historylessons Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
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...
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...
Why Phillies Fans Still Hate Danny Tartabull
Phillies pitcher Clay Buchholz had surgery earlier this week to fix a torn flexor tendon in his right arm. His 4-to-6 months of recovery will keep him out for the rest of the season....
How Philly's Little Leaguers Reclaimed "Taney" From America's Shame
You may never hear from Mo'ne Davis again. But even so, she and her teammates have already accomplished something amazing: They've taken back the name "Taney" from history's shit list. In a wonderful stroke of ironic resonance, the name that now evokes a mixed-race, inner-city little league team tha...
The Frat Boys Who Moved The Colts Out Of Baltimore
Thirty years ago this spring, Bob Irsay, the prototypical bad sports owner and an obstreperous public drunk, moved his Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis. His son, Jim Irsay, the current Colts boss, has sucked the fun out of the anniversary for Indianapolitans with a scandal that, in its sad and sordi...
The Unnatural Shooting Of A Baseball Player By A Silly Teenage Honey
Excerpted from Eddie and the Gun Girl, a Kindle Single about the shooting of Eddie Waitkus, the real-life event that's best known as the fictional pivot of Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Annotations by the author appear throughout....
A History Lesson For Sacramento: How Kansas City Lost The Kings
The owners insisted they had no plans to move the team. That's what the Maloofs swore, raising their right hand as their left hand worked deals with buyers first from Anaheim, then Virginia Beach, then Seattle. And that's what the owners of the Kansas City Kings maintained 30 years ago, even as they...
Derek Dooley Compares His Tennessee Team To The Nazis Or Something (UPDATED WITH VIDEO)
During a press conference today, Tennessee head coach Derek Dooley took a spin towards crazytown, comparing his team's miscommunication woes to the Nazis' prior to the Allies' landing at Normandy. This won't be hilariously recontextualized by a rival at all....
Racist Redskins Owner Did Not Listen To His Wife, And Now He Is In Hell
Tomorrow's Washington Post magazine unearths some letters from the Redskins archives to convey "the innocence of this long ago era" when a racist named George Preston Marshall married an actress (pictured) who convinced him to move his football team south....