bold decision to try to claim that Johnny was born and raised in Chicago, stating, “Johnny was born in Chicago, will be 20 years of age next June, and has no intention of being anything but an American citizen.” The Chicago Tribune went with the headline, “CAN’T BAR WEISS FROM OLYMPICS; WAS BORN HERE.” Rathbone backed off a bit, noting that it was possible Weissmuller WAS born in Chicago, but the fact remained that there was no evidence that he was and his family would not (or could not) deliver it.

With the Olympic trials fast approaching, the Weissmullers changed their tune. Johnny was not born in Chicago, he was born back in Windber. In fact, his younger brother Peter was actually his OLDER brother. The church records in Windber read “Petrus John Weissmuller,” but John has clearly been written in in another color pen with different handwriting.

Still, this was enough and Weissmuller was awarded a passport. Interestingly enough, I believe Weissmuller did not actually change his date of birth on the passport. I could be mistaken there.

An interesting aspect of this story is just how many people knew and just didn’t tell. For instance, all the people in Chicago who were friends with the family knew very well that this was untrue (particularly the ones who also emigrated from Hungary). Meanwhile, the people back home DEFINITELY knew, as they had his birth records! Still, no one wanted to make trouble for the Weissmullers, so they kept silent, even though I am sure a number of them felt that he was turning his back on his heritage.

It was those feelings of “hey, what about OUR connection to you?” that led to the truth coming out, as people began to publicly speak about the fact that birth records (and heck, all records) about Johnny and Peter told a different story than what was told in 1924. Weissmuller’s son had an interesting point when he wrote about it in his book about his father, that the amount of worry that Weissmuller had to deal with must have been quite extreme. They would most likely take away his six medals (three golds in 1924, two in 1928 and a bronze for water polo also in 1924) and his mother would suffer great shame. Not only that, but Weissmuller truly DID love the United States. He would go on and on about his great appreciation and love for “his” country, and the thought of having that identity taken away was likely frightening, so he kept it a secret right until his death.

But now the record is straight.

Thanks to Arlene Mueller’s Sports Illustrated article on the topic from 1984 plus Johnny Weissmuller Jr’s book about his father, Tarzan, My Father (written with W. Craig Reed).

OLYMPIC URBAN LEGEND: A cigarette lighter was once used to re-light the extinguished Olympic Flame.

STATUS: True

While the interlocking rings that make up the Olympic flag are undoubtedly the most recognizable symbol of the Olympic Games, the Olympic Flame is certainly a close second. Representing the theft of fire from the Greek Gods by Prometheus, a fire was kept burning throughout the ancient Olympic Games. This tradition continues today, with a relay of the flame (typically via torch) from Olympia, Greece (home of the original Olympics) to wherever the current Games are being held. The handling of the Olympic Flame almost always goes off without a hitch. In 1976, however, at the Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada, there was one notable slip that was magnified by the well-meaning efforts of a quick-thinking plumber with a cigarette lighter.

While today the Olympic Flame is a major symbol for the Olympics (it is one of their most protected trademarks), when the modern Olympics began in 1896, there was no Olympic Flame. It was not until the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, Netherlands that the Flame became a part of the Games once more. Amusingly enough, and demonstrating how little the event meant at the time, the first lighter of the Modern Olympic Flame was an unnamed employee of the Electric Utility of Amsterdam, who lit the flame in the Marathon Tower of the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam. Eight years later, with the Olympic Games being held in Berlin, Germany, the Nazis decided to introduce a torch relay. The Olympic Flame would be lit using a concave mirror in Olympia, Greece and transported via torch relay from Olympia to Berlin. This journey, which was over 3,187 kilometers long, was done by 3,331 runners running over twelve days and eleven nights. German propaganda filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, later staged the torch relay for her 1938 film, Olympia. Adolf Hitler felt that the Ancient Greeks were the forerunners to his modern Third Reich, and felt that such a relay was a bold expression of this idea.

While the relay did not have the most noble of starts, a good idea is a good idea, and the torch relay is a good idea, so it has been used in each Olympic Games (both Summer and Winter) ever since. As you might expect, as the years go by, the relay gets more and more elaborate. In the early days of the relay, the torch would be taken to the country where the games were being held and then the actual relay would begin. However, in recent years, more elaborate relays have taken place, likely set off by the 2004 Olympic Games, which were held in Athens, Greece. Since just taking the Flame from Olympia to Athens would not be particularly notable, it was determine instead to have the first global torch relay. A 78 day journey began, with the Olympic flame covering a distance of over 78,000 kilometers with over 11,3000 torchbearers. The relay passed through Africa and South America for the first time, and all previous Olympic cities were visited before returning to Athens to start the 2004 Summer Games. Since then, the 2008 Summer Olympic and the 2010 Youth Olympics have both traveled to multiple continents, as well.

In 1976, the flame was delivered from Greece to Canada through a particularly novel means of transportation. The Olympic Flame was lit through normal means and taken to Athens, where an electronic pulse derived from the flame was then transmitted via satellite from Athens to Ottawa, where this pulse arrived and was used to set off a laser beam that made a flame. This flame was then taken by hand from Ottawa to Montreal. After the early days where who lit the flame was not a big deal, it has become increasingly important to pick the “right” person to light the Olympic Cauldron where the flame will remain visible to the public throughout the Games (that is actually part of the rules – the flame must always remain visible, which was a problem in the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, when the main stadium where the opening ceremonies were held, BC Place Stadium, was domed, so the Cauldron had to go in a nearby stadium where it would theoretically be visible even when the stadium was closed). The first celebrity to light the Olympic Flame was in 1952, during the Summer Games in Helsinki, Finland. Nine-time Olympic Gold Medalist Paavo Nurmi was given the honor of being the last person in the relay and the famed Olympic runner (who also won three Silver Medals) lit the Olympic Cauldron. In 1976, the lighters were two teenagers, Stéphane Préfontaine and Sandra Henderson, who were track and field athletes, one from “English Canada” and one from “French Canada,” to symbolize the unity between the two parts of Canada.

When the Flame is being transported, there are always backup torches lit from the same source. This is in case of accidental dousing. This way, a backup torch can be used so that the Flame still comes from the same Olympia source. In 2008, during their massive multi-continental torch relay, anti-Chinese protesters gathered at various points of the relay. In Paris, France and London, England, protesters (upset with China’s treatment of Tibet) tried to extinguish the flame repeatedly. The torch with the flame was carried in a high-tech aluminium device designed to withstand high winds and sabotage with fire extinguishers, but eventually the folks in charge of the relay decided it best to extinguish the flame and pick it back up later on in the journey (they actually had to extinguish it again later for the same reasons). However, since they had the backup flames, it was not a big deal.

In 1976, though, an unexpected cloud burst doused the flame at Olympic Stadium. The problem was that no one was around, because there were no games scheduled that day. The only people on scene were workmen. One of the men, a plumber named M. Pierre Bouchard, quickly rushed up the steps of the platform holding the Cauldron and used a cigarette lighter to light some pieces of newspaper, then used his ingenious little contraption to re-light the cauldron. Naturally, when Olympic officials were notified of the situation, they quickly rushed over and extinguished Bouchard’s make-shift Olympic Flame and used the backup torches to re-light the Flame.

While it is pretty humorous, it was also quite enterprising on Bouchard’s part!

OLYMPIC URBAN LEGEND: The Paralympics got their name from the fact that they run parallel to the actual Olympics.

STATUS: False Enough for False

Nicolas Cage got his stage name from the comic book character Luke Cage (I discuss the connection in a Comic Book Legends Revealed installment here). Later on in his career, though, Cage began to credit avant garde composer John Cage as the inspiration for his stage name (I believe he’s back to conceding it was Luke Cage).

I mention this in relation to today’s legend, which involves a slightly similar scenario with the Paralympics.

The Paralympics are a tremendous athletic competition that every four years pits the world’ finest physically disabled athletes against each other (as opposed to the Special Olympics, which is for athletes with intellectual disabilities).

The Paralympics is run by the International Paralympics Committee, which was formed in 1989.

While the first official Paralympics was held in 1960, it was not until 1988 that the name “Paralympics” was formally adopted. If you find literature about the Paralympics, you’ll often find some variation of the following statement:

It is a common misconception that the name Paralympics derives from the term paraplegic, due to its origins as a sporting event for people with spinal injuries. The name comes from the fact that it runs parallel to the Olympic Games hence the name Paralympics.

Here is where the Nick Cage/Luke Cage/John Cage story comes in. While the Paralympics are a wonderful organization, their claims regarding their name are just not supported by the facts. Now don’t get me wrong, it is true that that is the official explanation for the name Paralympics nowadays. If you ask them, it is because they run parallel to the Olympics.

However, the term was in common use in the early 1950s, well before the first official Paralympic Games. It was used in connection with the forerunner to the Paralympics, the Stoke Mandeville Games, created at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital as a way to spur physical activity British veterans of World War II that had suffered spinal cord injuries. These initial “wheelchair games” soon led to the official Paralympic Games, where the “Paralympic” part was also an unofficial nickname of the games.

The games soon moved on past paraplegic athletes, so Paralympics would not make sense as a name, but it was still used for years before the various committees designed to officially adopt the name. Therefore, if they were going to officially adopt the name, they couldn’t use the “paraplegic Olympics” meaning, so they came up with the “parallel Olympics” meaning, which has been the official meaning for the name since.

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin

Click here to view an archive of all the previous football urban legends.

Let’s begin!

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: One of Georgetown’s canine mascots was a war hero.

STATUS: True

The first live animal mascot in college football was “Handsome Dan,” a bulldog who was purchased by Yale student Andrew Graves in 1889. The bulldog became quite popular with other Yale students and eventually became the official mascot of Yale’s football team, who were dubbed the “Bulldogs.” Yale is currently on its seventeenth Handsome Dan. While Handsome Dan is one of the most famous mascots of all-time, not even he could rival the achievements of the mascot of the Georgetown Hoyas from 1921-23, Sergeant Stubby, a true war hero!

