Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about tennis and whether they are true or false.
TENNIS URBAN LEGEND: Bjorn Borg had a pulse rate of 45 beats per minute.
Often in our zeal to celebrate legendary athletes, we sometimes begin to, well, create legends about these legendary athletes, often exaggerating their physical abilities to the extreme.
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: Charlie Kerfeld sought to commemorate his uniform number when it came time to renegotiate his contract after the 1986 baseball season.
Charlie Kerfeld was a big surprise for the Houston Astros in 1986 (just his second year in the majors, and his first full season – he was still considered a rookie).
The young righthander went 11-2 with a 2.69 ERA and seven saves to form a dynamite relief tandem with Astros closer Dave Smith.
The Astros bullpen was a big part of the Astro success in 1986, a season where they made the playoffs and almost went to the World Series (mostly due to their great starting pitcher, Mike Scott, who won the MVP of the series even though the Astros lost!) if those pesky Mets didn’t manage to beat the Astros in two of the most amazing games in National League Championship Series history (a 12-inning Game 5 victory in New York followed by a 16-inning Game 6 victory in Houston, where the Mets scored one run in the top of the 14th only to see Houston tie it in the bottom of the 14th, then the Mets scored three in the top of the 16th and the Astros scored two in the bottom half and had the tying run on third base when the game ended).
Kerfeld was a gregarious, fun-loving guy.
Here’s a popular video of him in a post-game celebration after the Astros clinched the pennant (Mike Scott pitched a no-hitter to clinch the pennant) to go to the playoffs…
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: The New York Yankees were the first Major League Baseball team to regularly use uniform numbers.
First off, let’s get it straight that I’m not talking about the first team to EVER use uniform numbers, because that would be the Cleveland Indians in 1916 who wore small numbers on the left sleeves of their home uniforms.
No, I’m talking about the first team to use the back of the uniform numbers that have become so ingrained in the game of baseball.
And that honor has been given to the 1929 New York Yankees for many, many years.
Just do a quick search for “yankess first team to wear uniform numbers” and you’ll see a lot of results (one even has “1939” as the date, which is silly, as Babe Ruth was retired by then) crediting the 1929 Yankees.
Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about football/soccer and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the football/soccer urban legends featured so far.
BASEBALL URBAN 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”).
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.
I’ll be posting some Sports Legends Revealed columns at ESPN.com. They’ll be unique to ESPN, so when a column goes up over there, I’ll link to it here (like how I link to Comic Book Legends Revealed at Comics Should Be Good on Entertainment Legends Revealed).
This is the latest in a series of examinations of legends related to golf and whether they are true or false.
GOLF URBAN LEGEND: Clifford Roberts once said that “As long as I’m alive, golfers will be white, and caddies will be black.”
This is a tricky one, to be sure.
Clifford Roberts is a legend in the world of golf, and not always (heck, rarely) for things you would think he would have liked to have been remembered for, like co-founding the Augusta National Golf Club in 1931 with Bobby Jones (then the most famous golfer in the world) and then forming the Masters Tournament with Jones in 1934.
No, Roberts (who served as the Chairman of the Masters from 1934 until 1976) is best known for being, as the World Golf Hall of Fame describes him, “autocratic, mysterious, intimidating and often enigmatic.”
Roberts (seen above with Bobby Jones sitting next to him – Jones is in the center and Roberts is on Jones’ left) was a strange guy who greatly helped to innovate the game of golf, and it was through his stewardship that the Masters became the premier golf tournament that it remains today. Roberts invented the current golf scoring system (that makes it easy for viewers to quickly figure out how a player is doing) and he designed most of the current gallery setups for fans to view the game. He ran a very tight ship but one that was geared towards making the Masters the greatest golf tournament around. In one example of how desperate he was for the Masters to be “perfect,” he even asked Jones to not come to the Masters late in Jones’ life, because Jones, enfeebled by Lou Gehrig’s Disease, would be a distraction from the festivities.
