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Game Comparing The best Superiority The next best
Cricket Batting averages Sir Don Bradman +66% Sachin Tendulkar*
Golf ‘Modern’ majors titles Jack Nicklaus +29% Tiger Woods*
Men’s Tennis Slam singles titles Roger Federer* +14% Pete Sampras
Women’s Tennis Slam singles titles Margaret Court +9% Steffi Graf
Soccer Goals per game Ferenc Puskas +5% Pelé
Baseball Batting averages Ty Cobb +2% Rogers Hornsby
Ice Hockey Points per game Wayne Gretzky +2% Mario Lemieux
Football NFL passer rating Steve Young +1% Philip Rivers*
Basketball Points per game Michael Jordan (15 seasons) = Wilt Chamberlain (14 seasons)
* Still playing in 2011
He simply lacked peers and was the best player of ball sports since the day the prototype ball rolled off the production line. Surprisingly, ‘The Don’ is not featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers but his genius is recognised in a book by Australian cricket statman Charles Davis; The Best of the Best in which he makes a convincing case that while there would be one Bradman for every 200,000 professional cricketers there would be one Pelé for every 14,000 professional footballers. He sums up Bradman’s talent as ‘so unlikely it must be described, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, as not impossible, just very, very improbable’.
England’s players plotted and came up with the tactic of aiming fast balls at the batsman rather than the wicket he was defending—similar to a beanball in baseball. The English team dressed the tactic with the euphemism of ‘fast leg theory’ but the Australian media weren’t buying euphemisms that day and came up with ‘bodyline’. From the start, Jardine instructed his fast bowlers who included the especially quick, Harold Larwood, to go for the man, while he set a special field to take the catches created as batsmen tried to defend themselves from serious injury. This was all within the laws of cricket because until then the idea of propelling a hard ball at 90 mph towards the head or body of an un-helmeted and largely un-padded opponent hadn’t been a large part of the original thinking behind the reason everyone had chosen to go out and stand on the grass in the first place. Dissent arose immediately. Gubby Allen refused to follow his captain’s bowling instructions and the Nawab of Pataudi refused to field as part of Jardine’s leg-trap and was immediately dropped from the side. Few nawabs have played for England since.
Short term, and unsurprisingly, the tactic worked: Bradman hit his lowest ever batting average (still 56) and England won the Ashes. But unprecedented bad feeling had been created within the game of cricket. In an especially heated match in Adelaide, for possibly the first occasion in cricket the crowd booed. A significance for the future diplomatic relationship between the two countries was signalled at government level. The bodyline series and its effects on the game are still spoken of wherever cricketers meet. Bodyline continued to be used by England in the West Indies and in India but after being seen in England by the game’s great and good its existence came into question and—possibly under pressure to guarantee that England would not ever bowl bodyline again—Jardine, the England captain, announced his retirement from all cricket.
Sir Don Bradman went on to be famous as the greatest living Australian until his death in 2001, and famous forever as the man whose skill resulted in the changes to law 42 that now protect batsmen from the potentially lethal ferocity of attack that he’d provoked, and faced, as a young cricketer in 1932.
The Texas Game
The national game of Texas is a card game played with dominoes and called 42. It is also played in parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. The history behind the game is either or both that games involving cards were regarded as immoral by the church or/and that it was illegal to play cards on trains after the Civil War. The game includes a bidding phase in the manner of contract bridge with forty two being the number of points that can be won in a hand of play. It is traditional for US Presidents from Texas to include the playing of 42 on their CV.
The Jackie Robinson Story
By far the world’s biggest celebration of the number 42 occurs on 15th April in the United States of America when players, officials and stewards in baseball games around the USA wear Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers jersey number in remembrance of the civil rights milestone achieved when Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play Major League Baseball.
Forbidden to play Major League before 1947, black players had to play in the Negro leagues. Outstanding talents that never got to play at the top level included: Josh Gibson—so good that Babe Ruth was sometimes referred to as the white Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard—the black Lou Gehrig, Judy Johnson—later the first black coach in MLB, Oscar Charleston—rated by some as the greatest ever baseball player, and the mercurially quick Cool Papa Bell—believed to have been quicker than the Olympic sprint champion Jessie Owens.
Even in the army an extraordinarily talented athlete in the America of the 1940s could be subjected to extreme racism. Jackie Robinson had been the first UCLA student to win letters across baseball, football, basketball and track but in the army had had to fight very hard before eventually being accepted for officer training. When he refused to sit in the back of an un-segregrated coach, and objected to blatantly racist military questioning he was given a gerrymandered court-martial but was later fully exonerated and had an honourable discharge. Choosing baseball rather than football or basketball, he was immediately an outstanding new talent, playing professional Negro League in Kansas.