The pit bull/terrier mixed breed puppy that would eventually be named “Stubby” entered the world in rough fashion. The dog lived off of garbage as a stray dog in his early months before being discovered on the campus at Yale University in 1917 by soldiers of the 102nd Infantry, 26th Yankee Division who were training before being sent over the Europe to fight in World War I. Private J. Robert Conroy adopted the dog who soon became a favorite among the troops. Dubbed “Stubby” because of both his short little legs and his short little tail, Conroy taught the dog to shake hands. Conroy then theorized that if he could get the dog to raise its paw to shake hands, he could get the dog to raise its paw even higher. Soon, when Conroy gave the command “Salute!,” Stubby would raise his paw in a close approximation of an actual military salute.

Conroy smuggled Stubby on to the troop transport ship headed to France. When Stubby was discovered, he charmed the superior officers enough that Conroy was allowed to keep him for “morale purposes” (the salute gag surely came in handy when it came time to charm officers). Stubby, Conroy and the rest of the 102 reached the front lines of France in February of 1918. Stubby took awhile to grow accustomed to the hellacious environment that the soldiers in the trenches were exposed to daily, with rifles and artillery fired constantly (dogs, as you might know, aren’t exactly fans of loud noises). Eventually, he grew accustomed enough to artillery attacks that he could hear incoming shells ahead of his human companions and warn them of incoming attacks.

The brave pooch suffered his first war injury when he was exposed to German gas. The rest of the men had gas masks, but although Conroy tried to use a gas mask on Stubby, he was unable to create an airtight seal and he was forced to take Stubby to a field hospital where the dog was given oxygen and eventually recovered. However, the attack left Stubby extremely sensitive to the odor of gas. This came in handy one morning later on in the war when the dog awoke the sleeping American troops with barks and nips to alert them of a surprise launch of mustard gas by the Germans. His actions helped to save the entire Division.

A month or so later, Stubby was injured in a grenade attack, being hit with a lot of shrapnel in his leg and chest. Luckily, after recovering at a Red Cross field hospital (where he cheered troops up by visiting with them), Stubby returned to duty.

During the war, there was the so-called “No Man’s Land” area between the trenches of both sides. It was dubbed this because you really did not want to be wandering out there, since the lack of cover would leave you an unprotected target for enemy snipers. It was here that trained army dogs would come in handy searching for wounded soldiers trapped in “No Man’s Land.” Stubby was trained to approach soldiers and respond to soldiers speaking English by barking loudly, alerting the Division to the whereabouts of wounded soldiers. If the soldiers were not incapacitated, he could also lead them back to the American trenches. It was on one of these missions that Stubby discovered a German spy mapping out the locations of the American trenches. Stubby approached and when the German did not respond with English, Stubby attacked, pinning the soldier down until American soldiers came by to capture the German (Stubby’s fellow soldiers had devised a military jacket for Stubby to keep the various medals awarded to him, and after he captured the German they pinned the German’s Iron Cross on to Stubby’s jacket). For capturing a German Spy, Stubby received a promotion to Sergeant. He now outranked his own master, who was by then “only” a Corporal!

After the war ended, Conroy brought Stubby back to the United States with him where Stubby was treated as a national hero. Stubby toured the country doing promotions to sell war bonds. He was given awards, took part in parades, he even met with three separate sitting U.S. Presidents (Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge). For a military dog, though, perhaps his greatest honor was receiving a medal from the Humane Society that was presented to him by General John Pershing, the Commanding General of the United States Armies.

Since 1964, Georgetown University’s animal mascot has been “Jack the Bulldog” (since their team name, the Hoyas, does not translate well into a mascot). However, before they settled on Jack the Bulldog, they had a number of other canine mascots (even a Great Dane at one point), including Stubby. You see, J. Robert Conroy began attending Georgetown Law School in 1921 and he, of course, brought Stubby along. Stubby then became the mascot for the school’s football program for the length of Conroy’s time at Georgetown, doing a “halftime show” that consisted of him pushing a football around the field with his nose (when Stubby left, a terrier dubbed “Hoya” would do similar tricks).

Stubby passed away in the arms of his master in 1926. His remains are held by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History as part of its The Price of Freedom: Americans at War display (he is currently on public display).

Here is a list of all the medals and honors Stubby received during his lifetime: 3 Service Stripes, Yankee Division YD Patch, French Medal Battle of Verdun, 1st Annual American Legion Convention Medal, New Haven World War I Veterans Medal, Republic of France Grande War Medal, St Mihiel Campaign Medal, Wound stripe (replaced with Purple Heart when introduced in 1932), Chateau Thierry Campaign Medal, 6th Annual American Legion Convention and the aforementioned Humane Education Society Gold Medal.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: The original Rose Bowl was the first postseason “bowl game.”

STATUS: False

At the end of each year, we enter into the holiday season. We also enter into the season of College Football Bowl Games, over two dozen of them every year. The Rose Bowl is nicknamed “The Granddaddy of Them All,” because it is the oldest of all the current bowls, taking place every year since 1916 and originating in the 1902 “Tournament East-West” football game in Pasadena, California as part of the Tournament of Roses (which also included the Rose Parade). When the stadium known as the Rose Bowl was introduced in 1923, the name of the game changed from “Tournament East-West” to “The Rose Bowl Game.” The Rose Bowl became so famous that all other bowls take their names from it, even if they do not actually take place in bowl stadiums such as the Rose Bowl. So it is clear that the Rose Bowl well deserves it reputation as the “Granddaddy of Them All,” as it is clear that all other current bowls were based on the success of the Rose Bowl. However, was the 1902 “Tournament East-West” game actually the first postseason “bowl game?”

The answer is a bit tricky, but ultimately I believe that the answer is no.

Thomas Bayne, a New Orleans native who had played football for Yale during the 1880s, brought intercollegiate football to New Orleans with a special game played on New Year’s Day in 1890 at Sportsman’s Park in New Orleans. Bayne brought together players from all over the East Coast to form two teams dubbed “Yale” and “Princeton” (then two of the most famous football programs in the country) who played against each other. The game was scoreless throughout most of the game before ending in a 6-0 “Yale” victory (the game ended following the point after the touchdown, as the only ball was kicked out of the stadium on the point after – touchdowns were worth five points back then). The same day that this “Yale”/”Princeton” game took place, the first Tournament of the Roses was held – a full twelve years before football was added to the program.

On New Year’s Eve, 1892, Bayne was at it again, only this time aided by his brother, Hugh, in organizing a special game between players from Louisiana against players from Alabama. The success of this game led to Bayne organizing football as a sport at Tulane University. Soon, Louisiana State University picked up the sport, as well (Tulane and LSU had a celebrated match against each other in 1893 that, due to LSU’s coach being indisposed, saw Bayne coach both sides!) and college football in Louisiana was well on its way to prominence.

Bayne’s informal games were more like All-Star Games, though, so I could see an argument being made that they can be differentiated from the idea of a “bowl game.” However, the same cannot be said for Adolph Stagg’s University of Chicago team. In 1894, Stagg’s Chicago Maroons played a New Year’s Day game against Notre Dame (like Bayne’s New Year’s Games jump-started New Orleans college football, so, too, did these early matches jump-start Notre Dame’s football legacy). Stagg then took his team to California later that year (in a sort of nationwide tour demonstrating how good the University of Chicago’s football team was) to defeat Stamford in a game on Christmas Day and then the San Francisco Reliance Athletic Club on New Year’s Day 1895.

While clearly none of these games were dubbed “bowl games,” it seems fairly evident that the idea of playing postseason games on New Year’s Day pre-dated the first New Year’s Day Game in Pasadena by a number of years. Again, this does not take away from the importance of the Rose Bowl. Clearly, it took the idea and made it into a tradition with a capitol T. It deserves all the accolades it gets for establishing the popularity of postseason games. It just was not the first instance of these sort of games occurring.

Thanks to Ronald Austin Smith and his excellent book, Play-by-play: radio, television, and big-time college sport for his valuable research in this field.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: The Cardinals got their name from the faded used jerseys they wore.

STATUS: True

As noted in the legend above, the University of Chicago Maroons were one of (probably the) most dominant football teams in the early days of college football. It is fascinating to think of what the program would be like if the school had not discontinued the sport in the late 1930s (by the time they picked it up again, decades had past).

In any event, it was likely the success of the Maroons that inspired Chicago painter/contractor Chris O’Brien to create an amateur football team in Chicago in 1898. The local club soon began playing at Normal Park on Racine Avenue in Chicago. The team therefore became the Racine Normals.

In 1901, O’Brien made a major purchase. He bought the used uniforms of the Chicago Maroons to use for his team. Here is a basic idea of what the maroon color looked like in the Chicago Maroons’ uniforms…

Obviously, by the time the Normals received the used jerseys, they were faded. O’Brien famously quipped, “That’s not maroon! It’s Cardinal red!”

And thus, the Racine Cardinals were born.

After a break from 1906 to 1913 (just not enough people were interested in football in Chicago), O’Brien got the team back together and began to turn it into a semi-professional team. O’Brien and another Illionois semi-pro team owner, George Halas, felt that their teams would benefit by being part of an organization – both by helping to promote the sport but also by preventing players from jumping from team to team…if there was an organized league, the players couldn’t play teams against each other.

In 1920, the American Professional Football Association was born. The following year, a team from Racine, Wisconsin joined so the Cardinals became the Chicago Cardinals. In 1922, the league was re-named the National Football League.

Ninety years later, the Cardinals are still part of the NFL, one of only three original franchises (Halas’ Decatur team, who also moved to Chicago and eventually became the Chicago Bears) and a team that joined the year that the American Professional Football Association became the National Football League – the Green Bay Packers (so depending on how you want to look at it, the Packers might not be considered an original franchise).

Okay, that’s it for this edition!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin

Click here to view an archive of all the previous basketball legends.

Let’s begin!

BASKETBALL LEGEND: Allergies allowed the Detroit Pistons to, in effect, steal Dennis Rodman in the 1986 NBA Draft.

STATUS: True

During Season 8 of the NBC TV series Celebrity Apprentice in 2009, Dennis Rodman missed one of the weekly competitions on the program. When later asked why he was not able to do the task, Rodman explained that he had severe allergies that knocked him out for the count. His fellow contestants doubted his story, claiming instead that Rodman had been partying and that he was hungover not suffering from allergies. I certainly cannot tell you whether Rodman was telling the truth on the show, but I can say that Rodman does, indeed, suffer from severe allergies. Rodman also has asthma, and his allergies can cause a terrible reaction with his asthma. While Rodman managed to control his allergies and his asthma long enough to have a Hall of Fame career in the National Basketball Association (NBA), it was due to his allergies that Rodman became one of the biggest steals in NBA Draft history.

