My picks for top 10 most important sports stories of the 20th century

By Stan Caldwell

stanmansportsfan.com

We have reached the year 2020, for better or worse, a fifth of the way into the 21st century.

Historians generally say that at least a generation, about 20-25 years, is needed before one can put important events into historical perspective and gauge their relative significance in the longer timeline of history.

That means we have about reached the point where we can look at the 20th century as a whole and see how trends and events have developed, and how those events were impacted by game-changing moments.

And without any current sports being played, this seems like a good time to look back over the previous century and judge which events had the most impact on sports, generally and specifically, within a particular sport.

I decided to pick the Top 10 most important sports moments of the 20th century. Not necessarily the most famous, or the most memorable, but the most important.

Which 10 events or moments had the most lasting impact on sports moving forward. Which were the game changers. It wasn’t easy.

I was born in 1955, so I was around for a lot of great moments in sports in the last century, and there were many of these moments I considered including in this list, but ultimately chose not to use.

Take Secretariat. The greatest racehorse who ever lived was a sensational story in 1973. I literally got goosebumps watching Big Red pull away to an unbelievable 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes to clinch the Triple Crown, the first horse to win it in 25 years.

But, as great as Secretariat was, he was just another racehorse, and another group of three-year-old thoroughbreds took the post the next year for the Kentucky Derby, and the year after and the year after.

Or the Miracle on Ice. Stirring story of underdog American college kids bringing down the mighty Russians in the 1980 Olympic ice hockey semifinal. The stuff of legend. But it didn’t really have a lasting impact on sports, so it was left off the list.

The Dodgers go to Los Angeles? Important turning point for Major League Baseball, as both National League teams from New York City, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, left New York for California in 1957.

It was a sensational story when it happened, but, in the long view, baseball’s move to California was inevitable. If it hadn’t been the Dodgers, it would have been another team, maybe the Chicago Cubs, as posited by one counterfactual I read a while back.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

So, here I’ve devised a list of Top 10 Most Important Sports Events in the 20th Century, and I’ve ordered them according to my personal judgement, and included why they were important.

10. Pele stars at the 1958 World Cup.

Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known by his professional name of Pele, was just 17 when he took the field for Brazil in the 1958 World Cup, played that year in Sweden.

Pele had shown flashes of brilliance since being put on the starting 11 for Santos in his home country the previous year, but few outside Brazil had heard much of him.

In fact, Pele was hurt going into World Cup and didn’t play at all until Brazil’s third and final game of group play.

But when he finally got on the field, he was a sensation, scoring six goals in four games, including two in a 5-2 rout of host Sweden in the final.

Pele became an international superstar, the first for his sport, even bringing soccer to the United States, which had mostly shunned the game until he came to America to play in the twilight of his career in the 1970s.

He would help Brazil win two more World Cup championships, in 1962 and 1970, and it is about Pele that the term, “the beautiful game,” was coined to describe the kind of flowing, artistic futbol that Pele made famous.

9. The NBA adopts the shot clock.

The National Basketball Association was still a struggling entity in 1954, played mostly in the Northeast U.S. in smoky, half-filled arenas. And the game itself was slow, plodding, with players holding or passing the ball, waiting for the right moment to shoot.

That year, the league decided to try something revolutionary, a 24-second shot clock, meaning a team had to put up a shot every 24 seconds or lose the ball to their opponent.

Suddenly, the pace quickened, scores began to go up and so did the level of fan excitement. Scores of games began to approach 90, then 100, until it was a rare game in which one team (usually both) did not reach 100 points.

By the early 1960s, the NBA had gained a foothold on American sports, landing a television deal and setting the foundation for the international game that pro basketball has become.

It would take another 30 years before American colleges adopted a shot clock, but when they did, they too saw the effects, making certain strategies obsolete, while changing the entire nature of the game.

8. Abebe Bikila wins the Olympic marathon.

In 1960, a slender young man from Ethiopia stunned the world of track and field by winning the marathon at the Olympic Games in Rome. Abeke Bikila, running barefoot, not only won by a large margin, but set a world record in the process.

It was a watershed event for long-distance running, and for Olympic sports.

Bikila was the first athlete from sub-Saharan Africa to win an Olympic gold medal in any event, and when he repeated his feat four years later in Tokyo – this time in running shoes – he became the first man to win back-to-back golds in the marathon.

Bikila’s body began to break down just prior to the Games in 1968 and he did not finish the marathon at Mexico City. He was paralyzed in a car crash in 1969 and died in 1973.

But his work had been done, because it was in 1968 that a Kenyan named Kipchoge Keino smoked American favorite Jim Ryun in the 1,500-meter final that year, helping establish East Africans as the dominant force in distance running, a dominance that continues to this day.

