YOU’RE OUT!
Fifty-six million people go to Major League baseball games each year.
A baseball has exactly 108 stitches.
Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his hat to keep his head cool. He changed it every two innings.
Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
Baseball games between college teams have been played since the Civil War.
Baseball was the first sport to be pictured on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine.
Baseball’s home plate is seventeen inches wide.
Before 1859, baseball umpires used to sit in rocking chairs behind home plate.
It takes about eight seconds to make a baseball bat in a baseball bat factory.
The first formal rules for playing baseball required the winning team to score twenty-one runs.
NOTHING BUT NET
Basketball was invented by Canadian James Naismith in 1891.
The theme song of the Harlem Globetrotters is “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
I WANT TO BE LIKE…
Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
Michael Jordan shaves his head on Tuesdays and Fridays.
RUN ON
In 1936, American track star Jesse Owens beat a racehorse over a one-hundred-yard course. The horse was given a head start.
Sprinters on track teams started taking a crouching start in 1908.
The expression “getting someone’s goat” is based on the custom of keeping a goat in the stable with a racehorse as the horse’s companion. The goat becomes a settling influence for the Thoroughbred. If you owned a competing horse and were not above some dirty business, you could steal your rival’s goat (it’s been done) to upset the other horse and make it run a poor race.
Anise is the scent on the artificial rabbit that is used in greyhound races.
BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM
Bulgaria was the only soccer team in the 1994 World Cup in which all the players’ last names ended with the letters “ov.”
Soccer is played in more countries than any other sport.
Soccer legend Pele’s real name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento.
The band Simply Red is named for its love for the soccer team Manchester United, which has a red home strip.
BLUE 42! HUT!
Green Bay Packers backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck has been struck by lightning twice in his life.
It takes three thousand cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year’s supply of footballs.
An American football has four seams.
O. J. Simpson had a severe case of rickets and wore leg braces when he was a child.
The Super Bowl is broadcast in 182 countries. That is more than 88 percent of the countries in the world.
When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home, the stadium becomes the state’s third largest city.
FORE!
Rudyard Kipling, living in Vermont in the 1890s, invented the game of snow golf. He painted his golf balls red so he could locate them in the snow.
Americans spend more than $630 million a year on golf balls.
Before 1850, golf balls were made of leather and stuffed with feathers.
The fastest round of golf (18 holes) by a team was 9 minutes, 28 seconds, a record set in Worcester on September 9, 1996, at 10:40 A.M.
Golfing great Ben Hogan’s famous reply when asked how to improve one’s game was, “Hit the ball closer to the hole.”
In the United States, there are more than ten thousand golf courses.
Many Japanese golfers carry hole-in-one insurance, because it is traditional in Japan to share one’s good luck by sending gifts to all your friends when you get an ace. The price for what the Japanese term “an albatross” can often reach $10,000.
Pro golfer Wayne Levi was the first PGA pro to win a tournament using a colored (orange) ball. He did it in the Hawaiian Open.
Twelve new golf holes are constructed every day.
The only person ever to play golf on the moon was
Alan Shepard. His golf ball was never found. The Tom Thumb golf course was the first miniature golf course in the United States. It was built it 1929 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by John Garnet Carter.
The United States Golf Association was founded in 1894 as the governing body of golf in the United States.
The youngest golfer recorded to have shot a hole-in-one is five-year-old Coby Orr of Littleton, Colorado, on the 103-yard fifth hole at the Riverside Golf Course in San Antonio, Texas, in 1975.
A regulation golf ball has 336 dimples.
Two golf clubs claim to be the first established in the United States: the Foxberg Golf Club in Clarion County, Pennsylvania (1887), and St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, New York (1888).
KNOCK OUT
Boxing is considered the easiest sport for gamblers to fix.
Boxing rings are so called because they used to be round.
In 1985, Mike Tyson started boxing professionally at age eighteen.
Boxing is the most popular sport to create a film about.
Four men in the history of boxing have been knocked out in the first eleven seconds of the first round.
OLYMPIC FANFARE
Canada is the only country not to win a gold medal in the Summer Olympic Games while hosting the event.
Only two countries have participated in every modern Olympic Games: Greece and Australia.
The 1900 Olympics were held in Paris, France.
Tug-of-war was an Olympic event between 1900 and 1920.
The five Olympic rings represent the continents.
Olympic badminton rules say that the birdie has to have exactly fourteen feathers.
The city of Denver was chosen to host and then refused the 1976 Winter Olympics.
FISHING FOR SWIMMERS
A top freestyle swimmer achieves a speed of only four miles per hour. Fish, in contrast, have been clocked at sixty-eight miles per hour.
Captain Matthew Webb of England was the first to swim the English Channel using the breaststroke.
SURPRISING SPORTS
In the United States, more Frisbee discs are sold each year than baseballs, basketballs, and footballs combined.
Kite-flying is a professional sport in Thailand.
There are at least two sports in which the team has to move backward to win—tug-of-war and rowing.
Badminton used to be called “Poona.”
PIN AND CONQUER
The national sport of Japan is sumo wrestling.
Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, once pinned a sumo wrestler using only a single finger.
Nearly all sumo wrestlers have flat feet and big bottoms.
The 1912 Greco-Roman wrestling match in Stockholm between Finn Alfred Asikainen and Russian Martin Klein lasted more than eleven hours.
LORDS OF THE ICE
A hockey puck is one inch thick.
Canada imports about 850 Russian-made hockey sticks on an average day.
Professional hockey players skate at average speeds of twenty to twenty-five miles per hour.
ON STRIKES
Three consecutive strikes in bowling are called a turkey.
Tokyo has the world’s largest bowling alley.
The bowling ball was invented in 1862.
FIRST CONTACT
The game of squash originated in the United Kingdom.
Australian Rules Football was originally designed to give cricketers something to play during the off-season.
Karate actually originated in India.
DANGEROUS GAMES
The only bone not broken so far during any ski accident is one located in the inner ear.
AND THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD IS…
Sports Illustrated has the largest sports magazine circulation.
AND MAYBE THIS IS WHY…
Cathy Rigby is the only woman to pose nude for Sports Illustrated.
THROW THE GAME
A forfeited game in baseball is recorded as a 9–0 score. In football, it is recorded as a 1–0 score.
TEAM SPIRIT
In the four professional major North American sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), only eight teams’ nicknames do not end with “s.” These teams are the Miami Heat, the Utah Jazz, the Orlando Magic, the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox, the Colorado Avalanche, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and the Minnesota Wild.
I’M SO HIGH RIGHT NOW…
Pole vault poles used to be stiff. Now they bend, which allows the vaulter to go much higher.