The frontier sport of gouging, imported from England, flourished in the Ohio River Valley around 1800.
The object was to gouge out the opponent’s eye with a thumbnail.
To compete effectively, you would have needed to let your thumbnail grow extra-long.
A baseball game running eight hours and six minutes was played by the Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers on May 9, 1984. It was the longest baseball game recorded. The White Sox won, 7-6.
Jack Dempsey was punched through the ropes by a first-round right from Luis Firpo on September 4, 1923, at the Polo Grounds in New York City. The punch did not end the fight: Dempsey came back to win by a knockout in the second round.
It isn’t certain. Constantine abolished the gladiator shows in A.D. 325, but they persisted. Honorius abolished them again in the fifth century, but even then they may have continued.
Neat is a now obsolete term for cattle. Neat’s-foot oil is the oil extracted from the hooves and slim bones of oxen or cattle. In olden days, the oil was also used as medicine and as shoe polish.
It was not Yogi Berra who said, “The opera ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings”. Former Washington Bullets coach Dick Mona popularized the saying during the 1978 NBA playoffs. However, it was Dan Cook, a television sports announcer and writer for the San Antonio Express-News, who invented it.
John L. Sullivan knocked out Jake Kilrain in the 75th round of the U.S. heavyweight championship at Rich-burg, Mississippi, on July 8, 1889. This was the last legal bare-knuckle fight. He claimed to have won the world’s championship with that victory, since Kilrain had previously fought a draw with the English champion. After that fight,…