In post-war America the milestone moment for MLB occurred on April 15th 1947 when Jackie Robinson walked out onto Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the Boston Braves. The colour barrier had been broken, and Jackie Robinson made the first ever MLB Rookie of the Year an African-American. Famous for both the 42 jersey and his sportsmanship, Jackie Robinson played ten MLB seasons and helped win the 1955 World Series. After his diabetes-forced retirement he was the first African-American to be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The off-field Jackie Robinson was as remarkable as his baseball. In a 1947 poll, Jackie Robinson was the second most popular man in America (after Bing Crosby). In 1950 he played himself in The Jackie Robinson Story. He became the first African-American TV analyst and was high profile in promoting opportunities for black Americans. A few weeks before an early death in 1972 the Brooklyn Dodgers retired his number 42 and the following year his wife, Rachel, began the Jackie Robinson Foundation to maintain the legacy and provide scholarships for minority students.
Then in 1997 the unprecedented announcement was made on the fiftieth anniversary of the breaking of the colour barrier that Major League Baseball was retiring Jackie Robinson’s jersey number 42 across all teams. The first Jackie Robinson Day was commemorated in 2004 and since 2007 the standing invitation has been for all MLB players on the 15th of April to wear a 42 jersey, maintaining the memory of the times when even a Jackie Robinson could not.
The Astonishing Career of Satchel Paige
No sports story is more remarkable than a top-level career filling some forty years. For many, Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige was the best Negro league player of his generation and one of the all-time greatests, but his age appeared to be against his
MLB Player Year MLB Season Age
Barry Bonds 2007 Last 43
Hank Aaron 1976 Last 42
Satchel Paige 1948 First 42
Ty Cobb 1926 Last 41
Babe Ruth 1935 Last 40
Nap Lajoie 1916 Last 40
Yogi Berra 1963 Last 38
Mark McGwire 2001 Last 38
Jackie Robinson 1956 Last 37
Joe DiMaggio 1957 Last 37
Mickey Mantle 1969 Last 37
following Jackie Robinson (‘the greatest colored player I’ve ever seen’, said Satchel in a cleverly diplomatic comparison) into Major League Baseball. But such was his potential to draw the crowds (DiMaggio called Paige the best pitcher he’d ever faced) that on the da
y of his 42nd birthday he signed with the Cleveland Indians. A $40,000 three month contract made him the first Negro pitcher in MLB, two days later walking onto the pitch and making one baseball statistic that is now truly unbeatable: the oldest MLB rookie.
Three weeks later a record was set for a major league night game when a crowd of 72,562 appeared to see Paige pitching. The Cleveland Indians won the 1948 World Series, although Paige played a relatively minor part. He was to continue pitching in MLB and Triple-A baseball until 1966. By then he was an incredible sixty years old and in 1971 he was the first African-American pitcher to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Magician
Chicken, steak, pork, lamb and alcohol are not dietary requirements for sporting legendhood. Sir Stanley Matthews the English soccer player was an abstemious vegetarian who used amazing pace and ball-dribbling skills with ruthless effect to beat defenders and win the name of ‘The Magician’ from fans. Playing around 800 games, he was never booked for misconduct in an English league career lasting from 1932 until 1965, retiring he said ‘too early’ at the age of 50. Most of his club career was with Stoke and Blackpool, where he helped win the 1953 FA Cup in a game called the Matthews Final, the only final ever to be associated with one man. He made 54 official England appearances and played in 29 ‘unofficial’ games during WWII. He was the oldest player ever to have scored for England at the age of 41 in 1957 and when he was 42, became the oldest England player with the longest ever England career.
PS (Previously Secret)
Secret records released from the public record office in 2010 under the sixty year rule included the details of an incident in 1945 in which Corporal Matthews and his friend Aircraftman Stan ‘Electric Heels’ Mortensen (who had survived a bomber crash and later became the only player ever to score three goals in an FA Cup final—the Matthews final) were involved in a spot of bother. Having helped beat Belgium 3-2 in an unofficial England game as an Armed Services International XI, the international soccer stars walked into a Brussels shop carrying a suitcase with a view to selling coffee and soap in the manner of Private Walker from Dad’s Army. It is a reasonably safe guess that England’s finest footballers did not then have the phone numbers of agents capable of demanding the 1945 equivalent of the £6,500,000 club salaries of England’s World Cup 2010 heroes Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and John Terry, players who should perhaps be now considering vegetarianism and teetotalism as a means of making the team in 2014.
The Father of Baseball. A Brit
I am pleased to relate that the inventor of the mostly harmless pastime of baseball statistics was English. Sensing a need for numbers, Henry Chadwick left England’s bucolic West Country in an unlikely quest to enliven America. As a journalist in New York he could see that the young nation really needed to be making box scores, calculating batting averages, computing an earned run average and have at least one good man keeping a sharp eye on runs batted in. First, he needed Americans outdoors, preferably playing a game of some kind rather than standing aimlessly on corners. Chadwick was the man America had been waiting for—understanding that England had cricket he chose baseball as an all-American sport that would guarantee the statistics the country needed. Promoting baseball through his columns he also worked on rules that would help create more statistics, all the time scrupulously noting everything that moved, or might move at some stage. By 1860 he had what would set America on her way: the first book of baseball stats being nattily entitled Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player.
