history Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
AP: Upstart Regional School Has The Honor Of Playing Notre Dame For A National Title
Yes, there is no higher merriment in college football than making fun of Notre Dame. But let's not overlook the joys of taunting the other side of the BCS championship matchup. If only there had been a giant sphygmomanometer hooked up to the deep Confederacy last night, to record the mass blood-pres...
Marvin Miller, The Man Who Beat Some Sense Into Baseball
He was in the phone book. That's the thing that always got me about Marvin Miller, the former head of the MLB players association and the man who pulled baseball out of its crude prehistory. You expect your heroes to be unlisted. You don't expect to find one of them in the white pages, right there b...
Redskins Quarterback Had A Great Debut
For a bungling NFL franchise looking for a reason to believe, there's nothing quite like a breakout performance by a superstar quarterback. So after years of failure, Washington fans had to be delighted to see the numbers RGIII put up in his first start for the team. When you see a stat line like th...
How "Seven Nation Army" Conquered The Sports World
The Euro 2012 semifinals kick off today, and 69 goals in, you might have noticed one fan chant being sung after every single one. How did an eminently chantable White Stripes ditty become soccer's universal goal celebration? This piece, originally published Jan. 13, 2012, has your answers....
History Is Bunk, When The <em>New York Times</em> Writes It About The Yankees
Two of the worst things in sports are Yankees homerism and New York Times writers who want to impress people. Put them together, and you get the Times's Mark Viera, coming off the sports department bench to gloat in yesterday's paper about the Yankees' 2-1 win over the Orioles the night before. His ...
10 Historical Events That Would've Been Completed In The Interval Between MLB's First And Last Opening Days This Year
1. Anglo-Zanzibar War (38 minutes) 2. Death and resurrection of Jesus (according to Bible) (36 hours) 3. October Revolution (2 days) 4. Bay of Pigs Invasion (3 days) 5. Operation Desert Fox (4 days) 6. The ground conflict of the Gulf War (4 days) 7. February Revolution (5 days) 8. Six-Day War (6 day...
Annals Of Bullshit: The Myth Of The Myth Of Cal Ripken's Historic Home Run
Twenty years ago, Oriole Park at Camden Yards brought in an era of fake history in baseball architecture. So it fits that The Baltimore Sun's roundup of the park's greatest moments would feature fake history too. For the No. 1 moment, baseball beat reporter Dan Connolly described the night Cal Ripke...
Let's Recall 32 Teams That Made Deeper Tournament Runs Than The 2011-12 Duke Blue Devils
Now that their season is over, it's time to place the accomplishments of Austin Rivers, Seth Curry, the Plumlees, and all the rest of this year's unforgettable Duke Blue Devils in their proper historical context. Below is a list of 32 teams in the past decade whose tournament glory outshone that of ...
Is Steve Nash A Time Traveler?
When reader Sam sent us some old photos of sports teams, we were intrigued. Old sports photos are cool—especially seeing the uniforms of the day. Yet not being able to place where the photos were taken (or who might be in them) left us guessing....
The Making Of “Homer At The Bat,” The Episode That Conquered Prime Time 20 Years Ago Tonight
On Feb. 20, 1992, more American homes tuned into The Simpsons than they did The Cosby Show or the Winter Olympics from Albertville, France. A foul-mouthed cartoon on a fourth-place network bested the Huxtables and the world's best amateur athletes. Fox over NBC and CBS—its first-ever victory in prim...
50 Years Later, Remembering The Mets' Hopeful, Awful Inaugural Spring Training
The great Robert Lipsyte has a story in today's New York Times remembering the Mets' first spring training, in 1962. Those Mets, as strange as it is to comprehend, were far more hapless than modern iterations—they went 40-120 and inspired a book called Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?—and as such ...
According To New Tapes, Richard Nixon Tried To Screw NFL Fans Forever
It's hard, in 2012, to imagine anyone being upset about Redskins games not airing on local television. Presumably it would be a treat for the long-suffering fans in DC....
How The Song "Seven Nation Army" Conquered The Sports World
The march toward musical empire began on Oct. 22, 2003, in a bar in Milan, Italy, 4,300 miles away from Detroit. Fans of Club Brugge K.V., in town for their team's group-stage UEFA Champions League clash against European giant A.C. Milan, gathered to knock back some pre-match beers. Over a stereo bl...
The Howie Spira Audio Archive
At nearly every turn in Howie Spira's tangled and antagonistic history, there was a phone call. And on the phone calls, he had his tape recorder. Howie's cassettes captured his rift with Dave Winfield, his conniving with George Steinbrenner, and his turn against Steinbrenner. They captured threats f...
The Last Act Of The Notorious Howie Spira
Howard Spira appeared in the Gawker offices one summer day as if summoned from the beyond, which in some sense he had been. He just stood there, anxiously clutching a black plastic bag, his enormous green eyes sweeping the room. His skin had the hue of a life spent mostly indoors and in poor health....
Howie Spira's Letters
Click in the lower right corner of the image to see it all....
The Curse Of Dopey "Curse Of The Bambino" References, And Other Dumb Things About The Red Sox's Stretch Run
Harvey Araton of the New York Times, reporting from Baltimore, sets the new/old standard for witless hackery today:...
SprtsCntr: ESPN Is Writing Tom Brady's Name All Over Its Trapper Keeper
What is ESPN prattling on about right now? We condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence....
Steve Carlton Really Was A One-Man Team In 1972
Joe Posnanski presents a backhanded defense of the old-fashioned statistic of baseball pitchers' wins today. True, the "winning pitcher" depends on his teammates playing defense and scoring runs for him; yes, great pitchers in bad circumstances can produce feeble win totals, and bad pitchers for gre...
