It’s “game on” for hipping you to the real stories behind these commonly believed sports mistruths.
In 1986, Bill Buckner lost the World Series for the Boston Red Sox when he allowed a hit ball to roll through his legs.
That play happened in Game Six of the championship series against the New York Mets. The Red Sox lost that night, but they still had a chance to win in the decisive seventh game, and they didn’t.
Michael Jordan had one of the greatest nights of his career with Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, putting up 38 points for the Chicago Bulls…despite having the flu.
It’s far more likely that he had food poisoning. According to Bulls trainer Tim Grover, the illness stemmed from a bad pizza Jordan ate the night before.
The “Miracle on Ice” went down at the 1980 Winter Olympics, in which a ragtag group of American hockey players defeated the heavily favored (and hated) Soviet Union to win the gold medal.
Yes, Team USA beat the USSR, and they won the gold medal, but the “Miracle on Ice” was a gold medal match qualifier. In the gold medal game, the U.S. beat Finland to win it all.
Don’t give up on your dreams; after all, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
Jordan was a sophomore and was moved over to the junior varsity squad, so as to give a spot on the varsity team to an upperclassman.
The length of a marathon—26.2 miles—is based on the distance an ancient Greek solider ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. to tell the Athenians that their side had been victorious in the Battle of Marathon.
The distance of 26.2 miles was the length of the marathon in the 1908 Summer Olympics.
The Portland Trail Blazers made the biggest draft blunder of all time in 1984, selecting Sam Bowie and allowing the Chicago Bulls, who had the next pick, to select Michael Jordan.
The Blazers needed a center, and so they took Bowie with the #2 pick in the 1984 NBA Draft. They already had a star shooting guard in Clyde Drexler. He went on to become an Olympic gold medal-winning basketball player and member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, just like Jordan.
Olympic gold medals are made of gold.
Not entirely, and barely at all. In recent years, the gold medal has been made up of 93 percent silver, 6 percent copper, and around 1 percent gold.
Hockey originated in Canada, the country that loves it the most.
Old documents show that it was played in England at least as early as the 1850s.
Bo Jackson was the first athlete to simultaneously play pro football and big-league baseball.
He was just the first to excel at both. The Heisman Trophy winner was an all-star in both sports and was heavily hyped by Nike’s “Bo Knows” ads. Jackson was preceded in his football/baseball juggling by Christy Matthewson. The Hall of Famer pitched in the National League from 1900 to 1916, and played fullback for the Greensburg Athletic Association and the Pittsburgh Stars from 1898 through 1902.
Baseball was ruined—or at least scandalized—when it was revealed that numerous players in the 1990s and 2000s used performance-enhancing drugs.
The Mitchell Report, which shed light on the issue in 2007, calculated that widespread steroid use began in Major League Baseball around 1973. But long before that, back in 1889, star pitcher Pud Galvin publicly credited his excellent play to the Brown-Sequard elixir, an injected concoction made from animal testosterone.
The first of Lou Gehrig’s record-breaking, 2,130 games-played streak began when regular Yankees first basemen Wally Pipp didn’t want to play because of a mild headache.
Wally Pipp indeed gave up his spot in the lineup to Gehrig one day in 1925, but it was because he’d suffered a fractured skull in a batting practice accident.
Racehorses ready to race are said to be “chomping at the bit.”
It’s “champing” not “chomping.” Champing means “grinding,” which is exactly what a racehorse does with the bit in its mouth.
Barry Bonds is the all-time home run king, knocking 762 out of the park.
The National League and the American League wouldn’t allow African-Americans to play in the early decades of the 20th century, leading to the development of the concurrent “Negro Leagues.” One of that world’s biggest stars was: power hitter Josh Gibson. While records are spotty, he reportedly hit as many as 962 home runs in his career.
African-American athlete Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier when he first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
The American League joined the National League as one of baseball’s two “big leagues” upon its creation in 1901. Its predecessor: the American Association. In 1884, Moses Fleetwood Walker joined that league’s Toledo Blue Stockings for a single season, making him the first African-American player in the big leagues.
Eight players from the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series and earned lifetime bans from baseball. Among them was Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was probably not in on the fix, but was punished nonetheless. In a famous moment that became part of baseball’s storied history, a little boy approached Jackson after his trial and said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe, say it ain’t so!”
In 1949, Jackson told Sport that Chicago Daily News sportswriter Charley Owens had invented the exchange.
If in baseball a runner touches a base at exactly the same time as he’s tagged out, the tie goes to the runner.
There’s nothing in the official baseball rule book that supports this. As with any call, it’s up to the umpire to decide.
Wrestling is anything but fake—those men and women in the WWE really do wrestle each other, and they can and do get hurt. However, it is scripted—outcomes are predetermined and wrestlers even work out what moves they’re going to do, and in what order.
Jay-Z owns the Brooklyn Nets.
At one point, the rapper was part of an ownership group, and his stake in the team amounted to 1/15 of 1 percent. He sold his shares in 2013.
The Orlando Magic is named after the city’s biggest attraction, Disney World, a.k.a. the “Magic Kingdom.”
The team was all set to be named the Juice, after Florida’s citrus industry, until a team executive’s young daughter paid a visit to Orlando and remarked, “This place is like magic!”
NBA legend Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain went to bed with 20,000 women.
Chamberlain offered up this unverified factoid in his 1991 memoir A View From Above. While he may have gotten around, that number can only be an exaggeration. Assuming Chamberlain first became active around age 15, and hit that twenty-grand at 55 (when he wrote his book), that works out to an average of 1.4 women a day, every day.
The Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event in the world.
The Olympics, the Cricket World Cup, and the FIFA World Cup of soccer all bring in around a billion viewers when they’re held every four years, way more than the Super Bowl.
The word “golf” comes from an acronym when it was a men’s only sport. It stands for “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden.”
It stems from a word that means “club.”
Americans hate soccer.
Major League Soccer puts up attendance numbers on par with the NHL or the NBA, but even before that league exploded in popularity, Americans loved soccer—playing it, not watching it. About three million kids a year sign up for youth soccer.
The sport evolved out of the similar British sports of cricket and rounders, which is what Baseball Guide editor Henry Chadwick tried to write in 1903, until his publisher, Albert Spalding (as in Spalding sporting goods) wouldn’t allow it, believing that an American game simply must have American origins. Spalding formed a commission, and in 1907 issued a report that concluded future Civil War general Abner Doubleday devised the basics of “base ball” in Cooperstown, New York, back in 1839. That was based almost entirely on a letter sent in by a man named Abner Graves, who said he was present that day in 1839 when Doubleday drew a diamond in a dirt field and got a game going. Spalding took Graves at his word, ignoring the fact that in 1839 Doubleday was an army cadet and nowhere near New York, or that in all of his diaries and correspondence, Doubleday never once mentioned inventing a sport. Doubleday became and remained the inventor of the national pastime in the collective mind, even after baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis received a letter in the 1930s from a man named Bruce Cartwright with proof that his grandfather, Alexander Cartwright, invented the game. The younger man provided original written rules, a field diagram, and a scorecard from the first game played in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1845.