Sports History Facts

The first baseball caps were made of straw.

Taekwondo is only about 70 years old, making it one of the youngest major martial arts in the world.

The average life span of a major league baseball is 5-7 pitches.

In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II was named an 'Honorary Harlem Globetrotter.'"

Babe Ruth wore No. 3 because he batted third.

Cheetahs were raced at Romford greyhound stadium in 1937!

In the 1930's, American track star Jesse Owens used to race against horses and dogs to earn a living.

The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers founded in 1744, is the world's oldest golf club!

The Heisman Trophy is the bronze statue college football hands its best player every year. The face on it is a forgotten NYU fullback. In 1934, sculptor Frank Eliscu asked his old classmate Ed Smith to pose for a project. Smith never asked what it was for. He played two pro seasons, then fixed elevators for a living. Forty-eight years later, a researcher called: your face is on the Heisman. In 1985 they handed him his own.

A cornhusking contest was a race to strip corn by hand, timed to the minute. In 1935, one of those contests drew 110,000 people to a cornfield in Newtown, Indiana. Two aerial bombs marked its start and finish, eighty minutes apart. Elmer Carlson of Iowa husked about 41½ bushels of corn by hand and won. NBC broadcast the whole contest live on national radio. Farmers still compete for the same title every October.

Bo Jackson destroyed his left hip in the 1991 NFL playoffs and was told he would never play again. Doctors replaced the joint with a prosthetic hip. Eighteen months later he pinch-hit for the Chicago White Sox - took the first pitch for a strike, then drove the next one over the right-field wall. All 42,775 fans at Comiskey Park rose to their feet. He hit 16 home runs that season and won AL Comeback Player of the Year.

Tom Brady was drafted by the Montreal Expos as a catcher in the 1995 MLB Draft. The scout ranked him a late second-round talent but placed him in round 18 - they knew his Michigan football scholarship made him impossible to sign. Brady chose football and won seven Super Bowls. Asked where baseball would have led, Brady said: "I would be selling insurance."

Michigan State coach Danny Litwhiler wanted to clock his pitchers, so in 1974 he borrowed a police radar gun built for catching speeders. It had no battery, so an officer drove the cruiser onto the field to power it, and it worked. Litwhiler and JUGS then built the first radar gun made for baseball. The prototype sits in the Hall of Fame, and radar guns still point at every mound.