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FAVORITE STUMPERS
The Elias Sports Bureau is the repository for statistics involving the major team sports, so a lot of information passes through its offices, in New York City. We asked Steve Hirdt, the executive vice president of Elias, for a few stumpers that might surprise even knowledgeable sports fans or win you a bet. Here are five (with the answers below):
Giants Stadium has been the site of more NFL regular-season games than any other building. Which facility comes in second?
Which player, certain to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, was on the receiving end of Brett Favre’s first NFL completion in 1992?
In recent years, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, and Kosuke Fukudome have started All-Star Games in center field in their first season in the majors. Prior to those three players, who was the only rookie to start an All-Star Game in center field?
Multiple choice: In 62 seasons, how many times has the team that led the NBA in regular-season free-throw percentage gone on to win the NBA championship that season? (a) 1; (b) 5; (c) 10; (d) 16; (e) 24
Which Hall of Famer hit the most home runs at Yankee Stadium as a visiting player?
Answers: 1. Wrigley Field in Chicago; 2. Brett Favre, following a deflection; 3. Richie Ashburn of the Phillies, in 1948; 4. (a) 1: the Minneapolis Lakers in 1953–54; 5. Goose Goslin: 32 home runs (from 1921 to 1938)
Chicago Bear Gale Sayers (number 40) runs through the Washington Redskins defense at Wrigley Field on September 15, 1968.
UNCOMMON SCENTS
DON’T STOP TO SMELL
THE HOCKEY BAGS
The smell of success is not always sweet. In fact, the aromas of locker rooms and equipment bags and team buses can take some getting used to. Along with the stench comes a more serious issue: bacteria. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a highly contagious mutation of the common staph infection, thrives in soiled pads and equipment and is hitting athletes with alarming frequency. Where there’s stink, there’s health risk.
And no sport has quite the pungency of ice hockey, with its combination of wet, sweat, and gear; the gloves alone would offend a skunk. So we asked an expert on the subject, New York Rangers equipment manager Acacio Marques, for some tips on how to get rid of the reek and protect players from potentially fatal infections. “The key is to get everything dry,” says Marques.
If it stays wet, bacteria tends to grow a lot quicker. We hang our gear up every night. Most youth-hockey players don’t do that. It probably stays in their bag wet, and that’s why it starts to stink. Rookies come in here from juniors or from Europe, and you can tell that their stuff has never been hung. It smells like puke.
There’s a drying room at our practice rink. After road trips, we go there, hang the gear, and crank the heat. It gets to about 100 degrees. The next morning everything is dry. Believe it or not, that really helps.
We also use a Sani Sport machine that disinfects with bactericide and ozone gas. And we put an MRSA-killing additive in the washing machine with towels and underwear. We’ve never had a guy get a staph infection, and we want to keep it that way.
Although you may not have the resources the Rangers have, you can follow their example by drying out wet equipment after each practice. And there are plenty of everyday disinfectant cleaners and sprays you can buy to kill germs. Hockey also has a cottage industry of products designed to take the PU out of equipment.
But as Marques admits, the sport will never smell like roses. “A 10-year-old pair of skates that a guy wears barefoot is always going to stink a little.”
The shortest player in NHL history was 5-foot-3 goalie Roy “Shrimp” Worters, who played in 484 games between 1925 and 1937.
REEL BAD
JEFFREY LYONS PICKS THE
FIVE WORST SPORTS MOVIES
Speaking of stink, here is Jeffrey Lyons’s list of the five worst sports movies of all time, again with trailers:
Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia won the marathon gold at the 1960 Rome Olympics while running barefoot and the 1964 Tokyo gold while competing 40 days after an appendectomy.
Personal Best (1982, track and field). “The only ass you need to whip is your own.”
—Kenny Moore as swimmer Denny Stites to Mariel Hemingway as runner Chris Cahill
The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979, basketball). “The astrology thing is just a mirror for us to look into. Our magic is made of sweat, strain, and pride. Now that’s what I’m taking back out on the damn court.”
—Julius Erving as Moses Guthrie
Wimbledon (2004, tennis). “Listen, you may have read about Lizzie Bradbury and myself being … involved, so to speak,… but I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight. I read the papers this morning, and they seemed to imply that Lizzie had let me down in some way. That’s just not the case. The truth is I let her down. I let her down, and for that I will always be truly sorry. Listen, I’m not in the habit of pouring my heart out on television or pouring my heart out at all…. Forgive me. Lizzie Bradbury … Lizzie is the reason that I’m here today. That’s all I really came here to say, so thank you.”
—Paul Bettany as tennis pro Peter Colt, to tennis commentator Mary Carillo as herself
Sylvester Stallone in Over the Top, 1987.
Rocky V (1990, boxing). “I’m officially expired.”
—Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa, to the promoter trying to get him back in the ring
Over the Top (1987, arm wrestling). “The world meets nobody halfway. When you want something, you gotta take it.”
—Sylvester Stallone as trucker and arm wrestler Lincoln Hawk
Tennis balls are fuzzy because their sixteenth-century ancestors were made with the hair of Scotland’s enemies.