Dennis Rodman was a late bloomer when it came to basketball. Growing up in the Dallas area, Rodman was too short to play on his high school basketball team (he was only 5 feet 6 inches as a freshman). After he graduated from high school, he took a job as a janitor at a local airport. However, a growth spurt that took him all the way to 6 feet 6 inches tall made him decide to give basketball one more chance. He attended Cooke County College in Gainesville, Texas for a semester. He played for their basketball team and averaged 17.6 points and 13.3 rebounds. Although he was only there for a semester, he showed enough promise that he got a spot on the basketball team at Southeastern Olkahoma State University, a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). Rodman excelled at SOSU for his three seasons there, averaging 25.7 points and 15.7 rebounds as he was named to the All-NAIA team in all three seasons.

As graduation approached, Rodman began to prepare himself for a chance at a career in professional basketball. He attended the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament in Portsmouth, Virginia. The Portsmouth Invitational Tournament is the only pre-draft tournament that only allows senior students to participate. As a result, in recent years it has developed a reputation of being a place where the fringe players compete – the players who really need to impress scouts to have a chance of being drafted. For instance, of the 64 participants from the 2011 tournament (it is a four day tournament made up of eight teams of eight players), only three of them were drafted in the 2011 NBA Draft, although one of them, tournament MVP Jimmy Butler, was drafted in the first round. Currently, five participants from the 2011 Tournament are playing in the NBA (with nine more playing in the NBA D-League). Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks is a notable alumnus of the tournament.

Obviously, back in 1985, the Tournament was a bigger deal because there were more good players who would stay in college for all four years, but even in 1985 Portsmouth was not considered the cream of the pre-draft crop. So with this in mind, when Dennis Rodman dominated the 1986 Portsmouth Invitational Tournament, winning MVP honors, he definitely caught a lot of attention but the attention was received with the proverbial grain of salt. When Rodman then followed up his performance at Portsmouth with horrible performances at the pre-draft workouts in Hawaii and Chicago, teams that were hot for the young forward were now cool on Rodman. The conventional wisdom was that Rodman was faltering as the level of competition increased. The Detroit Pistons had been all over Rodman from even before the initial workouts and following his dominant performance at Portsmouth they were heavily considering taking him with their first round pick, which was the #11 overall pick. But then came the later two workouts. Pistons General Manager Jack McCloskey recalled, “Everybody saw him in Portsmouth – he was MVP for the whole tournament. But his playing went down when he went out to Hawaii and then when he went to Chicago. I said, ‘Geez, this isn’t the same guy.’” Luckily for the Pistons, they had an ace in the hole. Rodman’s agent Bill Pollack was good friends with the Pistons’ trainer, Mike Abdenour, and during the Chicago workouts, Pollack invited Abdenour to Rodman’s room. Abdenour later recalled, “Dennis had allergies to almost everything. Cat hair, you name it. In Chicago, it was so hot and humid, the kid could hardly breathe, let alone play basketball.”

Fellow player John Salley roomed with Rodman at the Hawaii tournament, and he recalled that when he entered the room they shared, Rodman was already in there and “he has the sliding door open, the air conditioning on and he has asthma and he’s under the covers, watching cartoons, shivering. And I’m going, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m sick.’ ‘What kind of sick? I ain’t got time to be sick.’” Rodman explained his situation and told Salley that in return for Salley allowing their living arrangement to remain as they were, Rodman would defer to Salley the entire tournament and help make Salley look good. Salley agreed and Salley did, indeed, win the MVP of the Hawaii tournament.

So McCloskey now knew something very important – that Rodman’s weak performances were almost certainly due to allergies and when Abdenour informed McCloskey that he was confident that they could control Rodman’s allergies in the NBA, McCloskey knew that he wanted to draft Rodman. All things being equal, he would have Rodman ranked #1 on his board and would take him with the #11 pick. However, he wondered if he was the only GM that knew Rodman’s situation. McCloskey began working the phone lines and having his assistants do the same, trying to gauge what other teams thought of Rodman. You see, McCloskey also wanted John Salley, as he wished to concentrate on defense in the Draft and Salley was a powerful shot blocker out of Georgia Tech.

McCloskey knew that Salley would be there at #11 but he also knew that Salley would definitely not be there when the Pistons next made a pick, which was the third pick of the second round (#27 overall). So McCloskey decided to take a risk. Every other team seemed to have written Rodman off after Hawaii and Chicago, so McCloskey had to cross his fingers and just hope that Rodman would be there at #27.

As you well know, Rodman was there at #27, and he went on to become a key player (as did Salley) for the Pistons as the franchise won back-to-back NBA Championships in 1989 and 1990.

Rodman made an All-Star team as a Piston in 1990 and was named Defensive Player of the Year in back-to-back seasons in 1990 and 1991. Rodman is the only player from the 1986 Draft so far to make it into the Basketball Hall of Fame for his NBA playing career (Arvydas Sabonis was inducted for his international play). And who knows how his career would have went if it were not for allergies!

Thanks to Keith Langlois of Pistons.com and Steve Addy and Jeffrey F. Karzen’s great book The Detroit Pistons: More Than Four Decades of Motor City Memories for the great quotes for this piece.

BASKETBALL LEGEND: Drew Gooden missed three games due to infected hair follicles.

STATUS: Misleading Enough That I’m Going With False

It is plainly (if sometimes even painfully) evident that we live in a world of sound bites – information parceled into easy-to-understand descriptions. The problem, though, is when these easy-to-understand descriptions are inaccurate, or at the very least, lacking important pieces of information. That problem becomes exacerbated when news is created based on other people reacting to these incomplete sound bites. This is especially troublesome nowadays with the proliferation of social media like Twitter, where ill-informed people can spout off reactions to incomplete information. A sports-related example of this was during the 2011 National Football League playoffs. In the National Football Conference championship game, the quarterback of the Chicago Bears, Jay Cutler, left the game due to a knee injury and his team lost a close game with their third-string quarterback taking the snaps (as Cutler’s back-up was also injured in the game). Whatever the severity of Cutler’s knee injury, there were people who wished to react to the sight of Cutler standing on the sidelines later in the game. A number of players from other teams tweeted derisive comments about Cutler’s ability to play through pain. Clearly, they knew no more about his injury than anyone else watching the game on television, and yet they felt like they could pass judgment upon Cutler’s drive and willingness to play through pain. Heck, maybe they were even correct and Cutler’s injury was something most NFL players would have played through in such a big game, but whatever the situation, they clearly did not know the full facts before choosing to put Cutler down.

This brings us to the time that NBA forward Drew Gooden, then playing for the Orlando Magic in 2004, missed three games due to what was then termed “infected hair follicles.”

Even today, eight years later, Drew Gooden’s injury routinely appears in articles with titles like “Top 10 Embarrassing Sports Injuries” and “10 Really Bizarre Sports Injuries” (as well as some more offensive message board discussions, which I’ll just say include a number of homophobic declarations about Gooden’s injury). At the time, Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sun-Sentinel discussed the injury with former NFL-great Jack Youngblood (who once played in a game with a broken leg), and the discussion was mostly mocking Gooden’s fragility, with Youngblood exclaiming, “I’m sorry, but that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. That may be the all-timer. Lie if you have to and call it a hamstring, but don’t admit that you’re sitting out with a hair follicle” and Bianchi referring to Gooden’s injury as “the wimpiest injury in Magic history.”

Naturally, Gooden’s injury was a good deal more severe than anyone could understand at the time, to the point where its continued inclusion in “wacky sports injuries” lists is a great disservice to what Gooden went through. Read on to see what actually happened to Gooden…

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a bacterium that results in dangerous infections in humans. As it is part of the Staphylococcal infection family, it can generally be referred to as a “staph infection.” Staph infections historically tend to target people recovering in hospitals, due to the amount of open wounds and invasive devices that welcome infection, as well as the weakened immune systems that result in the bacteria causing an infection. Highly contagious, the bacteria can be carried by healthy people for weeks (in some cases, even years!), infecting anyone they come into contact with.

While historically hospitals and nursing homes tend to be the most common places for staph outbreaks, in recent years many other populations have become known as “high risk,” including students staying in dormitories, prisoners (Folsom Prison had an outbreak in 2007) and athletes who spend a great deal of time working out in confined spaces, like NBA players working out in their gyms.

As you might have noticed from the name, this particular staph infection is resistant to many antibiotics. Cuts get infected frequently, but they are treated and the infection goes away. That was the situation that Drew Gooden found himself in in 2004. He developed an infection in the hair follicles on his leg (most likely from an ingrown leg hair, but I can’t say for sure). Like most MRSA infections, it initially presented itself as small red bumps that resemble pimples, spider bites, or boils. In Gooden’s case, they presumed it was spider bites. They gave him some antibiotics and he tried to play through it.

In 2006, Gooden spoke on the subject:

I was in the most pain that I have ever felt ever in my life. I kept playing on it, thinking it was going to heal but the infection got worse and worse to the point where my leg swelled up and I couldn’t bend my knee.

They repeatedly drained Gooden’s infection until they eventually took him to the hospital where he received direst intravenous injection of antibiotics for a few days. After 72 hours of treatment, the bacteria was defeated and Gooden returned to health (and NBA action for the Magic).

Much like concussions, the public seems to be only now starting to understand the severity of staph infections, particularly MRSA ones like Gooden had. Will it eventually lead to Gooden’s injury no longer being seen as something to be embarrassed by? One could only hope!

Thanks to Tom Withers and Mike Bianchi for their articles on the subject!

BASKETBALL LEGEND: Dick Grubar was prepared to commit to playing at Kentucky until Adolph Rupp made a personal visit to his family.

STATUS: True

One of the most powerful tools that a college coach has in recruiting players is the home visit. Especially the famous coaches, those that have won multiple titles and are legends in their own times. In fact, these visits are so persuasive that the NCAA nowadays limits them (so Nick Saban can’t show up at your house constantly to convince you to come play for him).

Back in the 1960s, though, there was more or less free reign, and coaches like The University of Kentucky’s Aolph Rupp, at the time the coach with the most wins in college basketball history, drew in players like honey drawing in flies.

