Category Archives: Sports

The Origin of Nachos and How Football Helped Popularize Them Surprisingly Recently

Americans eat a lot on Super Bowl Sunday, according to one 2015 study consuming triple the amount of their daily allowance of calories per serving during the Super Bowl. In fact, it’s the second largest food consumption day of the year in the country (behind Thanksgiving). Of the many millions of pounds of snacks eaten in honor of America’s (still) […]

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The Bizarre First Super Bowl Halftime Show

These days, Super Bowl halftime shows are star-studded affairs that can eclipse the game itself. More people watched Madonna’s 2012 halftime performance than the Patriots and Giants matchup (despite it being thrilling). In 2007, everyone remembers Prince crooning “Purple Rain” during an actual torrential rainstorm. Also, the Indianapolis Colts beat the Chicago Bears in a rather uneventful game. In 1993, […]

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How the Modern Practice of Cheerleading Morphed from a Masculine to Feminine Activity

While people have been cheering in one form or another at sporting events  seemingly as long as there have been organized sporting events (for instance, see: The Truth About Gladiators and the Thumbs Up), what we’ve come to know as the “American phenomenon of organized cheerleading” dates back to the 19th century, with its genesis coinciding with the rise of […]

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Inventing the Huddle

Mike P. asks: Who invented the huddle in football? Prior to the twentieth century, American football teams tended to call their plays via a quarterback simply giving signals while the team either stood in more or less a generic near-set position or back from the line a bit as the quarterback called out what they’d do next. So where did […]

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Did Fidel Castro Really Almost Pitch in the Major Leagues?

There’s a long history of rulers bragging about their athletic talents. Ancient Egyptian kings sometimes used sporting prowess to show off masculinity and inspire fear. The Roman Emperor Commodus liked to step into the gladiator ring, often asking for already wounded or weakened opponents so he could look superior. (Yes, he was the partial inspiration for the movie Gladiator. Also […]

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The Strange Story of the First Person Disqualified From the Olympics for Doping

Olympians have been bending (and occasionally breaking) the rules in an effort to give themselves an edge over the competition since the games began. Despite this, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) only started testing for performance enhancing substances in 1968, and only seem to have really started taking the issue seriously in the 1990s. As for the 1968 Games, despite that a […]

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The Barkley Marathons, a 60 Hour Race so Intense Only 14 of Over 1,000 Ultramarathoners Have Ever Completed It

The Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, where they used to house some of the worst of the worst criminals, is located on the eastern side of Frozen Head State Park in the Tennessee mountains. Although escape attempts were rare, the prison’s ideal location reduced the chances of prisoners safely making it back to civilization. Beyond being a maximum security prison, if an […]

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The Trials and Tribulations of 1904 Olympic Marathon Runners

When the United States hosted the Olympics for the first time in 1904, the games had yet to reach the high level of competition and popularity we know today. Although athletes from countries around the world were invited to participate, the games were less about the world’s best athletes competing for medals and more about (actual) amateur athletes competing against […]

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