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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about baseball and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the baseball urban legends featured so far.

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: Roger Bresnahan invented the shin guard.

Although you may have never heard of him, Roger Bresnahan is in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

Bresnahan was a fine catcher (he was versatile enough to have played all nine positions!) for many years (I believe 17 in total) and a good baseball player, just not one good enough to make the Hall of Fame typically.

He mostly made it because he was very popular among sportswriters and fans.

Heck, Ogden Nash even included him in his famous 1949 baseball poem, Lineup for Yesterday, for crying out loud!

B is for Bresnahan
Back of the plate;
The Cubs were his love,
and McGraw his hate.

It is surprising that Nash couldn’t find someone other than Bresnahan for B. To put it into context, A was for Grover Cleveland Alexander, C was for Ty Cobb, D was for Dizzy Dean and B is for Roger Bresnahan?!!?

How odd.

In any event, Bresnahan passed away in 1944 and was elected to the Hall of Fame the next year by the Veterans Committee (if you’re thinking sympathy vote, you’re most likely correct).

However, the one thing that I suppose you could think of for his Hall of Fame case is that he invented the shin guards that catchers wore to protect their, you know, shins.

But DID he?
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Find out the answer in my latest ESPN.com column.

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Find out the answer in my first column at ESPN.com.

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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about basketball and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the basketball urban legends featured so far.

BASKETBALL URBAN LEGEND: Chuck Connors was once punished in a peculiar fashion for his reaction to a tough loss against the St. Louis Bombers.

Kevin “Chuck” Connors served in the military during World War II and was almost 25 when he got out of the service, but while still in the Army (he was an instructor at Camp Campbell in Kentucky and West Point in New York), Connors moonlighted as a professional basketball player for a variety of teams in the American Basketball League.

His dream, though, was to play for his hometown team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and eventually he got his chance, after spending a number of years in the minors…

While in the minor leagues, he played basketball, as well (taking time off from the minors when necessary), becoming an original member of the Boston Celtics of the brand-new National Basketball Association.

Connors was even drafted by the Chicago Bears of the NFL, although he never suited up for them.

Connors was not particularly good at any of the sports, but he was athletic enough to stick around. For the Dodgers, he had ONE at-bat (in 1949). In said at-bat, he grounded into a double play.

But first, in his one season with the Celtics, Connors was known as being a good defender because of his athleticism (but also because of his hard-nose, aggressive play, where he was willing to hit a guy if it needed doing). However, on the offensive side of the game, he was not so proficient.

This was highlit during a particularly brutal loss that the Celtics suffered in November of 1946 to the St. Louis Bombers in St. Louis.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about basketball and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the basketball urban legends featured so far.

BASKETBALL URBAN LEGEND: Jim Thorpe played professional basketball.

One of the neat things about the study of history is that quite often, historical facts can be discovered when you least expect them. One such instance of this is the professional basketball career of Jim Thorpe, which went undocumented in biographies of the man until 2005!!!

And all because of a ticket that fell out of a used book.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about basketball and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the basketball urban legends featured so far.

BASKETBALL URBAN LEGEND: Danny Ainge once bit Tree Rollins during a playoff game.

A good deal of legends revolve around the “telephone” effect, which is where the legends spread just like the game “telephone,” where a group of people sit in a circle and the first person whispers a phrase to the second person who whispers it to the third person and so on and so forth and you see if the last person hears the phrase exactly the same way the first person said it.

However, it’s rare to see the telephone effect distort something as dramatically as it has regarding the time Tree Rollins and Danny Ainge had an altercation in the 1983 NBA Playoffs, an event which eventually ended up having the player who was bitten being blamed for biting the OTHER guy!!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about football and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the football urban legends featured so far.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: A paternity test was done on George Gipp – almost seventy-seven years after he died!

George Gipp was one of the early legends of Notre Dame football, becoming just the second consensus first All-American in Football from the school in 1920, his senior year.

Gipp played for the Notre Dame Varsity for four years between 1916-1920 (his years 21-25), and held many records for decades, including the all-time rushing record, which he held for nearly sixty years!

Gipp played multiple positions for the Fighting Irish, including quarterback, halfback (his main position) and even punter!

He tragically died of a streptococcal throat infection in December of his Senior year (days after leading the Irish to a victory).

Years later, Notre Dame Coach Knute Rockne immortalized Gipp with a motivational speech he gave his team (trailing at halftime as underdogs against an undefeated Army team in 1928) that told them of Gipp’s last words to him:

I’ve got to go, Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock. But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.

“Win one for the Gipper!” became a memorable slogan, especially when it was immortalized in the 1940 film, Knute Rocke: All-American (with future United States President Ronald Reagan playing Gipp).

While Gipp was an All-American boy on the field, he also might have been a bit busy off the field, as well, and was actually subject to a paternity test involving a pregnant 18-year-old high school student.

That’s normal enough, except for WHEN the paternity test took place – in 2007!!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about football and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the football urban legends featured so far.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND: The NFL tried to trademark “The Big Game.”

The National Football League is quite strict when it comes to protecting its trademarks, which include the words and phrases “NFL,” “Super Bowl” and “Super Sunday” (a trademark registered specifically with regards to its use in conjunction with football).

As such, when it comes to hosting Super Bowl parties at churches and bars, the NFL prohibits Super Bowl parties at anywhere that promotes a particular message, which includes churches. In addition, unless you are a place that regularly airs sporting events (like a sports bar), you are constrained from using a TV bigger than 55 inches.

And, of course, you can not use the NFL’s trademarks like “Super Bowl” or “Super Sunday” in your advertisements.

So the most popular alternative is to say “The Big Game,” as in “Come Watch The Big Game This Sunday at 6pm!”

And that’s been the case for years, until the NFL, in 2006, actually registered a trademark claim on the term “The Big Game,” as well!!!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about tennis and whether they are true or false.

TENNIS URBAN LEGEND: Stefan Edberg once killed a man with his tennis serve.

Stefan Edberg was one of the best tennis players of his generation, and was actually ranked #1 in the world at one point in the early 1990s.

Edberg won the Australian Open twice (1985 and 1987), Wimbledon twice (1988 and 1990) and the U.S. Open twice (1991 and 1992), with the French Open being the only Grand Slam title he never won (he came in second in 1989).

However, when he was still in Juniors in the early 1980s, Edberg had an incident that almost made him quit tennis all together.
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