Amazingly enough, though, in the case of Dick Grubar, it was Rupp who turned him from a “yes” on Kentucky to a “no.”

Grubar was a highly recruited high school player out of Schenectady, New York. He was friends with Pat Riley, who was a few years older than Grubar and a star player at Kentucky. Riley told Grubar he had to come to Kentucky. They worshiped basketball players there. Grubar was on board.

And then Adolph Rupp visited Schenectady for a Christmas Basketballl Tournament.

Grubar later recalled the visit, “He never talked about any of his players. All he talked about was all of his own success. It was all about him. It was unbelievable.”

Grubar also noted his discomfort with the size of Rupp’s entourage when they visited the Grubars’ humble abode, “There must have been 15-16 people. And they all decided to come to my house. At my house, you could maybe sit six people comfortably. But Rupp brought all these people into my house, and at the time it really embarrassed my parents. They had all these people just standing around because we didn’t have chairs for them. It never even bothered Rupp, though. He just continued to talk about himself, what he’d done and how many wins he had.”

So Grubar changed his mind and opened himself up to other schools, ultimately choosing the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose young coach, Dean Smith, was prepared to let the six foot four Grubar play point guard (other schools thought he was too tall to be a guard). Grubar helped lead UNC to its first three Final Four appearances, although he did not win a title with UNC.

Injuries derailed Grubar’s chance at a professional basketball career. He worked as an assistant coach for a number of years before leaving basketball for good to become a businessman and later a politician in North Carolina (Greensboro, to be precise).

Years later, Grubar counseled Dean Smith to stick with his coaching long enough so that Smith would pass Rupp in the all-time wins category. Smith did just that, passing Rupp before Smith retired in 1997 (Smith himself has since been passed by three other coaches).

Thanks to Scott Fowler and Woody Durham’s book, North Carolina Tar Heels: Where Have You Gone?, for the great Grubar quotes.

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

Click here to view an archive of all the previous baseball urban legends.

Let’s begin!

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: A team’s radio announcer came in to pitch the final game of the team’s season.

STATUS: True

Criticism of professional athletes by announcers put an interesting spin on a traditional retort that people being criticized often use, which is the classic “could you do any better?” In the case of sports announcers, though, the one doing the criticism often was once a professional athlete, and often legitimately could have done better when they were younger! Therefore, quite often the playing career of the media member is put on trial when they criticize current players. In October 2010, when Brandon Marshall of the Miami Dolphins was criticized by NFL Network analysts Sterling Sharpe, Mike Mayock and Solomon Wilcots (all former NFL players) over his conditioning, Marshall retorted, “But again, those guys never coached, and I don’t honestly think that those guys were elite players, including Sterling Sharpe. I know he’s done some good things, but from my understanding, he’s not a Hall of Fame player.” When Sharpe was Marshall’s age, he actually had a better resume (by 26, they were both named to two Pro Bowls, but Sharpe also was a first team All-Pro while Marshall was “just” a second teamer), but imagine if the 45-year-old Sharpe could actually back up his criticisms of the 26-year-old Marshall on the field? That’s just what St. Louis Cardinal legend Dizzy Dean did on the last day of the 1947 season when he came out of retirement for one last game just to prove a point.

Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean pitched just six seasons for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1932-1937 (plus a single game in 1930), and those were the only six seasons that the pitcher pitched in more than 20 games in a season. An injury suffered in the 1937 All-Star Game effectively ruined his career. He was dealt to the Chicago Cubs in 1938 and managed to eke out three more seasons in the Majors before retiring at age 31 after pitching a single inning for the Cubs in 1941. Those six seasons were so good that Dean was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953.

His most famous season was 1934, when he went 30-7 on his way to the National League Most Valuable Player Award and a championship for the Cardinals’ “Gashouse Gang” (Dean won the clinching Game 7 of the World Series). So when Dean retired, he went straight to broadcasting Cardinals games.

There was an interesting radio situation in St. Louis in the 1940s. The Cardinals and the American League team in St. Louis, the Browns, each had two sets of announcers calling their games. Harry Caray and Gabby Street called games on WTMV and WEW while Dean and play-by-play man Johnny O’Hara called the games on WIL. The duos were able to call both teams because of an unusual arrangement between the Cardinals and the Browns where only the home games of each team would be broadcast on the radio. This was done so that the home games of the one team would not be competing against radio coverage of the other team. As you would figure, such an arrangement was bound to end eventually, and 1947 was the year it came to an end, as the Cardinals decided to broadcast all of their games on the radio. They took this opportunity to choose an exclusive announcing team, as well. Despite Dean’s presence as a legendary member of the Cardinals, Cardinals owner Sam Breadon decided to go with Caray and Street over Dean and O’Hara.

Dean was angry at being passed over, and he and O’Hara were effectively forced into becoming the announcing team for the lowly Browns (coming off a 66-88 record in 1946). The 1947 Browns season was even worse, with the team finishing the year 59-95 (they did have some positive historic moments that season, as they became the first Major League team to employ two African-American players – and when they played the Cleveland Indians, they were part of the first Major League baseball game that had two teams that each had an African-American player). All season long, Dean criticized the Browns, specifically the pitching staff, which ended the season with a league-worst team ERA of 4.33. Dean would often note that he could pitch better than these guys, specifically saying, “”Doggone it, I can pitch better than nine out of the ten guys on this staff!” On the last day of the 1947 season, Browns General Manager Bill DeWitt decided to call Dean on his bluff.

You see, while attendance for bad baseball teams nowadays can get pretty rough, especially at the end of the season, it was particularly bad back in the first half of the 20th Century. The Browns had failed to draw 5,000 fans in any home game from August 27th on (in 2011, the Houston Astros averaged over 20,000 fans a game on their final seven-game homestand in a season where they lost 106 games!), with the final game of their penultimate home series being particularly brutal, as just 315 fans watched the Browns defeat the Indians on September 25th. So DeWitt figured he had to do something to help the box office gate, and he was not above using a St. Louis legend’s bragging to his benefit. Dean was signed to a $1 contract and scheduled to pitch on September 28th, the final game of the season, against the Chicago White Sox (led by first baseman Rudy Yotk) and their top starting pitcher, Eddie Lopat. The Browns manager, Muddy Ruel, was so angry over the stunt that he refused to manage the game and actually started his offseason one day early.

Dean was not a popular man on “his” team that day, but the fans ate it up. A crowd of 15,910 attended Sportsman’s Park that day to see the 37-year-old Dean face off against the White Sox. That would be the second-highest attendance the Browns would have all season (the first being a June game against the eventual World Champion New York Yankees).

Dean pitched through three innings without allowing a run, scattering three hits and walking one batter. In bottom of the third, Dean also hit a single! However, he pulled a muscle on the hit and left after pitching the fourth inning. In typical Browns fashion, reliever Glen Moulder (who took over from Dean and pitched the rest of the game) gave up five runs in the ninth, including a three-run home run with the score tied at 2. The Browns lost the game 5-2. Dean, however, had proven his point. He would return to the broadcast booth, where he went on to have a stellar career as an announcer, especially a few years later when he became the voice of ABC’s “Game of the Week,” a national telecast of MLB games. The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association inducted Dean into its Hall of Fame in 1976.

Dean once said, “it ain’t bragging if you can do it,” and on that September 1947 day, Dean was no braggart.

Thanks to Ben Volin of the Palm Beach Post for the Brandon Marshall quote.

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: The Yankees signed a player sight unseen based solely on his statistics in an independent league.

STATUS: False

One of the main (if not the main) conflicts in Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball and the recent film of the same name is between “traditional” scouting (people who judge players by watching them play in person) versus statistical scouting (making decisions about players based on their statistical achievements). In the film, traditional scouting is portrayed as almost an archaic way of doing business but in reality, there is not a single Major League Baseball team today that does not place a great deal of emphasis on traditional scouting, including the Oakland Athletics. The differences between the various teams is how much emphasis they each give to statistical scouting in augmenting traditional scouting, not replacing it. While nowadays there is a general acceptance that the two modes of thinking are complimentary and not adversarial, it admittedly seemed pretty darn adversarial during those first few years after Moneyball came out. And in 2007, a 26-year-old relief pitcher became a symbol of the divide between traditional scouting and statistical scouting when the story came out that the Yankees signed Edwar Ramírez without seeing him in person.

But was that actually what happened?

Edwar Ramírez was originally signed as an amateur free agent by the Anaheim Angels in 2001. He played for the Angels’ Class A club in 2002 and 2003 before being released in 2003. He did not play baseball professionally in 2004. The Angels re-signed him in 2005 but released him again after just one game for their Triple A team. He signed on with the Pensacola Pelicans of the Independent League. While out of baseball in 2004, Ramírez taught himself a change-up. His change-up soon became a dominating pitch in the Independent League. In 2005 and 2006, pitching for the Pelicans and then the Edinburg Coyotes, Ramírez put up very impressive numbers. In 43 games with the Pelicans, Ramírez had a 1.45 ERA with 93 strikeouts and 15 walks. In 25 games with the Coyotes, Ramírez had a 1.07 ERA with 46 strikeouts and 10 walks.

Mid-way through the 2006 season, the New York Yankees were looking for a reliever to fill out their Single A club in Tampa. Billy Eppler, the team’s director of professional scouting began looking through a list of players who had recently been released by other clubs. Meanwhile, Troy Caradonna, the assistant director of baseball operations in the Yankees’ Tampa office (along with intern Kiley McDaniel), began looking at statistics of players in the Independent Leagues and he was wowed by the numbers Ramírez was putting up for the Coyotes. In July 2007, after Ramírez shocked everyone in the Yankees organization by going from organizational fodder to becoming a legitimate prospect by blowing through all levels of the Yankees minors in 2006 and 2007 and making the Yankees Major League roster, Ed Price of the Newark Star-Ledger looked back on the day that Caradonna and Eppler first looked into Ramírez. After Caradonna saw Ramírez’s strong numbers, he brought him to the attention of Eppler, who later recalled, “We didn’t send anybody in to look. I looked at a few old reports, didn’t see anything [negative], and made a couple of phone calls checking on [mental] makeup.” After checking with the Angels organization and not hearing anything bad about him, the Yankees purchased Ramírez’s rights from the Edinburg Coyotes for under $3,000. Thus, Ramírez was a player who was signed just on his stats. As Eppler himself stated, “statistics found him.” Granted, we are talking about a player originally signed just for organizational depth, but still, the soundbite was significant and got a lot of play around the internet, especially when Ramírez made his Major League debut by striking out the side against the Minnesota Twins (including reigning American League Most Valuable Player Justin Morneau).