BEND IT LIKE KLJESTAN
A TEAM USA PLAYER ON
HOW TO CURVE A FREE KICK
Sacha Kljestan is a rising star on the U.S. national soccer team and a midfielder for Chivas USA, a team that shares a stadium, the Home Depot Center, with the Los Angeles Galaxy. That means Sacha and his Chivas teammates get dressed down the hall from David Beckham, a player famous for his ability to bend free kicks with an uncanny combination of power and accuracy. Kljestan, who is of Slovakian descent, has become one of the league’s better free-kick takers, but he says he does not exactly bend it like Beckham. Here’s his take:
Personally, I like to approach the ball at about a 45-degree angle, but Beckham, the master, approaches at closer to 90 degrees. It is all a matter of preference, and by far the most important thing of all is to practice.
When taking a free kick, so many factors come into play, especially when shooting from close range, when you need to be able to bend the ball over the wall (which is usually the tallest guys) and then get the ball to dip back down into the goal. The first thing you need to do is put everything else out of your mind and focus 100 percent on just this free kick. I try to visualize where I am going to put the ball and try to put it in a spot where the goalie can’t get to it. Then I take a breath and hit the ball with the inside part of my foot and try to create enough spin to bend the ball over the wall.
You have to take thousands of free kicks in practice to the point where you feel you can put the ball exactly where you want it. It’s very similar to a golfer working on one shot for hours, hoping that in his next round he’ll get a chance to execute that very shot.
A very wise man and mentor of mine growing up always told me the same story about free kicks. He told me how he got to watch Chelsea train quite a few times, and every day after practice Gianfranco Zola would practice his free kicks, one after the other. One Friday he watched him in training practicing his free kicks, and the next day he had a free kick from exactly where he had been practicing his free kicks. Sure enough, Zola bent it over the wall and into the net. I think of that story every day after training, when I do my work.
Members of the Liberia national soccer team escaped imprisonment by holding Gambia to a goalless draw in 1980; the Liberian
head of state, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, had threatened to jail them if they lost.
SPORTUGUESE
WHAT’S A BLUTARSKY?
A QUIZ ON SPORTS LINGO
The language of sports—Sportuguese, if you will—has its mysteries. You may know that the expression “throwing the ball around the horn” is derived from the navigational feat of sailing around Cape Horn and that gridiron comes from the griddle that fields with hash marks resemble. But did you know that Mendoza line was coined by Royals third baseman George Brett to denote shortstop Mario Mendoza’s typical average of .200? Or that in five of his nine seasons, Mendoza was actually below his eponymous demarcation?
Here’s a little quiz in which we ask you to match 12 terms with their correct definition. If you get three right, you’re above the Mendoza line:
The mashie niblick at bottom left was one of the clubs that Francis Ouimet used to win the 1913 U.S. Open
goofy
Blutarsky
corridor of uncertainty
keepie uppie
nutmeg
cherry-picking
butterfly
bolo
golden sombrero
bug boy
vigorish
mashie niblick
the amount charged by a bookmaker for his or her services, in order to make sure the bookie makes money on a wager no matter what the outcome
a stance on a skateboard, surfboard, snowboard, or wakeboard in which the right foot is on the front of the board
the style of goaltending in which the goaltender covers the lower part of the net with his or her leg pads, leaving the upper portion of the net somewhat exposed
an obsolete golf club that roughly corresponds to a modern-day 7-, 8-, or 9-iron
a quarterback’s zero passer rating for a game; also known as a Rex Grossman
a game of juggling a soccer ball using the feet, thighs, knees, chest, and head
a baseball player’s striking out four times in one game
an apprentice jockey
a type of punch that’s set up by swinging one arm in a circular motion, then hitting one’s opponent with the other
the area in which a cricket ball can be pitched, usually a narrow line on and just outside a batsman’s off stump
the act of hanging out in the offensive zone (thus not playing defense) and waiting for an offensive opportunity to arise without much effort
a play in which a soccer player kicks the ball through the defender’s legs
Key: 1-B, 2-E, 3-J, 4-F, 5-L, 6-K, 7-C, 8-I, 9-G, 10-H, 11-A, 12-D
MIGHTY CASEY
THE MAN WHO WROTE AMERICA’S BEST-KNOWN POEM
“Casey at the Bat” begins “The Outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day” and ends with … Well, you know. What you might not know is that it was a one-hit wonder written by a man, Ernest Lawrence Thayer, who spent many of his 77 years looking after his family’s textile mill in Worcester, Massachusetts. But Thayer had studied at Harvard and worked at the Lampoon alongside William Randolph Hearst. So when Hearst’s father gave his son the San Francisco Examiner to run in 1885, the young man brought along Thayer and two other Lampoon writers. On June 3, 1888, The Examiner published “Casey at the Bat,” which Thayer—under his pen name, Phin—had written with Boston baseball star Mike “King” Kelly in mind. There was no immediate response to the poem.
