history Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
That Time An Ass Exam Scuttled The Sixers' Chances Of Signing Pete Maravich
Basketball what-ifs can be a fun game to play, so here’s one that wouldn’t have significantly changed the course of NBA history but is nonetheless odd: Did you know an in-his-twilight “Pistol” Pete Maravich might have picked the Celtics over the 76ers because of a threatened ass exam?...
Big League Bullying: The Conspiracy To Humiliate MLB Umpire Steve Fields
Baseball consensus holds that umpires only get noticed when they make a bad call. Steve Fields’ career as a major league ump was bookended by two calls that put him in the spotlight. But he went to his grave insisting both were right....
On The Origins, Use, And Meaning Of "Ass In The Jackpot"
The emergence last month of a 2016 video featuring mic’d-up Terry Collins arguing with umpire Tom Hallion not only gave the world, if only briefly, a unique insight into how umps deal with enraged managers, but also its most prominent demonstration of a phrase that was, until that point, known by on...
Weird FS1 Segment: Say What You Will About Joseph Stalin, But He Had A Sick House
Today’s World Cup coverage on Fox Sports 1 featured a short segment produced by National Geographic, in which a reporter gave viewers a light-hearted tour of Joseph Stalin’s dacha while going to some remarkable lengths to avoid mentioning that Stalin was a brutal dictator who was responsible for the...
Let's Remember Some Guys, Early '80s Fleer Mustache Dudes Edition
The Rememberer’s art is, for the most part, a lonely one. That is kind of portentous and serious-sounding, but it also seemed like a better way to begin this post than the thought it was intended to convey, which is “if you are someone who remembers a lot of rando middle reliever dudes from your you...
The Cleveland Barons' NHL Existence Was A Short And Spectacular Disaster
Bob Whidden got the bad news first. On June 14, 1978, Whidden was in Montreal representing the Cleveland Barons at the NHL owners’ meetings....
The RGIII™ Brand Is Dead, And Here's The Death Certificate
Want to see something really sad? Look at what’s become of Robert Griffin III’s stable of trademarks:...
Treat Yourself To Bartolo Colon's "Batters Faced" Page On Baseball Reference
If he hadn’t out-pitched Justin Verlander and completely baffled the defending world champions for seven innings on Sunday Night Baseball last week, there is a decent chance that Bartolo Colon might not have started another game for the Texas Rangers. The pitcher whose spot Colon filled last Sunday ...
The Wizards Of Aughts: The Post-Millennium Washington Wizards And The Bloggers Who Immortalized Them
The late-model Washington Wizards are broadly competent, secretly mediocre, spotty, and more boring than they are not. They could be nutshelled as an equal and opposite reaction to their counterparts of a decade ago. Those Wiz teams, which weren’t better but sure were stranger, boasted a bigger coll...
Loyola-Chicago's Been Here Before
Loyola-Chicago punched its ticket to the Final Four on Saturday by handing out its first decisive ass-kicking of the tournament after all those heart-stopping wins. If you saw them thrash Kansas State, 78-62—or if you’d seen them eke out one win after another en route to the Elite Eight—you know the...
For Black History Month, Boston Police Pay Tribute To White Man Who Coached Black Guys
Boston’s reputation as a city oblivious to racial issues is undeserved, I tell you....
Climate, Plague, And The Fall Of The Roman Empire
The Roman Empire in the west fell for a great many reasons. We could cite a lengthy series of breakdowns in its political structures, feckless leadership by a series of child-emperors and self-interested court officials, and aggressive and opportunistic barbarian groups. As the Empire fell apart, th...
The 1987 NFL Players Strike Created The Modern NFL
The darkest day in NFL history began with several Philadelphia Eagles players arriving at Veterans Stadium at midnight, some 13 hours before the scheduled kickoff of a game against the Chicago Bears. They weren’t there to play; they were there precisely not to play. More specifically, they were ther...
How Latin Became The Romance Languages
The Latin language is one of the Roman Empire’s lasting legacies. We hear it around us every day in the form of direct Latin loan-words into English, like “abdomen” or “exterior.” Every time you say something is “necessary” or you need to make a “revision” to a document, you’re using a loan-word fro...
Please Do Check Out The Spicy Drama Going Down At The International Society For The History Of The Map
I’ve found, personally, an inverse correlation between how interesting an institutional power squabble is and how significant the institution in question is. A power squabble at the highest levels of a large national government, for example, is not really interesting; it will very often be terrifyin...
After The Black Death, Europe's Economy Surged
The Black Death, the wave of bubonic plague that devastated Europe after 1348, marked the final end of a long period of economic growth. The several prior centuries had been a time of explosive expansion of both the population and economy of Europe, a development the historian Robert Lopez termed th...
In Unloving Memory Of HawkVision, A Low Point In Sports Owner Shamelessness
The story of professional sports is, among other things, the story of cheap bastard owners doing cheap bastard things. Charlie Comiskey charged his White Sox players to launder their uniforms. Jeffrey Loria coldly auctioned off two World Series champions, sold the Marlins for more than a billion dol...
How The Roman Empire's Cities Crumbled
When we think of the Roman Empire as a physical space, cities are what come to mind. We see the huge bulk of the Coliseum. The ruined husks of aqueducts, bathhouses, and grand temples reach for the sky, reminders of the engineering prowess and resources the Romans had at their disposal. Those kinds ...
What Were The Knights Templar Really Like?
Over the last seven centuries, the Knights Templar have left the realm of history and entered the realm of pop culture. They’re a major plot point in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and the villains of the Assassin’s Creed series of games, and feature in an astonishing array of pseudo-history and cons...
Professional Mercenaries And Cannon Made Medieval War Obsolete
As the medieval world gave way to the early modern around 1500, European warfare was utterly transformed. Mounted knights and castles gave way to cannon, firearms, and enormously complex fortifications. The scale of war grew as well. Armies that had contained thousands of soldiers in the 15th centur...