However, while that was the story, it was not exactly true.

Just three days after his original story, Price wrote a correction (and as is typically the case, people remember the original story and not so much the correction). Here’s Price:

Mark Batchko, one of the Yankees’ top area scouts, last Independence Day weekend drove across Texas to see Ramirez pitch an inning for his independent-league team. Ramirez had first come to the Yankees’ attention because of his statistics — based on work by John Coppolella (who was then the Yankees’ assistant director of pro scouting and now works for the Atlanta Braves) and Kiley McDaniel.

Batchko reported that Ramirez had a 90-92 mph fastball and a devastating changeup. That report turned out to be accurate, and Ramirez used those pitches to move from Class A to the majors in less than a year after the Yankees signed him based on the statistical analysis and Batchko’s evaluation.

So, as it turns out, rather than being a sign of one model being better than another, Ramírez’s signing was actually a perfect example of how both models work to compliment each other, with the Yankees ending up with a decent reliever for a few years.

Thanks to Ed Price for the information!

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: A player was once acquired for two treadmills and cash.

STATUS: True

I write “true,” because the story is true, but it is a bit misleading.

Everyone knows that baseball teams trade players. That is a common occurrence that everyone is used to. However, very often, baseball players are not traded for other players, instead, their contracts are sold to another team. “You give us $100,000, we’ll give you the rights to Player X.”

For example, earlier this year the Cleveland Indians purchased the rights to slugging first baseman/outfielder Russ Canzler from the Tampa Bay Rays.

So it happens all of the time. Now the question is, “What do these teams do with the money they get for these players?” That money goes into the maintenance of the team usually. Or into allowing the team to spend money on another player. There is a famous scene in Moneyball where Billy Beane wheels and deals to find enough money via trades to give himself room in the budge to trade for a certain pitcher.

So if that money goes into the maintenance of the team, is it all that odd if a team finds other ways of maintaining the team? For instance, what if another team would rather give you supplies for your team rather than cash. If you would spend the money you were bringing in on those supplies anyways, why not just take the supplies directly, especially if you might be able to get them cheaper this way than if you purchases them yourself.

This brings us to an odd 1997 trade between the San Diego Padres and the Cleveland Indians.

Sean Mulligan was a 1991 draft pick for the Padres who had settled in as mostly organization depth, although he had seen a stint in the big leagues at the end of the 1996 season when the rosters expanded.

During the offseason, the Padres General Manager Kevin Towers was trying to find a way to improve the Padres’ exercise facilities and ownership was not giving him much room to work with. So Towers traded Mulligan to Cleveland in exchange for two treadmills and $75,000.

As Towers later recalled, “Sometimes you have to be a little creative. Just get the job done.”

So while it is true, it almost seems like it has a negative connotation for Mulligan, but I don’t think that’s fair, as if he were traded for $100,000 and Towers used that extra $25,000 to buy two treadmills (I have no idea how much fancy treadmills cost – would it be more than $25,000? Less?) then no one would ever think twice about it, right?

It is more a credit to Towers’ ingenuity than a knock to Mulligan’s reputation.

Thanks to Nick Piecoro for the Towers’ quote.

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin

Click here to view an archive of all the previous football urban legends.

Let’s begin!

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: The National Football League’s official football has a name.

STATUS: True

Giving names to inanimate objects is a tradition that has been going on for centuries, from the christening of vessels on their way to sea to the guy down the street who calls his old beat-up Chevy “Betsy” (the number one name car owners give their cars). This tradition has extended to baseball, as well. From Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose famous bat “Black Betsy” (man, people sure love to name their stuff “Betsy,” don’t they?) sold for nearly $600,000 at an auction a decade ago to current Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey, who names his bats after fictional swords (like Hrunting, the famous sword used in the epic poem “Beowolf”), giving nicknames to your bats is not particularly unusual. However, the National Football League (NFL) has gone one step further with its official game ball – it has an actual official name!

Tim Mara founded the New York Giants in 1925 at the behest of the NFL, who felt that their fledgling league needed a team in the biggest market in the country. Mara was the owner and President of the Giants from 1925 until his death in 1959. In that time, he turned the Giants into one of the most successful franchises in NFL history. When the Pro Football Hall of Fame was founded in 1963, Mara was an inaugural member. Mara’s sons, Jack and Wellington, took over the running of the team upon Mara’s death (Jack as President, Wellington as Vice-President – the brothers had already been running the day-to-day operations of the team unofficially since 1946, with Jack handling the business side of things and Wellington handling the on-the-field side). Jack died in 1965 and then Wellington ran the team from 1966 until his own passing in 2005, with his son John then taking over the team (Bob Tisch bought a piece of the Giants in 1991 and co-owned the team with Mara until 2005, as Tisch died less than a month after Mara. Tisch’s son Steve currently co-owns the team with John Mara). Wellington Mara was also enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame (unlike his father, he lived to see his enshrinement in 1997). Mara’s most significant achievement as an owner came in the early 1960s when he and his brother Jack agreed to split the revenue from the TV airings of NFL games evenly with the other teams. This decision reverberates in the NFL to this day (and it is the main reason why the Green Bay Packers are able to still have a team).

Long before he was owner of the team, though, Wellington Mara was associated with the Giants. During the team’s first season in 1925, at the ripe old age of nine, he served as the Giants’ ball boy. After graduating college, Wellington went to work in the Giants front office, serving as the Assistant to the President and Treasurer in 1937; Secretary from 1938–1940; Vice-President and Secretary from 1945–1958; Vice-President from 1959–1965; President from 1966–1990; and finally President and Co-Chief Executive Officer, 1991–2005 (his death). Everyone believed that Tim Mara had named his son after Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington (a famous military and political leader who was born in Ireland, which would likely be appealing to the Irish-American Mara). Whether he did or not (and he almost certainly did), the key point is that everyone thought that he did, so they nicknamed the younger Mara “The Duke.”

Here is Mara with the team in the 1940s when he was in his mid-20′s (he is in the middle of the photo)…

In 1941, George Halas (owner of the Chicago Bears) began to negotiate with Wilson Sporting Goods to make Wilson the exclusive supplier of official game balls for the NFL. Mara backed Halas on the deal and at the 1941 owners meeting, the NFL signed a deal with Wilson that still goes on to this day. In gratitude for Mara’s help in getting the deal done, Halas suggested that they name the ball after Mara’s son, Wellington, then serving a stint with the U.S. Navy for World War II (the only time from 1937 until his death that Wellington was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the New York Giants). This was agreed upon and the official NFL game ball was officially named “The Duke.” It was displayed in big letters on one side of the ball.

This remained the status quo from 1941 until 1969. In 1970, the NFL merged with the American Football League (AFL). Presumably not wanting to exacerbate any feelings that the NFL thought that they were better than the AFL, the original NFL owners agreed to drop the name from the ball. So for over thirty years, the official NFL game ball had no official name.

That changed in 2006. In honor of the passing of Mara, the NFL agreed to once again officially name the NFL game ball “The Duke.” Now, though, instead of being in big letters on one side of the ball, it is in small letters on the left side of the NFL logo (right above the Wilson logo).

Still, it is quite an honor for the Mara family.

Thanks to Tyler Kepner for the neat information about R.A. Dickey’s bat-naming habits.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: The Cleveland Browns were named after boxer Jou “The Brown Bomber” Louis.

STATUS: False

The Cleveland Browns opened shop in 1946 as one of the inaugural teams in a new professional football league designed to compete with the National Football League (NFL), the All-America Football Conference (AAFC). They were led by coach (and part-owner) Paul Brown, who was one of the most famous sporting figures in the state of Ohio at the time, having coached Ohio State to a shared national championship earlier in the decade (following years of dominance in Ohio High School football). So it would seem logical that the team was named after Coach Brown, right?

Well, from a 1995 Washington Post article when the announcement was made that Browns owner Art Modell was moving the team to Baltimore (where they became the Baltimore Ravens):

Contrary to popular belief, the Browns were not named for their famous coach Paul Brown. Rather, they were called the Brown Bombers, after the nickname of the revered boxer of that era, Joe Louis. The name later was shortened to the Browns.

So, is the popular belief true?

While Paul Brown certainly enjoyed the respect that came with being such a successful coach, he did not care as much for the hoopla that surrounded it. When Arthur “Mickey” McBride agreed to form the Cleveland franchise for the AAFC, McBride was not particularly versed in the world of football. He was more concerned with owning a sports franchise in Cleveland, it just happened that football was the one that was available. He first tried to buy the NFL team, the Cleveland Rams. They turned him down so he was “forced” to be a part of a new league instead (read here for an earlier Sports Legends Revealed column about the strange reaction the Cleveland Rams, the 1945 NFL Champions, had to the news that a rival team was opening up shop in their city). So when it came to naming his coach, he went with the one thing he did know about football – Notre Dame. He offered a contract to the pre-World War II coach of Notre Dame, Frank Leahey. The President of Notre Dame, though, convinced McBride to choose someone else, as the school did not want to lose their coach. A Cleveland sports reporter suggested Brown, and McBride went for him big time, seemingly more because of his popularity in the area than for his actual coaching resume. Brown (who was serving in the military as a football coach for the Great Lakes Naval Training Center) received a substantial salary, a percentage ownership of the team and complete control over personnel decisions. In effect, the new team was Brown’s team.

That much would be made evident by the results of a 1946 Cleveland Plains-Dealer poll to name the new franchise (with a $1,000 War Bond offered up as a prize for the fan who suggested the winning name). There is some dispute over the exact timeline of the naming of the franchise. What is clear is that after the poll, the team was going to be named the Cleveland Panthers, which was the nickname of a failed American Football League (AFL) franchise in Cleveland that only lasted a single season in 1926. The team was owned by General C. X. Zimmerman, who was the Vice-President of the AFL. The dispute is over how the Panthers was chosen. It was either that they simply were the highest vote-getter in the poll or that they were the second highest, with the highest vote-getter being “The Browns,” chosen for Coach Brown. Coach Brown did not like the idea of the team being named after him, so either way, the team was going to be named the Panthers (either because it was the top vote-getter or because Brown refused to have the team named after him). However, Zimmerman chimed in, noting that he still owned the name and that he would have to be compensated for its usage. The new franchise declined (I’ve seen some reports argue that Brown was not a fan of the team being named after a failed franchise anyways, which could be true, but I find it a bit hard to believe, since Brown later named the Cincinnati Bengals after a…wait for it…failed AFL franchise).

