FTW combed through our extensive archives and scoured the Internet to come up with 101 sports facts that even die-hards fans probably did’t know, such as the attendance for Muhammad Ali’s first title fight to Michael Jordan’s minor-league paycheck to Michael Phelps’ status as his own country.
1. Jordan Spieth won $61,867 less at The Masters than Arnold Palmer won in his entire career.
2. Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf continued to pay Michael Jordan his reported $4 million basketball salary while he was experimenting with baseball.
3. If Michael Phelps were a country, he’d rank No. 35 on the all-time Olympic gold medal list, ahead of 97 nations.
4. Wilt Chamberlain didn’t win MVP the year he scored 50.4 points and grabbed 22.9 rebounds per game. (Bill Russell did.)
5. The Buffalo Bills haven’t made the playoffs since Bill Clinton was president.
6. Roger Bannister held the world record in the mile for exactly 46 days.
8. When Michael Jordan averaged 37.1 points per game in 1986-87, his Chicago Bulls were a sub.500, eighth-seeded playoff team that got swept by the Boston Celtics in the first round.
9. The average golf ball has 336 dimples.
10. Venus Williams (7 Grand Slams) has been ranked No. 1 in the WTA rankings for 17 weeks, more than a full year less (56 weeks) less than Caroline Wozniacki (0 Grand Slams).
11. Six of Tim Tebow’s seven wins with the miracle 2011 Denver Broncos were of the come-from-behind variety.
12. If three-time Cy Young winner Clayton Kershaw were to break Young’s record of 511 wins, he’d need to stay at his current pace for the next 41 years, until he were 68 years old.
13. Jimmy Chitwood, the hero of the film Hoosiers, only has four lines in the entire movie.
14. Wilt’s 50.4 ppg season is 31.6% better than the next-highest scoring average in history. (Elgin Baylor’s 38.3 ppg is second and was also set in 1962). To put into perspective, someone breaking Tony Gwynn’s record for batting average in last 70 years (.394) would have to hit .518 to match that 31.6% difference.
15. Miguel Cabrera (No. 48 at .321) is the only active player in the top 50 of MLB career batting average.
16. There are 18 minutes of total action in a baseball game.
17. The two golf balls Alan Shephard hit on the moon with a six-iron
(one that went into a crater another that “sailed for miles and miles”)
are still there.
18. When the Americans defeated favorite England in the 1950 World Cup, the story goes that many newspapers around the world believed the 1-0 score to be a typo and instead printed that England won 10-1.
19. Only three active players are in the top 50 on the all-time MLB home run list, yet 27 of the top 50 have played in the past 20 years.
20. The Phillippines has competed in the most Summer Olympics (20) without winning a gold medal.
21. Liechtenstein has competed in the most Summer Olympics (16) without winning any medal.
22. In the 1970s, Jack Nicklaus played all 40 majors and made the top 10 in 35.
23. While there has never been a three-peat in the Super Bowl, the NBA (10), NHL (9) and MLB (7) have each featured multiple such championships.
24. Babe Ruth only won four World Series in 15 seasons with the New York Yankees.
25. Yogi Berra won 13 World Series in 18 seasons with the Yanks.
26. The 100-point game gets all the deserved attention, but a few years later, Wilt went for 25 points, grabbed 22 rebounds and dealt out 21 assists. It remains the only “double” triple-double in history.
27. Only 10 other quarterbacks in NFL history have thrown half as many touchdown passes as Peyton Manning.
28. Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth II, did not have to undergo gender verification at the 1976 Olympics due to “royal courtesy.”
29. John Isner and Nicholas Mahut (the 70-68 Wimbledon match) played 183 games over those three days, which beat the previous record of 112 games (set when there no tiebreaks for any set) by 71 games, which is just insanity.
30. To put that into perspective, only one men’s Grand Slam final in the Open era (that’s 193 matches) has been longer than 71 games. That came when Roger Federer defeated Andy Roddick in the 2009 Wimbledon final 5–7, 7–6 (6), 7–6 (5), 3–6, 16–14 in 77 games.
31. When asked why he didn’t win gold in cross country at the 2010 Olympics, Norwegian skier Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset said, “I think I have seen too much porn in the last 14 days.”
32. Sammy Sosa has three of the eight 60-home run seasons in baseball history.
33. The longest recorded point in tennis history took 29 minutes and featured the ball crossing the net 643 times in a 1984 women’s match. Young Aussie player Bernard Tomic (nicknamed “Tomic the Tank Engine”) lost a match last year in 28 minutes.
