PLAY BALL!: Sports Stories of the Urban Legends William Smith & Wikipedia
Contents
Madden Curse Pages 8 Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx Pages 10 Kevin Mitchell: Cat Killer Pages 12 Wade Boggs Pounds Brews Pages 14 Football Team was Poisoned Pages 16 Wilt Chamberlain & His Women Pages 18 Jimmy Hoffa's Body Pages 20 Curse of the Billy Goat Pages 22
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Madden Curse Whoever get on the cover of the game Madden will have a bad year the next year until the next person get on the cover.
The Legend Prior to 1999, every annual installment of the Madden NFL series primarily featured Madden on its cover. In 1999, Electronic Arts selected Garrison Hearst to appear on the PAL version's cover, and has since featured one of the league’s top players on every annual installment despite Madden's opposition. While appearing on the cover has become an honor akin to appearing on the Wheaties box, much like the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx, certain players who appeared on Madden video game box art have experienced a decline in performance, usually due to an injury The "Madden Curse" has taken down a number of high profile players including Michael Vick, Daunte Culpepper, and Marshall Faulk.
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Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx
An urban legend that states that individuals or teams who appear on the cover of the Sports Illustrated magazine will subsequently be jinxed
The Legend If a player or team appears on the cover, that player or team will experience some kind of misfortune in the near future. Recent examples including the pictured SI cover from November, three months before Peyton Manning threw Super Bowl-clinching interception against the New Orleans Saints. Other recent examples include the "Favre On Fire" cover two weeks before the Vikings lost to the Saints in the NFC Championship Game. In September 2008, Tom Brady appeared on the cover of the 2008 SI NFL Preview edition and promptly had his knee blown out in the opening minutes of the Patriots' first game.
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Kevin Mitchell: Cat Killer
An urban legend involving Mitchell holds that during the Mets' championship run in 1986, during an argument with his then live-in girlfriend, Mitchell decapitated her cat.
The Legend The legend grew out of Doc Gooden's 1999 autobiography titled "Heat." In it, Gooden goes into vivid detail about a time he went to Mitchell's girlfriends house to pay a visit to his former teammate who he found in an enormous fit of rage. The story goes that the knife-wielding Mitchell had melted down at his girlfriend and was screaming profanities and threatening her. Then, Mitchell grabbed his girlfriend's cat and chopped of its head with one clean shot. Years later, neither Gooden nor Mitchell claimed responsibility for the story. Gooden denies putting in the book while Mitchell denies it ever happened, leaving the legend to grow and grow.
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Wade Boggs Pounds Brews An urban legend about a baseball player of Wade Boggs
The Legend Wade Boggs was famous for eating chicken before every game, but he entered legendary status due to the urban legend that he once drank 64 beers on a cross-country flight. Boggs went on "Pardon the Interruption" and publicly denied it. However, former teammate Jeff Nelson added fuel to the legend by outlaying just how Boggs achieved the number. "I’ve never seen anyone drink as much beer as [Boggs] did in my life," Nelson said in a radio interview. "I’d say, on a typical road trip, east coast to west coast, say a road game to Seattle... Wade would drink anywhere between 50 and 60 beers...I know how crazy that sounds, and I wouldn’t believe it myself unless I saw him do it...numerous times. And he drank nothing but Miller Lite." Boggs may have denied it, but a teammate vouching for the story has helped it survive well passed Boggs' retirement.
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Oklahoma Football Team was Poisoned An urban legends about the 1957 Oklahoma team.
The Legend Oklahoma was in the midst of the greatest streak in the history college football. That was until Notre Dame paid a visit to Owen Field and defeated Bud Wilkinson's team 7-0, ending the Sooners' 47-game winning streak. As the legend goes, the Sooners, who had no trouble scoring that season, looked so out of whack and physically disoriented that the only explanation was food poisoning orchestrated at the hands of their opponent. Oklahoma went on to win the rest of their games in 1957, which fed even more fire into the feeling that something fishy happened day. Years later, the story grew into a legend.
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Wilt Chamberlain and His Women An urban legend about Wilt Chamberlain off the basketball court
The Legend Wilt Chamberlain was already a legend of the NBA for his 50-point scoring average and 100-point game. However, Wilt became a legend to men when later in life he declared that he had slept with over 20,000 women in his lifetime. Men and women alike corroborated over the years just how sexual driven Chamberlain was, but still, that math equates to more than one person a day for his entire adult life. According to Rod Roddewig, a contemporary of Wilt's, the 20,000 number was created when he and Chamberlain were staying in Chamberlain's penthouse in Honolulu during the mid-1980s. He and Chamberlain stayed at the penthouse for 10 days, over the course of which he recorded everything on his Daytimer. For every time Chamberlain went to bed with a different girl he put a check in his daytimer. After those 10 days there were 23 checks in the book, which would be rate of 2.3 women per day. He divided that number in half, to be conservative and to correct for degrees of variation. He then multiplied that number by the number of days he had been alive at the time minus 15 years. That was how the 20,000 number came into existence.
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Jimmy Hoffa's Body An urban legend about Jimmy Hoffa, whose disappearance coincided with construction of the stadium, had been buried under one of the end zones at the field.
The Legend The location of Jimmy Hoffa's body was an urban legend that crossed the lines of sports and Americana. Hoffa was a former union leader who disappeared in 1975 in what was expected as a mob hit. 1975 was also the year Giants Stadium was being built. Decades later, the rumor grew into legend that Hoffa was buried under the goal line at Giants Stadium. However, the supposed site of Hoffa's final resting place is now under 13 feet of concrete as what was the goal line of Giants Stadium is now a parking lot, sealing Hoffa's place as the greatest urban legend in sports.
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Curse of the Billy Goat A sports-related curse that was supposedly placed on the Chicago Cubs in 1945 by Billy Goat Tavern owner Billy Sianis
The Legend The exact nature of the curse differs in various accounts of the incident. Some state that Sianis declared that no World Series games would ever again be played at Wrigley Field, while others believe that his ban was on the Cubs appearing in the World Series, making no mention of a specific venue. Sianis’ family claims that he dispatched a telegram to team owner Philip K. Wrigley which read, “You are going to lose this World Series and you are never going to win another World Series again. You are never going to win a World Series again because you insulted my goat.”[citation needed] Whatever the truth, the Cubs were up two games to one in the 1945 Series, but ended up losing Game 4, as well as the best-of-seven series, four games to three. The curse was immortalized in newspaper columns over the years, particularly by syndicated columnist Mike Royko, and gained widespread attention during the 2003 postseason when Fox television commentators played it up during the Cubs-Marlins match-up in the 2003 National League Championship Series.
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PLay ball!:
Sports Stories of the Urban Legends
Designed, printed, and bound by William Smith Boise State University, ART 277, Fall of 2014
Typefaces include: Cracked, Copperplate Gothic , Arial Black, Marion