So Brown eventually bowed to popular sentiment and went with the Browns (I believe that there was the formality of having a second poll, but it was clear what was going to be the #1 choice). For years, though, Brown played it coy over whether the team was named after him, publicly offering up the Joe Louis suggestion. Also, after Brown left the organization in the 1960s after a dispute with new owner Art Modell, the Browns (under Modell) supported the Joe Louis version of the story (which would almost certainly be why the Washington Post reported as such in 1995, since that was the official position of the Browns organization at the time). Brown, though, never really held fast to the Louis position and late in his life he would cop to the fact that the team was named after him.

The Browns, meanwhile, support the “Named after Paul Brown” position. From the Browns’ media guide:

Not a single entry in the contest listed Louis or his nickname as a reason for choosing ‘Browns.’

When you add in the fact that while yes, Jou Louis was quite famous at the time, he was not particularly associated with Cleveland at all (Louis was born in Alabama and became a famous boxer out of Detroit), then I think there’s enough evidence to support the assertion (that both the Browns and the NFL itself both agree with now) that the team was, in fact, named after Paul Brown.

Thanks to Charles Babington and Ken Denlinger for the initial Washington Post article, Cleveland Browns.com writer Matt Florjancic for the Browns’ media guide take on the topic, the NFL for their official take on the subject, legendary Cleveland sports reporter, the late Chuck Heaton (for his take on the situation in a Baltimore Sun article in 1991. Heaton supported the “Browns named after Brown” story) and Frank M. Henkel for his book Cleveland Browns History.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: The annual Governor’s Cup game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston team from the AFC began due to a legal settlement.

STATUS: True

In the early days of the existence of the American Football League, then a rival to the National Football League, there were many battles over college players. In fact, the existence of the AFL was, in many ways, one of the biggest boons to players’ salaries in the history of professional football. Until the AFL came along, there was no way of truly demonstrating how much a given player was worth on the open market because there WASN’T an open market. Once the AFL came along, they were desperate for relevance, and the quickest way to get to relevance was to get star players. So the AFL paid through the nose for the best of the college graduates. As a result, salaries soared. One of the reasons the NFL was willing to merge with the AFL was that they couldn’t afford to continue fighting with the AFL for players.

One of these players was Ralph Neely, the standout offensive tackle from the University of Oklahoma. The beginning of his professional career led to a great battle between the two pro teams from Texas, the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL and the Houston Oilers of the AFL.

In 1965, Neely was drafted in the second round of both the NFL Draft and the AFL Draft. In the NFL, he was drafted by the Baltimore Colts. Neely signed with the Houston Oilers in a deal that included an ownership stake in a gas station in Houston. Neely kept the deal quiet so that he would remain eligible to compete in the Gator Bowl during his Senior year (eventually the news got out and he was ruled ineligible for the game). During this time, the Cowboys made a trade with the Colts for Neely’s rights. The Arkansas native Neely was okay with choosing Houston over the Baltimore Colts, but now that the nearby Dallas Cowboys were interested, things were different. So Neely returned the Oilers’ check and signed with the Cowboys. As you might imagine, the Oilers were none too pleased about this particular turn of events, so they sued the Cowboys (presumably tortious interference with contractual relations).

The case dragged on into 1966, even as Neely began playing for the Cowboys in 1965, where he was a starter at right tackle right of the bat (a position he played for five seasons, plus eight more at left tackle) as he made the NFL All-Rookie team.

When the AFL/NFL merger was being negotiated in 1966, one of the outstanding matters was the lawsuit between the Oilers and the Cowboys. The Cowboys were ordered to settle the matter so that the merger could be completed. They sent three draft picks and cash to the Oilers and also agreed to begin to play a yearly game against the Oilers starting in 1967. These games became known as The Governor’s Cup. They took place in the preseason unless the two teams happened to be scheduled against each other during the regular season. The Governor’s Cup continued until the Oilers moved to Tennessee in 1997. A number of notable Governor’s Cup games were played, including games in Tokyo, Japan as well as Mexico City, Mexico.

The Cowboys won 18 of the 31 Governor’s Cup games.

In 2002, the expansion Houston Texans brought professional football back to Houston. The Texans and the Cowboys picked up the Governor’s Cup tradition and played the game every year until it was a casualty of the shortened NFL preseason following the resolution of the NFL lockout in 2011. They have not yet announced the 2012 NFL schedule, but I imagine that the Governor’s Cup will continue to be played in 2012. The Cowboys have a 5-4 advantage in Governor’s Cup games against the Texans.

Okay, that’s it for this edition!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin

Click here to view an archive of all the previous baseball urban legends.

Let’s begin!

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: In Back to the Future II, a bat “autographed” by “Ken Griffey III” is used in a scene set in 2015.

STATUS: False

Few films seem to spawn as many rumors, myths and legends as the Back to the Future franchise, particularly the scenes in the second film set in the future.

Whether it be the famed “hoverboards are for real” joke by director Robert Zemeckis (that way too many people took seriously) or the requests sent to Nike for self-tying sneakers like the ones Marty McFly wears in the film, people really took the scenes set in 2015 quite seriously. The world of sports also has a great many legends spinning out of those 2015 scenes in Back to the Future II, which makes sense, seeing as how the plot of the second film involved a Sports Almanac being used to travel back to the past to amass a fortune through gambling.

The most prolific sports legend about the film involves the (falsely) assumed notion that the film predicted that the Florida Marlins would win the 1997 World Series and/or the 2003 World Series. In reality, the film simply states that the Chicago Cubs defeated the “Miami Gators” in the 2015 World Series. As Major League Baseball did not yet have a team in Florida at the time of the making (or release) of Back to the Future II, the filmmakers likely deserve some credit for predicting Florida baseball, but I think it is safe to say that Florida baseball was seen by many of the time as an inevitability more than a possibility (and indeed, it was just four years later that the Florida Marlins joined the National League as an expansion team).

However, another sports legend about the film is about the bat that young Griff Tannen (grandson of the main antagonist of the trilogy, Biff Tannen) uses in Back to the Future II. Did they really think to have it autographed by Ken Griffey III before Ken Griffey Jr. ever became a superstar?

As you might expect, with the added development necessary before entering the Major Leagues, #1 draft picks in Baseball do not have nearly the same success rate as their contemporaries in Football, Basketball and Hockey. When a basketball #1 pick does not become a great player, it is seen as bad luck. If a baseball #1 pick does not become a great player, it is seen as almost typical. I featured this topic in an old Baseball Legends Revealed about the only player to be drafted #1 in the MLB draft twice (you can read that story here)! Amazingly enough, George Kenneth Griffey Junior, when he is elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in three years, will be the first #1 draft pick to be elected to the Hall of Fame (the draft began in 1965) (things look a lot brighter for the future, though, with Chipper Jones a cinch for the Hall and Joe Mauer, Adrian Gonzalez and Alex Rodriguez all having decent odds for enshrinement). So with those odds, when Griffey was selected first in 1987, he was certainly not a sure thing. He did get a goodly amount of hype, though, especially as he was the son of three-time Major League All-Star (as well as a two-time World Champion and the winner of the 1980 All-Star Most Valuable Player award), Ken Griffey (who played most of his career for the Cincinnati Reds). When Griffey made the Majors in 1989 at the age of 19, he gained quite a good deal of media attention (he ended up finishing third in the American League Rookie of the Year voting, behind closer Gregg Olson and starter Tom Gordon). So it would certainly make some sense for the filmmakers of Back to the Future II (which was released in November of 1989) to make a little nod to Griffey (and his parentage) by having a teenager in 2015 wielding a bat autographed by Ken Griffey III.

But did they?

The scene in question happens when Marty McFly is impersonating his own future son. He is tasked with keeping his son from going along with a robbery with “Griff” Tannen and his gang of hoods. Griff attacks him with a futuristic baseball bat. Later, after a chase involving “hoverboards” (skateboards that, you know, hover) Marty appears to be in trouble when his hoverboard gets stuck over a small pond (hoverboards don’t work over water unless you have an independent power source). Griff’s hoverboard DOES have an independent power source, so Griff prepares to zoom after Marty and smash his head in with his baseball bat. As he prepares to do so, we quickly see the baseball bat. You can definitely make out that there is a name on the bat, and it appears as though it is a K___ G______ and then either “Jr.” or “III.” Ken Griffey III certainly would fit the scene.

However, it is not Ken Griffey III.

Bob Gale, screenwriter of the film, actually specifically debunked this legend back at the end of last year. Here is Gale on the subject (from this following nifty Back to the Future website):

Griff’s bat is signed by “Kirk Gibson Jr.” The gag was inspired by Kirk Gibson’s stellar year in 1988 and clutch walk off home run in that year’s world series, which took place just a month before we started shooting Back to the Future Part II. The gag was concocted by production designer Rick Carter and me, in a discussion regarding what signature the bat should have on it. Neil Canton [producer of the film - BC], being a die-hard Giants fan, went along with it, seeing the humor in it, despite his total disdain for the Dodgers.

So there you go!

Amusingly enough, in 1994, Griffey Jr. did, indeed, have a son. And he was, in fact, named George Kenneth Griffey III, although they decided to call him “Trey” as his nickname, which is what he goes by today. He is a well-regarded wide receiver prospect currently deciding what college to attend following his standout play at Dr. Phillips High School in Florida. Perhaps some day Trey Griffey will play professional sports, but it most likely will not be baseball!

Thanks to Bob Gale for the great information!

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: Babe Ruth played a part in the institution of Major League Baseball’s first trade deadline.

STATUS: True

Every year, as the baseball season gets closer to the July 31st Major League Baseball (MLB) Trade Deadline, fans’ thoughts generally turn to where players will end up being dealt (if they get traded at all). However, did you ever think about why there is a deadline? It has been July 31st since the players and owners collectively bargained for it to be changed in 1986. For the previous sixty-three years it was June 15th. How did it get to be June 15th? And how did it come into existence in the first place? The answer lies with a few deals involving Boston and New York, both the Red Sox and Yankees of the American League and the Braves and the Giants of the National League. It also does somehow involve Babe Ruth.