34. Tiger Woods once made 142 straight cuts, topping Jack Nicklaus’ record by 37 and routinely leading the next-best active player by 100 or more tournaments. (This is one of Tiger’s most underrated stats.)
35. About 46% of Pro Football Hall of Famers played for one team during their NFL careers.
36. Bill Buckner had more hits than Ted Williams.
37. The phrase about winning something “hands down” originally referred to a jockey who won a race without whipping his horse or pulling back the reins.
38. An NFL player’s union study determined that the average NFL career is 3.3 years, with running backs (2.57 years), wide receivers (2.81) and cornerbacks (2.94) having the shortest career, by average.
39. The longest average NFL careers? Punters, at 4.87 years.
40. At the first modern Olympics, winners were awarded silver medals.
41. Roger Maris was never intentionally walked the year he hit 61 home runs. (Mickey Mantle batted behind him.)
42. In 2004, Barry Bonds was intentionally walked 120 times, which is more than 2.5 times higher than the longtime record held by Willie McCovey (45 in 1969). Only six players in the NL that year walked that many times in total.
43. Teenager Michael Chang hit an underhand serve to defeat world No. 1 Ivan Lendl en route to his shocking 1989 French Open title.
44. Rickey Henderson’s stolen base total (1,406) is almost three times as high as the active SB leader, Ichiro (487).
45. Katie Ledecky’s world record in the 1,500 would have placed her 24th in the 2012 Olympic men’s swimming race.
46. Only three men have won the NCAA title as a coach and a player: Joe B. Hall, Bobby Knight and Dean Smith.
47. Among Ted Williams’ many records, he set a student gunnery record as a World War II pilot. The test emphasizes reflexes, coordination and visual reaction time and still stood, as of 2002.
48. China did not win an Olympic medal until 1984. At the 2008 Beijing games, the Chinese won 100 medals.
49. Chris Evert won 125-straight matches on clay, from Aug. 12, 1973 to May 12, 1979. Amazingly though, that run included just two French Open titles.
50. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, played goalie for the amateur Portsmouth Association Football Club, which would eventually become the Portsmouth professional team that won the FA Cup in 2008.
51. The men’s long jump world record has been broken once since 1969.
52. Bob Beamon’s 1968 Olympic record in the long jump would have won the 2012 Olympics by almost two feet.
53. Horse racing’s Triple Crown has been achieved just three times since 1949, all within a six year span in the mid-1970s. (Secretariat, 1973; Seattle Slew, 1977; Affirmed, 1978). That’s three in six years and zero in the other 60.
54. There have been three Olympic Games held in countries that no longer exist.
55. Greece is the only country to have participated in every Olympics under its own flag.
56. Rasheed Wallace had his 2004 Detroit Pistons championship ring resized to fit his middle finger.
57. Only 11 goalies have scored a goal in the history of the NHL, with the first coming in 1979 and the last in 2013.
58. The PGA record for highest score on a par-4 is a whopping 16, set by Kevin Na in 2011
59. Only 72 players in NBA history have attempted more free throws in their careers than the 5,317 Shaquille O’Neal missed.
60. The night before the Miracle on Ice, American goalie Jim Craig played the video game Centipede with Soviet star Sergei Makarov at the Olympic Village.
61. During the 1974 World Cup in Munich, national teams were given BMW buses for transportation. After being eliminated, Zaire unsuccessfully tried to drive theirs back to Africa.
62. There has been a regular-season NFL game on every single day of the week.
63. The Boston Bruins name is spelled “BQSTQN BRUINS” on the Stanley Cup for their 1971-72 title.
64. Author David Foster Wallace was a fine junior tennis player, reaching No. 4 in his home state of Illinois. He’d later write the seminal tennis piece of all time, Federer as Religious Experience.
65. The Cleveland Browns are the only team to neither play in nor host a Super Bowl.
66. Of the four NBA players who have played for the most teams (the shared record is 12), three of them (Jim Jackson, Tony Massenburg and Joe Smith) had a college relationship with former Ohio State and Maryland coach Gary Williams.
67. Alaska and Maine are the only two states to never send a school to the NCAA tournament.
68. In 1974, Chris Evert was the top money winner in two sports. Chrissy, as she was affectionately known, won the French Open and Wimbledon and led the WTA money list. Then there was Chris Evert, the horse, named after the female tennis star, who won the three-year-old filly of the year award.
69. Despite invitations, England didn’t participate in the first three World Cups, probably sort of figuring the misery that was to come. (It was actually beef with FIFA that kept away the Brits.)
70. A contest was held to name the San Jose Sharks and “Rubber Puckies” was one of the finalists. The “Blades” won voting but was determined to have too many gang ties, so the team went with “Sharks” because apparently they’ve never seen West Side Story.