Aged 42 he was scoring for the National Baseball Club of Washington D.C. on their first national tour and continued his life in baseball until his death. Henry Chadwick is one of three Englishmen in the Baseball Hall of Fame and the only baseball writer. His grave marker reads ‘Father of baseball’.
The 42-42 Club
Henry Chadwick knew America’s secret desire. Baseball boasts, as I write, 6247 different performance statistics. It doesn’t, I just made that up but there are an extraordinarly vast number and until baseball statistics receive proper attention 6247 will do as a highly plausible quantum. There are almost certainly more statistics relating to baseball than any other sport, there are university courses on baseball stats and WikiProject Baseball scores Wikpedia baseball articles by quality and importance; at this moment the project is keeping tabs on 33,438 pages.
The most fun to be had is in synthesising a new statistic. Here are two from Shropshire in England: firstly, players batting .42 or better in a season.
MLB Player Season Batting Average
Hugh Duffy 1894 .440
Tip O’Neill 1887 .435
Ross Barnes 1876 .429
Nap Lajoie 1901 .426
Willie Keeler 1897 .424
Rogers Hornsby 1924 .424
Ty Cobb 1911 .420
George Sisler 1922 .420
Since the most recent occasion fans saw a major-leaguer player bat .42 in a season was 1924 I think we need something more topical: the 42-42 Club. This is a neo-stat being two notches beyond the 40-40 Club. Membership is achieved by hitting 42 home runs and stealing 42 bases in a season. There is one guy in the club-house so far—Alex Rodriguez, with the Seattle Mariners in the ’98 season he hit 42 home runs and stole 46 bases. A player purloining this many bases on this kind of basis will have soon filled the garage and be over-spilling into the yard.
1966 And All That
The result of the most famous game in English football was 4-2. And its most famous match official was Tofic Bahkramov, the Azerbaijan linesman (most definitely not ‘Russian’) who persuaded the referee that England’s third goal in the 1966 World Cup final between England and Germany was good. In Germany they still aren’t seeing it the same way, a shot that hits the bar then the goal line is, saracastically, now a ‘Wembley goal’.
Tofic became the first FIFA official to officiate at two World Cups and was a national hero for his work promoting both football and Azerbaijan. The national stadium in capital Baku bears his name and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher asked to meet him on a visit in 1992. Perhaps the ultimate tribute was paid in 2004 when the scorer of the first ‘Wembley goal’, Sir Geoff Hurst, unveiled a statue of the linesman who played a part in his World Cup hat-trick. It is probably the world’s only monument celebrating a linesman.
The Gold Retriever
The England team’s presentation with the World Cup was thanks to Pickles, a mongrel dog, who supposedly was allowed to lick the plates at the after-match celebration. Recognisable around the world, the Jules Rimet trophy not Pickles, vanished while on display at a convention of stamp collectors. Fortunately for England it was scented out from under a hedge a few days afterwards by Pickles. If I am swivelling my complimentary patented Duckworth-Lewis Rubik cube correctly it appears that in human years, Pickles was 42 (D/L method).
In a bad case of history failing to repeat itself, after being won outright by Brazil in 1970 the Jules Rimet trophy vanished for a second time in 1983. It is feared that this time it was smelted not smelt.
The First 42 Ks Are The Worst
A marathon course is now set at 42 kilometres and 195 metres. Give or take 42 metres. This became the official course length in 1921 having varied since the first modern race in 1896. The first 42k marathon had been run 13 years earlier at the 1908 London Olympics—being the distance from Windsor Castle to the Olympic White City stadium. The race is remembered because it was the first Olympics with significant surviving film and was especially famous because the first man over the line, the Italian Dorando Peitri had had to be helped and was disqualified in favour of the second-placed American.
To allow Queen Alexandra the best view of the finish the direction of the final lap of the stadium was reversed from the anti-clockwise common at most sports tracks. Dorando entered the stadium but turned right, confused and totally exhausted his final 385 yards before crossing the line was to take ten minutes. The film had made the marathon popular and Dorando went on to make significant e
arnings by finishing first in two re-runs staged in America with the gold medal winner.
Art and Literature
The Defining Genius
One of few London houses built around 1700 and still standing, 17 Gough Square, was the place where 42-year-old Samuel Johnson was living and working when mid-way through the task of compiling his world-famous Dictionary of the English Language. It is regarded as one of the greatest works of scholarly genius ever. It was the first dictionary to reveal how a language worked, Johnson’s insight was to choose for each word phrases and sentences that made exemplary use of the word. In a nine year period he defined a total of 42,777 words with 114,000 illustrative examples.
Not allowing for duvet-days, Johnson defined an average of 15 words per day. Having agreed a price in advance for a task he had expected to take three years he found himself working for an unexpected six further years, ending up receiving the equivalent of 9 old pence per word defined. In terms of equivalent buying power in 2011 he was getting £90 a day but from this he still had to pay his assistants. The lexicographical genius was working at close to today’s minimum wage.
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