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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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Just as a head’s up, I’m re-formatting the site to have the legends each have their own individual entry. It is how I’ve been doing them every week at the L.A. Times and I think it likely works best going forward. So I’m going to go through all of the old entries and re-post them in new individual entries. The old format entries will still be around (so as to not break any old links people might have), but they will eventually not be linked by tags or by the archives. Just a head’s up in case you were wondering why you were suddenly seeing a whole pile of new posts with old legends in them.

What’s funny is that individual posts for each legend is how I originally did it on Sports Legends but changed it to match Entertainment Legends and now I’m switching them both to match the original Sports Legends format.

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My new book, Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? (the answer, of course, is so he can repel sharks…and other dangerous sea creatures) is out today!

The book contains a series of lists about comic books. Some examples include the three topics depicted on the cover (which was drawn by Kevin Hopgood, the fellow who designed War Machine’s armor)…

Seven Bands That Got Their Names from Comic Books
Six Fellow Superheroes That Wolverine Has Stabbed at One Point or Another
Ten Crazy Items Found in Batman’s Utility Belt

Essentially, it is all the sort of stuff you expect from my comic book writing! Roughly 75% of it is brand-new material!

In addition, there are twenty-two guest lists by a whole bunch of great comic creators. Some examples include the three creators mentioned on the cover….

Mark Millar’s “Five ‘WTF?’ Moments in Comic Book History?”
Dave Gibbons’ “Six Great Silver Age Covers”
Geoff Johns’ “Nine Iconic Green Lantern Covers”

The other creators who contributed lists are (in alphabetical order): Jason Aaron, Scott Allie, Paige Braddock, Peter David, J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Deodato, Jay Faerber, Kieron Gillen, Gabriel Hardman, Frazer Irving, Jeff Lemire, Greg Pak, Jimmy Palmiotti, John Rozum, Marc Sumerak, Eric Trautmann, Fred Van Lente, Mark Waid, Zeb Wells and Skottie Young.

Order a copy today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Powell’s Books and many more fine online bookstores (or buy it in whichever brick and mortar store you enjoy)!

If you buy it from Amazon, I get a cut, but really, buy it from wherever you’d like! A sale is a sale!

The important thing is buying it. 😉

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Julie Ham, of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, wrote an interesting guide to the role of rumor when it comes to sporting events and the trafficking of women for sex.

She e-mailed me to mention that she cited an old installment of Soccer/Football Urban Legends Revealed about the myths about women trafficking at the World Cup (you can read that installment here).

You can read Julie’s guide here. It’s an interesting read.

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I finally finished putting together archives for all the sports legends (that have had at least five installments).

Check them out (I’ll also include the archive links in future installments for each of them, of course)!

Baseball Legends History

Football Legends History

Basketball Legends History

Hockey Legends History

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As baseball goes back to playing ball, so, too, do we go back to brand-new sports legends!

I’ll be opening up with eight straight installments of baseball legends (appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from April 5th through April 21st) before then returning to the regular schedule of new sports legends on Mondays and Fridays (the categories in the sidebar show you which sports you might see featured), with baseball legends appearing every Wednesday.

It is eight installments because I’m going to devote one installment to legends from each of the eight playoff teams from last season! I’ll begin with last year’s World Champions, the New York Yankees!

Enjoy!

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I like the new set-up, I think it looks a lot nicer.

That said, that still leaves a whole pile of legends left in the old format, so what I figure I’ll do is for the next couple of weeks, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll re-post the old legends in the current format. It is just annoying to me that Baseball Legends Revealed, for instance, is only on #3 while TV Legends Revealed are going to be up to #11 this week.

So this way, the Sports Legends will soon basically catch up to where the Entertainment Legends are, numbers-wise.

And when people look back at this in the future, it’ll make a lot more sense than “Well, you see, here are a bunch of orderly numbered legends and here are 10-20 stray legends for some reason.”

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After doing this for a month or so now, I think that the set-up I use for Entertainment Legends Revealed is probably just a more attractive format, so starting this week, I’m going to begin using that set-up, with installments on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I’ll have it be three legends from one sport each time around, although I think Wednesday will be just Baseball.

So look for the first installment this Monday! I believe it’ll be Tennis this time around.

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SPORTS LEGEND: A former football Rookie of the Year was involved, without his knowledge, is two separate nationwide scams.

John Brockington was a star at Ohio State when he helped lead the team to a definitive spot as the 1968 National Champions.

He was drafted by the Green Bay Packers with the ninth overall draft pick in 1971.

He won the Offensive Rookie of the Year Award on the way to having a very impressive career in the National Football League, although a relatively short-lived one (he had a lot of wear and tear on his body), making the All-Pro team and the Pro-Bowl his first three seasons, but he was finished with football by 1977.

That’s when things got a little more interesting.
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