71. Rocky III was nominated for Outstanding Foreign Language Film at the Japanese Academy Awards.
72. Four presidents have been on the cover of Sports Illustrated: John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan (twice) and Bill Clinton.
73. Speaking of politics, Grant Hill’s mother roomed with Hillary Clinton at Wellesley.
74. Cubs uber-prospect Kris Bryant, who was called to the majors with much fanfare this month, is 10 months older than Bryce Harper.
75. Jason Lezak’s anchor split (46.06) in the unbelievable 4×100 relay comeback that allowed Michael Phelps to win his eight gold medals in Beijing was 0.73 faster than any other relay split in history.
76. No Stanley Cup winners from 1929 through 1954 currently have their names on the Cup due to the increasing size of hockey’s famous trophy.
77. Thirteen women have their name on the Cup, in the form of team owners and front-office members.
78. Despite not playing baskeball since high school, Bruce Jenner was drafted No. 139 by the NBA’s Kansas City Kings after winning the men’s decathlon at the 1976 Olympics.
79. Starting in 1990, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls never had a three-game losing streak for eight years.
80. From 1918-1949, the Philadelphia Phillies had one winning season.
81. Only one city has won three major sports championships in the same year: Detroit in 1935, when the Lions won the NFL title, Tigers won the World Series and Red Wings took the Stanley Cup.
82. Cleveland has more titles in the Big Four sports than Dallas, San Francisco, Washington, Baltimore, Denver and Houston, so enough with this “woe is Cleveland” nonsense.
83. Wayne Gretzky broke the all-time single-season goals record by 16 goals and the points record by 65 as a 20-year-old on the Edmonton Oilers.
84. Secretariat’s 31-length win at the 1973 Belmont Stakes is two seconds faster than any other horse has ever run the race.
85. The movie Angels in the Outfield featured two Angels players who would eventually go on to win Best Actor Oscars (Matthew McConaughey and Adrian Brody).
86. Babe Ruth set baseball’s career home run record in 1921 when he smacked his 139th homer.
87. In order to break Cal Ripken’s consecutive games record, current leader Evan Longoria (257 straight as of Apr. 22, 2015) would have to play every day until sometime around July of 2029, when he’d be 43 years old.
88. In 1991, Sports Illustrated predicted that the NFL of 2001 would have a 20-game season and 40 teams, including squads in London, Paris, Berlin, Tehran, Johannesburg, Bombay, Djakarta, Sydney, Auckland, and Mexico City.
89. Wilt Chamberlain won three-straight Big Eight titles in the high jump and was also inducted into the volleyball Hall of Fame.
90. Barry Switzer has a better NFL playoff winning percentage than Bill Belichick, Bill Walsh, Joe Gibbs, Jimmy Johnson and Chuck Noll.
91. Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson and Wayne Gretzky starred in a short-lived 1991 NBC Saturday morning cartoon called Pro Stars.
92. With the final pick of the 1983 NBA draft, Philadelphia 76ers owner Harold Katz took 49-year-old Norman Horvitz out of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. There are different rumors about the connection between Katz and Horvitz, though one holds that they were poker buddies. Horvitz’s stats as the draft’s “Mr. Irrelevant” was noted unironically by contemporary newspaper accounts.
93. Mickey Mantle was originally a shortstop but after making 102 errors in his last two seasons in the minors, he was moved to the outfield.
94. These kids had no interest in Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Bench.
95. Wheelchair tennis legend Esther Vergeer retired after 470-straight wins and four Paralympic golds.
96. Frank Sinatra actually had the first right of refusal to play John McClane in Die Hard because of a contractual clause from his role in The Detective. (Die Hard‘s source material, a book by Roderick Thorpe, was a sequel to The Detective.) Then 73, the Chairman of the Board turned down the role, obviously. (What? Die Hard is totally sports.)
97. Joe Gibbs is the only coach to win the Super Bowl with three different quarterbacks.
98. George Steinbrenner was supposed to play himself in an episode of Seinfeld (rather than the Larry David voice that had served as a faux Steinbrenner for years) but the scene was eventually cut.
99. While he was a football player at Florida State, Lee Corso had a college roommate named Burt Reynolds who eventually quit school because he was going “to Hollywood to be a movie star.”
100. When 7-1 underdog Cassisus Clay (who would change his name to Muhammad Ali days later) defeated Sonny Liston in Miami Beach in 1964, the 16,000-seat arena was half-empty.
101. Michael Jordan’s nickname is high school was Magic, after Magic Johnson.
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