Browsing: Sports

A Brief History On June 30, 1994, Tonya Harding was banned for life from participating in figure skating events.  She is currently competing on season twenty-six of Dancing with the Stars, titled Dancing with the Stars: Athletes.  The season premiered on April 30, 2018 on the ABC network.  The four-week season, the shortest ever, features a cast of current and former athletes. Digging Deeper Shortly before the 1994 national figure skating championships which were being held in Detroit, Nancy Kerrigan was hit in the knee in what would become known as the “whack heard round the world”. The attack was…

A Brief History On June 4, 1974, baseball history (not the good kind!) was made in Cleveland.  Although we have run many articles about great baseball performances, the event described in this article is not one of them. Digging Deeper On a beautiful June night in Cleveland, over 25,000 fans came out to the ballpark to watch the Indians play the Texas Rangers.  While there, they enjoyed 10 cent beer, a promotion that provided more of a draw than the baseball team on the field.  Stadium management wisely (that is a joke… we are kidding) limited fans to only 6…

A Brief History On April 30, 1993, Hungarian (by ancestry) tennis star, Monica Seles, was stabbed in the back by a fan obsessed with Steffi Graf, another well known female tennis star.  Seles was number one in the world for the previous 2 years, but unfortunately was absent from pro tennis for 2 years after the stabbing.  She had already won 8 Grand Slam titles had become the youngest ever French Open winner at age 16.  She was only 20 years old at the time of the attack and never regained her championship form, playing her last professional match in…

A Brief History On February 10, 1933, Primo Carnera, a heavyweight boxer called “The Monster” by Time magazine, dealt Ernie Schaaf fatal blows during a boxing match in New York City.  The hapless Schaaf died 4 days after the match. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Carnera as the heaviest heavyweight boxing champion of his day (a record held until 2005) and at 6’7″ (an exaggeration by an inch and a half), also listed as the tallest (again until 2005 when Nikolay Valuev won a title).  Also known as the “Ambling Alp,” Carnera was an Italian fighter who was dogged his…

A Brief History On February 7, 1882, John L. Sullivan became the last of the bare-knuckle boxing champions with an eighth-round knockout of Paddy Ryan. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Sullivan, known as “The Boston Strong Boy,” fighting his way across America challenging any man any time any where! His victory in Mississippi over Paddy Ryan, the man recognized as the heavyweight boxing champion of America, if not the world, made Sullivan the last of the bare-knuckle champs and the first of the gloved boxing champs. Sullivan fought all comers, including Europeans, giving him legitimate claim as “world champion.”  Fighting…