7. Tiger Woods wins The Masters in smashing fashion.

Late on the afternoon of April 13, 1997, 21-year-old Tiger Woods walked up the 18^th fairway at Augusta National to a thunderous ovation from the packed gallery, in front of what is still the largest television audience to watch a round of golf.

On the final hole of the world’s greatest golf tournament, Woods had a 12-shot lead and was about to finish four rounds at Augusta in 18 shots under-par, both of which are still tournament records.

And his achievement is all the more stunning when you consider that he was actually 4-over-par after the first nine holes of the tournament.

But Woods shot 6-under on the back nine that day – with four birdies and an eagle – and he never looked back. He led by nine shots after three rounds, then shot 69 in the final 18 holes.

Woods had already won three PGA Tour events in less than a year after going pro, so his win wasn’t entirely unexpected, but nobody could have predicted the show he put on at The Masters in ’97.

It was the first of 15 major tournaments Woods would win in a career that would establish him as one of the greatest golfers who ever lived.

Now at the age of 44, Tiger is past his prime, but last spring he showed he can still muster up greatness, winning his fifth Masters title, becoming the second-oldest player to win it.

6. The Black Sox conspire to fix the World Series.

In 1919, the Chicago White Sox had developed into the best team in baseball, which had established itself as America’s premier spectator sport over the previous two decades. The Sox had won the World Series in 1917, and after an off year in 1918, had come back strong.

Going into the World Series, baseball’s premier event, the White Sox were heavy favorites over the National League champion Cincinnati Reds.

But little did anyone know that several key players on the White Sox, disgruntled at the miserly ways of owner Charles Comiskey, had approached some well-known gamblers about fixing the outcome of the Series.

In the end, eight players were judged to have taken money, or to have known about the plot, to throw the Series in Cincinnati’s favor, and after the Reds won in eight games (the World Series was best-of-nine games in those days) everyone smelled a rat.

The so-called Black Sox Scandal had far-reaching consequences for baseball, as it was not an isolated event. Gambling had long been a part of the game in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with rumors of game-fixing long swirling around some of the game’s top players.

In response, baseball’s owners decided to establish the Commissioner of Baseball to oversee the game, and they hired a retired judge named Kennesaw Mountain Landis, whose first order of business was to slap a lifetime ban on the Black Sox players.

Landis subsequently cleaned up the game and ruled baseball with an iron fist until his death in 1944. And the White Sox would not win the AL pennant for another 40 years, and would not win the World Series again until 2005.

5. Cassius Clay knocks out Sonny Liston.

On February 25, 1964, a 22-year-old boxer named Cassius Clay entered a ring at Miami Beach, Florida, to fight the most feared man in the game, Sonny Liston, for Liston’s world heavyweight championship.

A scowling brute who served a prison sentence prior to becoming a boxer, Liston was an 8-1 favorite to silence the kid who had become known as the Louisville Lip, because of his boastful style.

Clay had won the gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the Rome Olympics in 1960 before embarking on a pro career, and he was undefeated coming into the fight with Liston.

From the very start, Clay used his reach advantage and superior speed to dance around Liston, peppering the bigger, but slower fighter with jabs and hooks, while staying away from Liston’s lethal right hand.

As the bell rang to start the seventh round, an exhausted Liston failed to come out of his corner, and Clay was ruled the winner by a technical knockout.

It was the first significant victory by the man who would soon change his name to Muhammad Ali, reflecting his conversion to Islam, and who would go on to become one of the greatest fighters who ever lived.

More importantly, his decision in 1967 to refuse draft induction into the United States Army would be one of the signature events of the tumultuous decade.

Later, he would become a global symbol of black liberation, and at his death in 2016 he would be universally mourned as one of the key figures of the century. And it all started when he, “shook up the world,” in Miami Beach in 1964.

4. Curt Flood refuses trade to Phillies.

Not long after the end of the 1969 baseball season, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Phillies worked out a blockbuster trade after both teams had finished well behind the New York Mets in the National League East standings.

The Cardinals would send star centerfielder Curt Flood, catcher Tim McCarver and two other players to the Phillies for three players, including star slugger Dick Allen.

But Flood, a 12-year veteran with St. Louis, balked at the move and demanded instead that he be granted free agent status. When this was denied, he filed suit, supported by the fledgling player’s union, led by an obscure lawyer named Marvin Miller.

At issue was what was known as the reserve clause, a standard in each player’s contract that gave the team exclusive rights to the player’s services in perpetuity. If a player was traded, he had two choices: accept the trade or quit the game.

With the union’s backing, Flood challenged the reserve clause, and while he wasn’t successful in bringing it down himself, his lawsuit would lead to an arbitrator’s ruling in 1974 granting Baltimore pitcher Andy Messersmith free agency.