Read on to find out how!

I have written before about the environment surrounding Red Sox owner Harry Frazee’s 1920 sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees (you can read an extensive piece on it here), but I’ll quickly set the scene for you. At the time, the American League and the National League were very much run as their own independent leagues. It would not be until later in 1920 (with the Black Sox Scandal making headlines) that Major League Baseball would appoint Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the very first Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

In the American League, among the eight teams, there was a split between those five teams loyal to Ban Johnson, President of the American League (Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Washington Senators, Philadelphia Athletics and St. Louis Browns) and the three teams that were at odds with Johnson (New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox). It was a very strange situation to be in, as an all out civil war in the American League seemed to be a constant threat, so teams like the Yankees and Red Sox would actually go out of their way to make deals with the other teams for purely political reasons (you know, like “you can’t say that we don’t deal with you – we just sold you Player X!”).

So when the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for a little over $100,000 (plus some other financial interests, including help on the mortgage to Fenway Park), the rest of the league was outraged at the idea of the Yankees using their great financial strength to take advantage of the Red Sox to the detriment of the rest of the American League.

Meanwhile, the new owner of the Washington Senators, Clark Griffith, also tried to get Ruth from the Red Sox, but he did not have much luck. Moreover, when he saw how much Ruth was signed for, he became a bit worried. The fact that the Yankees were willing to spend so much was a sign to the players in the American League that, hey, the owners had money to spend – we should be getting a piece of that money. This might have been true for the other owners, but Griffith, who was in his first year as the owner of the Senators after managing the team since 1912 (he and a partner, grain broker William Richardson, purchased a controlling interest in the team in 1919 and Richardson allowed Griffith to represent both of their interests), had no other income than from the Senators and their stadium (which was re-named Griffith Stadium). So he took a hard line with his players in that first 1920 season. In addition, Griffith decided to try to get involved in American League leadership (as he was one of those owners who was friendly with Ban Johnson) and Griffith proposed a new rule that required that no player could be sold to another team for more than the waiver price. This was a direct response to the Babe Ruth sale (of course, if money was included in a trade of players, that was all right, which is obviously exactly what ended up happening). This rule of Griffith was strengthened by the other owners into a new rule – that no trades or sales could take place between August 1st and the end of the World Series. This was the first trading deadline in Major League Baseball history (the National League, in 1917, had instituted a rule saying that after August 1st, players would have to clear waivers to be dealt, but that was not a strict deadline like the American League’s new rule).

After the Babe Ruth sale, any deals between the Yankees and Red Sox began to be viewed with disdain by the other owners (and there were a lot of them, as the Red Sox sent the Yankees the following players- Ernie Shore, Duffy Lewis, and Dutch Leonard in 1918; Carl Mays in 1919; Babe Ruth in early 1920; Waite Hoyt, Harry Harper, Wally Schang, and Mike McNally in late 1920 and Everett Scott, Joe Bush, and Sam Jones late 1921). The problem was that after the 1920 season, the Black Sox scandal broke out and suddenly Charles Comiskey was no longer available as a friend to Frazee. So the Yankees owners were Frazee’s only friends in the American League, which was likely why he did so many deals with them. Still, after the Yankees won the American League pennant in 1921, Frazee tried to quell the complaints (especially Ban Johnson’s brutal comment that Frazee was a “champion wrecker of the baseball age”) by pointedly dealing with the other teams. Most notably he worked out a three-way deal with the Athletics and the Senators where he sent star shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh (who he had just acquired from the New York Yankees) to Washington for shortstop Frank O’Rourke and third baseman Joe Dugan (who came from the Athletics, with the Senators sending pitcher Jose Acosta and outfielder Bing Miller to the Athletics to complete the trade). As soon as the deal happened, though, the other teams all grumbled that it would only be a matter of time before Dugan would end up a Yankee, as they felt Frazee only acquired Dugan because he could later sell him to the Yankees for $50,000.

Frazee held off on such a deal, but late in the season, with the surprising St. Louis Browns in first place (two and a half games ahead of the Yankees) and the Red Sox mired in last place, Frazee could not hold on to Dugan any longer. So on July 23, 1922, Frazee traded Dugan and right fielder Elmer Smith to the Yankees for outfielder Elmer Miller, shortstop Johnny Mitchell, utility man Chick Fewster, pitcher Lefty O’Doul (initially a Player to be named Later) and, of course, $50,000. The Yankees then went on to surpass the Browns and win the American League pennant (although they were swept by the New York Giants in the World Series, their second straight defeat to the Giants in the Series).

The other teams were apoplectic, President Ban Johnson included. Johnson wanted to ban mid-season trades all together.

However, what is often overlooked in the hullabaloo over the Dugan trade is the fact that it was really ANOTHER deal with Boston and New York that put the collective outrage in the baseball community over the edge. You see, while the Yankees had been using their financial advantages to, well, their advantage, so, too, had the New York Giants in the National League.

Only twice did Frazee deal a player to the Yankees late in the season. Mays in 1919 and now Dugan in 1922. The Giants, however, repeatedly made deals in July.

In both 1917 and 1919 they made deals, with the August 1, 1919 acquisition of star pitcher Art Nehf from the Boston Braves for pitchers Joe Oeschger, Red Causey, and Johnny Jones, catcher Mickey O’Neil, and $55,000 being the most notable.

In June 1920, the Giants acquired star shortstop Dave Bancroft from the Philadelphia Phillies for shortstop Art Fletcher, pitcher Bill Hubbell and $100,000.

In June and July of 1921, the Giants made a number of deals, with the most notable one being the late July acquisition of outfielder Irish Meusel (then hitting .353 with 12 home runs) from the Philadelphia Phillies for outfielder Curt Walker, catcher Butch Henline, and $30,000. The deals helped the Giants come from four games back of the first place Pirates and win the National League pennant and then the 1921 World Series.

In late July 1922, the Giants had a small one and a half game lead over the St. Louis Cardinals when the Giants acquired pitcher Hugh McQuillan from the Boston Braves for pitchers Larry Benton, Fred Toney, and Harry Hulihan and $100,000.

Now, finally, after years of little media attention to the Giants and their mid-season acquisitions, THIS deal suddenly drew the rage of sportswriters across the country, as the Giants were being accused of “buying” the championship once again.

It helped that the two teams most affected by the New York teams and their trades were both from St. Louis. Cardinals General Manager Branch Rickey tried to drum up moral outrage over the deals, getting the City Council, the Rotary Club and other local St. Louis organizations to send letters of protest to Commissioner Landis. After the season, with complaints from all sides, Landis agreed to make changes (it helped that the owners had recently agreed to new rules allowing Landis considerably more power as Commissioner) and while he did not take Ban Johnson’s “no mid-season trades” rule seriously (especially since Landis strongly disliked Johnson), he did agree to make a trade deadline for the Major Leagues, choosing June 15th based on a suggestion by the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Barney Dreyfuss.

So that’s how we got the June 15th trade deadline. First the Babe Ruth sale, and then later Boston/New York deals.

Thanks to Mike Lynch and his brilliant book, Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson, and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League and Ted Leavengood’s nifty biography, Clark Griffith: The Old Fox of Washington Baseball , as they were filled with information about this topic (particularly Lynch’s book).

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: A “farce game” ended up robbing Walter Johnson of an impressive pitching record (although the robbery was not recorded for over half a century!).

STATUS: True

In 1912, Clark Griffith became the manager of the Washington Senators. He would manage the team for nine seasons and eventually buy the team himself.

A tradition he started early on was that at the end of the season, he would treat the fans to a “farce game,” a game intentionally played for laughs (only if the game did not affect the standings – the Senators were in second place in the American League in 1912 and 1913 and third places in 1914). For instance, Griffith himself (a former star pitcher then in his 40s) would come out of retirement on the last game of the season to pitch in relief in 1912-1914 (he got an at-bat in each of the three games and actually hit a double in 1913 and 1914!). When the game was actually held in D.C. in 1913, they went even MORE overboard!

The Senators and the Red Sox played a wild game on Saturday, October 4th 1913 that included a then-record EIGHT pitchers used for Washington!

The Senators’ star pitcher Walter Johnson was the center fielder that day! He stole two based that day. With the Senators up 10-3 going into the 9th inning, Johnson moved from center to pitcher Senators coach Jack Ryan (like Griffith, in his mid-40s at the time) came in to catch. Johnson intentionally throw two lob pitches to the Boston hitters. They both got hits. Johnson then moved back to center field (while pretending to be disgusted at his performance) and the Senators back-up catcher, Eddie Ainsmith, came in to make the only pitching appearance of his career. Ainsmith promptly gave up back-to-back triples, scoring both runs. Griffith came in to pitch, forming an octogenarian battery with Ryan. The Senators used a then-record five pitchers in the inning, including rookie second baseman Joe Geldeon, before they managed to hold on to a wild 10-9 victory that seemed to entertain everyone (including the umpires, who let both teams have additional outs during the game).

Here is the twist, though. Since the game was a joke game and Johnson intentionally threw what amounted to batting practice pitches, the official scorer did not charge Johnson with the earned runs. This left Johnson with a 1.09 ERA for the season, a remarkable year in which Johnson went 36-7 with 243 strikeouts in 346 innings pitched.

That 1.09 ERA was one of the best ERAs of all-time and it was THE best ERA for a pitcher who threw over 300 innings.

Well, in 1968, Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA in over 304 2/3 innings pitched. At the time, while it was a tremendous feat, it was thought to be the second-best ERA of a pitcher who threw at least 300 innings.

Sometime in early 1980s, though, a researcher was going over Johnson’s box scores and discovered the scoring decision. Naturally, it was overruled (as the game WAS an official game, even if it was intended as a joke) and so Johnson’s ERA for 1913 ended up as 1.14, making him second to Gibson among pitchers who threw at least 300 innings (and from fourth to sixth in best single-season ERA by a pitcher qualifying for the ERA title).

So the joke, as it turned out, was on Johnson! Then again, he died thinking he had the record (and he also died a first ballot Hall of Famer – and when I say “first ballot,” I mean FIRST BALLOT, as he was one of only five men to get elected in the Baseball Hall of Fame’s inaugural induction in 1935), so I don’t think he minded too much.

