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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: Manute Bol coined the term “my bad.”

When Manute Bol passed away in 2010 at the far too young age of 47, he left behind an impressive legacy. Besides a ten-year career in the National Basketball Association (NBA), where the seven foot seven center (one of the very the first African-born players to be drafted in the NBA) was a dominant shot blocker (he is currently second all-time in career blocks per game)…

Bol had an even larger impact off of the court as a charity worker. Bol ended up effectively donating all the money he made during his NBA career to charity organizations, specifically those involving his home country Sudan. Bol was a tireless advocate for Sudanese refugees, choosing to do pretty much anything to raise money for his Ring True Foundation (which was a fund-raising organization to bring relief to Christians within Sudan), even competing in Fox’s Celebrity Boxing in 2002 in exchange for publicity for the Ring True Foundation.

Bol was a great man and when he passed away in 2010 due to acute kidney failure, he was honored all over the world, by both the basketball world and the world of international charity. He even received a salute on the floor of the United States Senate.

As noted above, Bol was second all-time in career blocks per game. However, on a per minute basis, Bol was even better. On a per minute basis, he was by far the most prolific shot-blocker in the history of the NBA. The problem was that Bol, who never played basketball until he was 16, was not particularly skilled in the other areas of basketball. He was an awful shooter, a mediocre rebounder for hie height (average overall) and he turned the ball over at a prodigious rate. Therefore, he never played a lot of minutes in the NBA, only averaging over 20 minutes a game twice (not surprisingly, the only two years he led the NBA in blocks per game). In addition to not playing basketball until he was 16, Bol did not start learning English until he was 21, when he was invited to Cleveland by the coach of Cleveland State University (Bol could not actually play for Cleveland State, as their basketball program was put on probation for giving improper financial assistance to Bol and a couple other African players). When you combine his rough basketball skills, his rough grasp on the English language and his general good natured attitude, you possibly get the creation of a new phrase.

The great Bill Plaschke had this to say on ESPN’s Around the Horn following Bol’s death in 2010:

Also, you might not know this, he coined the phrase ‘my bad’ back in the late 1980s. Language experts have pretty much proven this. When he made a pass, instead of saying ‘my fault,’ he would say ‘my bad,’ because he didn’t understand the language. That is the absolute truth.

Is it? Let’s find out!
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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 2003 Florida Gators media guide featured a crocodile by mistake.

In 2003, the Florida Gators put out their Media Guide.

All well and good except, of course, that was a crocodile on the cover, not an alligator!
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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: Rick Honeycutt cut himself on the tack he was using to cheat in a game.

Rick Honeycutt spent twenty-one years in the Major Leagues pitching for eight different baseball teams between 1977 and 1997.

Here he is when he was on the Texas Rangers…

In 1980, while pitching for the last-place Seattle Mariners against the first-place Kansas City Royals, in one of the last games of the season, Honeycutt decided he would try SOMEthing different. He took a tack off of a Royals bulletin board and taped it to one his fingers hidden in his glove. Then things got weird…
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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: Drew Gooden missed three games due to infected hair follicles.

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, eleven 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…
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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: A Major League Baseball team’s announcer pitched the final game of the season for the team he was covering.

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.
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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: Mike Holmgren impersonated God in an attempt to get Reggie White to sign with the Green Bay Packers.

The Green Bay Packers have long been an oddity in the world of professional sports. In a thirty-two team league where the Buffalo Bills have the thirty-first smallest metropolitan area population at 1.1 million people, the Packers have less than a third of that population, and Green Bay, Wisconsin sits over 110 miles from Milwaukee’s 1.5 million. So while the Packers (who are owned by the community of Green Bay itself) will almost certainly never move, when the National Football League (NFL) began having unrestricted free agency in 1993, the Packers’ relatively small stature as a metropolitan area was seen as a major disadvantage to the team in its pursuit of prospective free agents.

But then God helped them out…with an assist from Mike Holmgren…or maybe it was the other way around?
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This is the first in a series of legends about the sport of rugby.

RUGBY URBAN LEGEND: A player used a blood capsule to fake a cut as part of an elaborate scheme by his team.

One of the more annoying aspects of sports like football and basketball is the concept of “flopping,” players pretending to be fouled when they did not actually get foul. Like two basketball players being tangled up and one of them flings himself to the ground so that the referee will call a foul on the other guy even though there was no actual foul. After all, how can the referees possibly tell what happened when the “flopper” does a good acting job? After all, it is easy enough to pretend that you were hit by someone. However, it is a whole other story to try to fake being cut and bleeding. And yet, that’s just what happened in 2009 during a rugby union match during the Heineken Cup tournament (a tournament of the top rugby union teams for six different countries: England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, France and Italy) between The Harlequin Football Club (from London) and Leinster Rugby (from Dublin). Read on to learn about one of the most outlandish cheating scandals in rugby union history (and heck, in basically all sports history)!

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

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!

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

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.
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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: Joe Namath posed for his Topps rookie card while still in the hospital.

One of the notable differences in the world of sports cards nowadays as opposed to the early days of Topps sports cards is the pictures on the fronts of the cards. Today, you routinely get detailed shots of the players in action – hitting home runs, dunking the basketball, throwing a touchdown pass, shooting the puck and more. Early on, though, almost all cards were just simple head shots of a player or, for variety’s sake, players posed in a few different standard “action” shots (like a player crouched over as if they were fielding a ball). Heck, sometimes Topps even re-used the photos for some players in multiple years! While it did not always make for the most interesting looking cards, it was at least very simple to get the necessary shots for the cards. In fact, since they often used a blank background, you could get a shot for a card pretty much anywhere – it did not have to come on the actual field and/or court. Never was this more evident than with the 1965 Topps rookie card of Joe Namath – a card posed for by Namath while he was in the hospital!

Read on to see how this strange event came about…

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