That last story shows how Roberts could be a real tough guy to work with at times. Another, more serious, claim against Roberts was over the racial makeup of the Masters Tournament. Read the rest of this entry »
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 football urban legends featured so far.
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!).
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! And the result ruined a record for Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson.
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: The United States voted against sending National Basketball Association players to the 1992 Olympics.
From the first Men’s Basketball tournament in the Summer Olympics in 1936, where the United States won a thrilling, high-scoring 18-9 victory over Canada (okay, maybe not thrilling or high scoring) to claim the Gold Medal, the United States has dominated the sport of Men’s Basketball. From 1936 through 1984, a span of eleven Olympic Games, the United States only failed to win the Gold Medal twice. Once in the highly controversial (I mean highly controversial) 1972 Gold Medal Game against the Soviet Union and once in 1980 (when the United States boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics). So really, in the first eleven Olympic Men’s Basketball tournaments, the United States did not suffer a single clean loss. They were the dominant force in men’s basketball in the world. That changed in 1988, when the amateur-led team from the United States (featuring future NBA Hall of Famer David Robinson and future NBA All-Stars Dan Majerle, Danny Manning and Mitch Richmond) lost to the Soviet Union basketball team, which consisted of professional basketball players, including future NBA players Šarūnas Marčiulionis and Arvydas Sabonis. The 24-year-old Sabonis was one of the best players in the world at the time (and had already been named European Player of the Year three times by the time the 1988 Olympics rolled around).
Before the tournament even finished (but after the United States had been eliminated from Gold Medal contention), the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) had decided to hold a vote in early 1989 to re-visit the subject of whether players from the National Basketball Association (NBA) should be allowed to participate in future international games. Obviously, the vote passed and the “Dream Team” was born, and they dominated the next three Olympics (plus the 1994 FIBA World Championships) before they, too, fell short at the 2004 Olympics and the 2002 and 2006 World Championships (the 1998 team lost, too, but it had no professional players on it due to the then-current NBA labor dispute). A re-vamped USA Basketball team dominated the 2008 Olympics, the 2010 World Championships and the 2012 Olympics. Clearly, though, the rest of the world has closed whatever gap existed in 1992 (as shown by the Gold Medal games in 2008 and 2012, where Spain hung very tough with Team USA).
History remembers the situation as the United States being angered/embarrassed over losing the 1988 Olympics and deciding to fix the situation by sending their best to take care of things in 1992. But is that actually what happened?
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: Larry Bird played a game where he shot all of his shots left-handed.
Today is “Left Handed Day,” so I thought it appropriate to post this legend – BC.
On Valentine’s Day, 1986, Larry Bird gave a love letter, of sorts, to his fans when he thrilled them with a striking example of Bird’s ability to shoot from both hands, his normal right hand as well as his left hand (Bird used his left hand to eat when he was not playing basketball).
But HOW striking was the example? Did Bird really shoot all of his shots left-handed that day?
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 Gatorade shower caused the death of Hall of Fame football coach George Allen.
After leading the New York Giants to a victory in Super Bowl XLVI earlier this year, head coach Tom Coughlin earned himself his second post=Super Bowl Gatorade shower (in the Giants’ Super Bowl XLII victory, it was a clear liquid while this time around it was purple Gatorade). While the Gatorade shower is a notable tradition for coaches who just won the big game (a tradition popularized by the New York Giants during the 1980s, I addressed the history of the tradition in a Football Urban Legends Revealed here), there are concerns from some about an older coach like Coughlin (who is 65 years old) being doused with cold liquid in February. These concerns appeared to be justified with the 1990 death of Hall of Fame football coach George Allen, who allegedly died because of a Gatorade shower he received earlier that year. Read on to learn if the story is true.
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Here are links to some fine online bookstores where you can order copies of the books!
100 THINGS X-MEN FANS SHOULD KNOW AND DO BEFORE THEY DIE