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin

Click here to view an archive of all the previous soccer/football legends.

Let’s begin!

SOCCER/FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: A Senegalese player was signed by a British Premier League team through a hoax played on the club’s manager.

STATUS: True

Association football history is littered with players who were given a chance to play in the Premier League in England (the top football league in the country) or in Serie A in Italy (the Italian equivalent to the Premier League) and not only failed, but flamed out quickly and spectacularly. There have been many legends told about these flame-outs. Heck, in a previous Sports Urban Legend installment, I examined the legend of Luther Blissett and how exactly he came to be signed by AC Milan for a disastrous season in Serie A (you can read that story here). One of the craziest stories, though, involves a Senegalese football player named Ali Dia who actually managed to con himself on to a British Premier League team (and even saw an action in a Premier League game!)!

Read on to see how he managed to pull it off…

Born in 1965 in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, Ali Dia spent the late 1980s and early 1990s playing for a variety of small non-league football clubs in France, Germany and, by the mid 1990s, England. Dia had failed try-outs for a number of smaller league football clubs in England. In 1996, he appeared in one game for the semi-professional Blyth Spartans in Blyth, Northumberland, England. Where he ended up playing next would astound everyone. You see, Dia and another person (some reports say it was his agent, but I don’t know if we’ll ever have a definitive answer on it, so I think it is better to stick with referring to him as a friend of Dia’s) had come up with a scam that would involve the friend calling teams in the Premier League and presenting himself as George Weah, the Liberian football player who was the reigning Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Player of the Year in 1995 (and who would later be named the African Player of the Century soon after)!

Dia’s friend had already tried West Ham United before convincing Southampton manager Graeme Souness that the actual George Weah was calling him and recommending his cousin Ali Dia, who had played with Weah at Paris Saint-Germain and had represented his native Senegal in international play.

Souness agreed to give Dia a try-out, and despite not exactly impressing his fellow Southampton players at his try-out, Souness still figured that Weah must know what he is talking about, so he gave Dia a trial contract with the team (I have seen conflicting reports as to the length of the contract – some say a month and some say a week. It doesn’t really matter) and he was listed as one of the possible substitutes for Southampton’s next game against Leeds on November 23, 1996. Southampton star player Matthew Le Tissier later recalled that after seeing Dia’s weak try-out that they would never hear from the player again, only to see the next day, “Then when we turned up for the game against Leeds the following day, I was amazed to hear that he’d been named on the subs’ bench. I think the picture of the faces of the boys must have been remarkable. Our jaws all dropped to the floor.” Souness had told the media about what he thought was Dia’s story, so the crowd knew about “Weah’s cousin” being a member of the team the next day.

Amusingly enough, it was an injury to Le Tissier that led to Dia entering the game!

Dia entered at the 32 minute mark in the game. Peter Harrison, Manager of the Blyth Spartans, was particularly floored, “Next thing I knew I was watching him on Match of the Day playing for Southampton which was pretty unbelievable.” What is really interesting is that Dia actually nearly scored a goal soon after entering the game!! However, soon it became quite apparent that Dia had no place playing in a Premier League match. Le Tissier later recalled, “He ran around the pitch like Bambi on ice; it was very embarrassing to watch.” So after just fifty-three minutes on the pitch, Souness actually had to put in a substitute for his substitute!! Ken Monkou entered for Dia and Dia never played another game for Southampton.

Dia actually played eight games for a small non-league team in Gateshead, England (no doubt using his experience on Southampton as his pitch for being signed) before retiring from football period to go back to school. He graduated from Northumbria University in Newcastle in 2001 with a degree in business.

Souness later stated, “I don’t feel I have been duped in the slightest. That’s just the way the world is these days.” Souness resigned as Southampton manager after the 1996-97 season, his only season in Southampton.

Thanks to David Hills of the Observer, Thom Gibbs of the Telegraph and Paul Bradbury for the great quotes for the piece!

SOCCER/FOOTBALL LEGEND: A player’s debut for a Premier League club was put off by a number of months because he injured himself celebrating a pre-season goal.

STATUS: True

Celestine Babayaro is a retired football player from Nigeria. Babayaro spent parts of eight seasons for Chelsea’s Football Club in the Premier League. He had some success in Chelsea, being part of the team when they won the FA Cup in 2000. He was let go right before Chelsea went on their REALLY successful run in the mid-2000′s, though. Still, Babayaro had a fine career for Chelsea.

However, his start was not so good.

Babayaro moved to Chelsea as a teenager for £2.25 million pounds. Then the most Chelsea ever spent on a teen player.

Babayaro was popular with the fans for his acrobatic celebrations when Chelsea scored a goal. However, said acrobatics got him into trouble in his first pre-season for Chelsea.

In a pre-season match against Stevenage Borough, Babayaro actually BROKE HIS LEG doing a post-goal backward somersault!

Because of that injury, he did not make first-team debut for many months (finally debuting against Slovan Bratislava in the European Cup Winners’ Cup).

Not the way to start your career! Luckily, things worked out well for him as a player anyways. He has allegedly had some post-career financial problems, although Babayaro has downplayed the severity of his money problems.

Thanks to Mike Baker of the Guardian for the information about Babayaro!

SOCCER/FOOTBALL LEGEND: The sport apparel company Adidas got its name from the acronym “All Day I Dream About Soccer” (or, in the alternative, “All Day I Dream About Sport”).

STATUS: Both False

In the world of product names, quite often the names behind the companies are plainly evident. To wit, Rawlings Sporting Goods was named after its founders, brothers Alfred and George Rawlings. Another sporting goods giant, Spalding, was named after its founder, Albert Spalding. Pretty simple, eh? Even when things get a bit more confusing, many companies do a good enough job advertising their history so that while you might not know much about Greek goddesses, you might know that Nike is the Greek goddess of victory.

But when names are not obvious and the origin of the name is not widely promoted, that’s when things get tricky. That’s when you start getting into somewhat “conspiratorial” waters, where people start to think up elaborate acronyms and the like to explain odd company names. Muddying these waters are companies like Fubu, which actually ARE named after an interesting acronym for “Five Urban Brothers United,” testifying to the original goal of the company (as was their later slogan/acronym “For Us, By Us”), which was to create a market for shoes and apparel designed and produced by African-Americans.

So it is not surprising that the somewhat odd name of the European shoe and sports apparel company Adidas has given rise to legends about the origin of its name.

The first acronym bandied about as the basis of the company’s name was “All Day I Dream About Soccer,” although more recently the more generic “All Day I Dream About Sport” has become a popular guess for the origin of the company’s name.

Both are incorrect.

The actual origin is tied to an acrimonious split between two German brothers in the wake of World War II.

After returning from World War I, Adolf Dassler began producing sport shoes in his mother’s laundry (using debris from the war as his starting point). Adolf’s father worked at a shoe factory, and in the early 1920s, his father and some family friends helped Adolf start up his own shoe company. In 1924, Adolf’s older brother, Rudolf, joined Adolf in the business, with Adolf as the main designer and Rudolf as the salesman. The pair ran a very low budget organization (at one point, they were actually using pedal-generated electricity for the production of their shoes) but by the 1930s had begun to make a name for themselves. Their company, Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory) really broke through in 1936 when the American star athlete, Jesse Owens, wore their shoes as he won four gold medals in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. In the years leading up to World War II, the brothers were selling 200,000 pairs of shoes a year!

By this time, the brothers had already joined the Nazi Party in Germany (in fact, it was their Nazi connections that made it possible for them to get access to Owens in the first place) and during World War II they produced shoes for German soldiers (and by the end of the war they had transformed their factory into an armament production factory for the war effort). For a rising company in Germany in the 1930s, becoming a member of the Nazi party was practically a necessity, so I would not be so quick to judge the Dassler brothers on their actual political viewpoints. That said, while it was practically a necessity, it was not actually a necessity, so they certainly have to take at least some heat for their political alliances.

The brothers had quite different personalities, with Rudolf the bombastic salesman and Adolf the quiet shoe designer. They lived together in the same house with their wives during World War II and their relationship got more and more strained. When Rudolf was drafted into the German army, he believed that Adolf had pulled strings to get Rudolf out of his hair. Later, when Rudolf was captured by American soldiers and accused of being a member of SS (the armed force of the Nazi Party), he believed that Adolf had tipped the Americans off (Rudolf was cleared of the charges).

Either one of those incidents could have led to estrangement between the brothers, but another possibility is something that happened in 1943 during the Allied bombings of Berlin. The brothers were forced to share Adolf’s bomb shelter with their families, and Adolf remarked “The dirty bastards are back again,” which Rudolf took as a reference to him and his family, while Adolf maintained that he was referring to the Allies.

Whatever the reason for the estrangement (the “dirty bastards” misunderstanding is the most popular one, but I don’t see how that would be worse than thinking your brother turned you in to the opposition and said you were a member of the SS), after the war, in 1948, the brothers split their business in half.

In 1949, Adolf named his new company adidas AG (originally it was lowercase like that) after his nickname Adi and his last name Dassler. So Adi Dassler became adidas.

Rudolf did the same thing with his company name, calling his new company Ruda. Soon after forming Ruda, though, he changed the name of the company to Puma, which remains its name today.

The brothers were highly competitive in the athletic endorsement market, as they each competed to be the shoe of choice for Olympic and World Cup star athletes. They also pushed each other in the realm of shoe innovations, with each company trying to add new bells and whistles to their respective shoes (like bolt-on cleats or screw-in studs). Rudolf got off to a great start by scoring key endorsements in the 1948 and 1952 Summer Olympics, but Adolf would make the biggest score when his adidas shoes were worn by the West German national team as they won the 1954 FIFA World Cup, which was a really big deal at the time.

Adidas went on to become the largest shoe company in Europe and second only to Nike in the world.

Puma is a successful worldwide company, as well.

“All Day I Dream About Soccer” and the more recent “All Day I Dream About Sport (sometimes Sports)” are just acronyms created BASED on the success of adidas (these sort of acronyms are sometimes called backronyms, because they work backwards off of an established name). A German artist named Barbara Gauss claims to own a trademark on both phrases dating back to 1981.

Thanks to reader Jonathan B. for suggesting I feature this one!

Okay, that’s it for this edition!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

-Brian Cronin