1. On February 6, 1971 Astronaut Alan Shepard hit the first golf ball on the moon. He then went to the clubhouse for a martini.
2. The first Soccer World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930 and attracted 30 countries.
3. Dick Button accomplished the first triple jump in competitive figure skating in 1952.
4. In playing poker, there is one chance in 500 of drawing a flush.
5. There are 2,598,960 five card hands possible in a 52 card deck of cards.
6. Tom Brady, Don Bebee, and Mike Lodish are tied for being members of the most Super Bowl teams with six. Lodish, however, is the only player to have played in six games. Lodish was a defensive tackle who played in four Super Bowls with the Buffalo Bills and two with the Denver Broncos
7. The game of volleyball was invented on February 9, 1895 by William G. Morgan, a YMCA physical education instructor. The game was originally called mintonette.
8. Poland’s Stella Walsh (Stanislawa Walasiewicz) won the Women’s 100 Meter race in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles Angeles, becoming the first woman to break the 12 second barrier. In 1980 she was the victim of a robbery attempt in which she was killed. During the autopsy it was discovered that she was really a man.
9. At Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater, Florida in 1985, organist Wilber Snapp played “Three Blind Mice” after a call by Umpire Keith O’Connor. O’Connor was not amused and had Snapp ejected from the game.
10. Gymnasiums were introduced in about 900 B.C. Athletes practiced in the nude while music was played and admiring young ladies watched.
11. Bulgaria was the only soccer team in the 1994 World’s Cup in which all 11 players on the roster had names which ended with the letters “OV”.
12. Olympic badminton rules state that a birdie has to have exactly fourteen feathers.
13. In the days of Thomas Jefferson, billiards was illegal in the state of Virginia. Jefferson’s home, “the dome on Monticello” however, was built to conceal a billiard room so that he could play away from prosecution from the law.
14. It is not uncommon for a racehorse to wear out a set of shoes in a single race.
15. A baseball has exactly 108 stitches.
16. In 1975 Junko Tabei of Japan became the first woman to reach the top of Mt. Everest.
17. Tony Dungy, Dan Reeves, and Mike Ditka have appeared in Super Bowls as players, assistant coaches, and head coaches.
18. Major League Baseball umpires are required to wear black underwear in case they split their pants during a game. While protection is an issue, preventing social suicide is the top priority.
19. Track athletes are most likely to post the best times and even break records late in the day when their body temperature is the highest.
20. A golf ball can reach a speed on 170 miles per hour. Golfers spend an estimated 8 hundred million dollars annually worldwide.
snicewanger@yahoo.com
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