It was republished a few weeks later, however, in the New York Sun Hand brought to the attention of the legendary actor DeWolf Hopper, who was performing at the Wallack Theatre before an audience that included members of the New York and visiting Chicago baseball teams. The date of the performance was August 14, 1888, which happened to be Thayer’s 25th birthday.
Thanks to Hopper, “Casey” soon became the most famous poem in the land. As the game’s patriarch, Albert Spalding, once wrote, “Love has its sonnets galore. War has its epics in heroic verse. Tragedy its somber story in measured lines. Baseball has ‘Casey at the Bat.’ “Thayer, however, lived in relative obscurity. He did recite “Casey” at a Harvard class reunion in 1895, but he must not have been very good. Hopper himself once said, “I have heard many others give ‘Casey’ Fond mamas have brought their sons to me to hear their childish voices lisp the poem. But Thayer’s was the worst of all.”
Hank Gowdy, a catcher and first baseman for the New York Giants and Boston Braves from 1910 to 1930, is the only major leaguer to have seen combat in both world wars.
Read more than 100 years later, though, it holds up rather well. Because of “Casey,” somewhere hearts are light.
King Kelly, the supposed inspiration for Casey.
FROM THE PEN
A POEM BY THE LATE
DAN QUISENBERRY
If “Casey at the Bat” is the best poem about an athlete, what’s the best poem by an athlete? Here’s a candidate, written by Dan Quisenberry, the submarining reliever who saved 244 games and entertained countless teammates and writers during his 12-year career. He penned “Baseball Cards” before he died, of brain cancer, at the age of 45, in 1988. This can be found in On Days Like This (Helicon Nine), a collection of his poems:
BASEBALL CARDS
that first baseball card I saw myself
in a triage of rookies
atop the bodies
that made the hill
we played king of
I am the older one
the one on the right
game-face sincere
long red hair unkempt
a symbol of the ’70s
somehow a sign of manhood
you don’t see
how my knees shook on my debut
or my desperation to make it
the second one I look boyish with a
gap-toothed smile
the smile of a guy who has it his way
expects it
I rode the wave’s crest
of pennant and trophies
I sat relaxed with one thought
“I can do this”
you don’t see
me stay up till two
reining in nerves
or postgame hands that shook involuntarily
glory years catch action shots
arm whips and body contortions
a human catapult the backs of those cards
cite numbers
that tell stories of saves, wins, flags, records
handshakes, butt slaps, celebration mobs
you can’t see
the cost of winning
lines on my forehead under the hat
trench line between my eyes
you don’t see my wife, daughter and son
left behind
the last few cards
I do not smile
I grim-face the camera
tight lipped
no more forced poses to win fans
eyes squint
scanning distance
crow’s-feet turn into eagle’s claws
you don’t see
the quiver in my heart
knowledge that it is over
just playing out the end
I look back
at who I thought I was
or used to be
now, trying to be funny
I tell folks
I used to be famous
I used to be good
they say
we thought you were bigger
I say
I was
Baseball pioneer Albert G. Spalding once wrote, “Modern baseball had been born in the brain of an American soldier. It received its baptism in the bloody days of our Nation’s direst danger. It had its earliest evolution when soldiers, North and South, were striving to forget their foes by cultivating, through this grand game, fraternal friendship with comrades in arms.”
Spalding’s words are given special meaning in this 1863 lithograph of Union prisoners playing baseball under Confederate guard in a prison in Salisbury, North Carolina.
MIGHTIEST FEAT (OLYMPICS)
THE DAY BOB BEAMON DID THE IMPOSSIBLE
A year before Neil Armstrong took his small step for a man, Bob Beamon made a giant leap that was almost as fantastic as a walk on the moon. It was in the long jump at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and it’s still hard to fathom.
Beamon, a 22-year-old from Jamaica, Queens, had recently been suspended by the University of Texas, El Paso, for refusing to compete against Brigham Young University because of its racist policies. But after agreeing to be trained by Olympic long jumper Ralph Boston, he was the clear favorite in the event. Still, he almost didn’t make the finals, qualifying on his third try after fouling on his first two attempts.
Beamon described the moments before he sprinted down the track and leaped into history this way: “I felt that day very calm, very peaceful. When I stood there, I didn’t hear anybody. I was very focused. When I jumped, there was nothing … but quietness.”
The judges were initially unable to determine Beamon’s distance because he had jumped beyond the range of the electronic monitor that performed that function. Measuring by hand, officials announced that Beamon had flown a mind-boggling 29 feet, 2.5 inches—nearly 2 feet farther than the previous record. The jump marked the first time anyone had jumped 29 feet. Heck, it marked the first time anyone had jumped 28 feet! When Boston told him the distance, Beamon collapsed to his knees and held his hands over his face in shock.
Although it was said that Beamon benefited that day from both Mexico City’s high altitude and a strong trailing wind, scientific research later determined that those factors could not fully explain his achievement. Beamon himself never jumped beyond 27 feet again in his career. His record stood until 1991, when it was broken by Mike Powell’s jump of 29 feet, 4.375 inches. But his Olympic record endures, as do the words of the defending Olympic champion, Britain’s Lynn Davies, who told Beamon that day, “You have destroyed this event.”