That effectively killed the reserve clause and opened the doors for the first wave of free agent signings. Within two years, the New York Yankees had signed pitcher Catfish Hunter and slugger Reggie Jackson to million-dollar contracts, and the spending frenzy was on.

And union leader Marvin Miller would go on to build the baseball players’ union into the strongest sports union in the world. Miller, who died in 2012 at age 95, was finally – belatedly – selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame last December and would have been inducted this summer.

3. Jesse Owens dominates the 1936 Olympics.

Berlin was awarded the Olympic Games for 1936 nearly two years before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January, 1933, but as those games approached, there was real concern about Hitler’s approach to the Olympics.

Hitler planned to use the Games to showcase the Nazi ideals of athleticism, and the Germans had put together a strong team in a variety of sports.

Many Western liberals, hearing of pogroms against Jews in Germany, urged boycotts of the Olympics, but American Olympic leader Avery Brundage turned a deaf ear to those calls and prepared to send a large American contingent to Berlin.

Among the athletes on the U.S. team was track-and-field star Jesse Owens, a young black man attending Ohio State University at the time.

In 1935, Owens had burst onto the scene with record-setting performances and many Americans set aside their prejudices and looked to Owens to carry U.S. hopes in the Games.

And he delivered. In stunning fashion, Owens won four gold medals, in the 100-meter and 200-meter dash, the long jump and the 4×100-meter relay.

Germany actually had a spectacular Games, winning more medals and more gold medals than any other nation, but all anyone remembers is Jesse Owens, a black American, spoiling Adolf Hitler’s show in his own capital.

2. The Jets upset the Colts in Super Bowl III

On January 15, 1969, the Baltimore Colts and the New York Jets took the field at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, for the third installment in what was still officially called the NFL-AFL World Championship Game.

The National Football League had fended off challenges from earlier leagues before the American Football League came along in 1960, but the AFL proved to have staying power.

Except for New York City, the AFL placed its teams in cities that had not had pro football before – Denver, Houston, Buffalo, Kansas City – and their success in those cities had shown a nationwide appetite for the pro game.

In 1966, seeing that the AFL wasn’t going away, the NFL agreed to a merger, scheduled for 1970, and part of the package was a championship game between the two league champions.

The first two games, featuring the Green Bay Packers against the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders, had been lop-sided mismatches, and there was real concern that the NFL might renege on the merger.

In 1968, the Colts had supplanted the Packers as the NFL’s dominant team, posting a 13-1 record in the regular season, then clobbering Cleveland in the NFL Championship Game.

Meanwhile, the Jets had scraped past the Raiders in the AFL title game and were thought to have little chance against the powerful Colts. Indeed, Baltimore was nearly a three-touchdown favorite to win.

The underdog Jets were led by Joe Namath, a flashy quarterback with a rifle arm and two bad knees. After the Jets started looking at film of the Colts, however, Namath began to talk, publicly guaranteeing that the Jets would win.

And win they did, and they did it NFL-style, with a crunching ground attack and a smothering defense. The final score of 16-7 doesn’t indicate just how thoroughly the Jets dominated the game.

The next season, just to show that the AFL win was no fluke, the Chiefs put a similar beating on the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV, the Super Bowl name having been formalized for the big game for the 1969 season.

There is no understating how important the Jets’ win was for pro football and sports in general.

It brought the innovative AFL teams into a unified NFL as equals; in the 1970s, pro football would become America’s Game, the most popular sport in the country, and the NFL would become one of the most powerful leagues in all of sports.

1. Jackie Robinson breaks baseball’s color barrier
   

On the Opening Day of the 1947 baseball season, at Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn Dodgers started a rookie named Jackie Robinson at first base against the Boston Braves.

Only this wasn’t just any rookie. By playing that day, Robinson became the first black athlete to play in a major league game since 1884.

Blacks had played the game in baseball’s infancy in the 1870s, but by the middle of the next decade, they had been pushed out and henceforth denied the chance to play.

Over the first four decades of the 20th century, black players had become stars in the Negro Leagues, and in the aftermath of World War II, with Landis, a strict segregationist, having died, some teams began scouting black stars and angling for a way to break the color barrier.

The Dodgers were the most aggressive in this effort, and Dodgers’ general manager Branch Rickey quickly sized up Robinson as the man to do the job. He signed Robinson to a contract, sent him to Montreal to play in 1946, and he was brought to the Dodgers in ’47.

Robinson was perfect for the role. He was from California, a college graduate from UCLA and had become one of the first blacks to pass Officers Candidate School, earning a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army during the war.

As a result, he was 28 when he began his major-league career, and he played just 10 seasons for the Dodgers, finishing with a career batting average of .311 and electrifying fans with his aggressive style of play. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962.

After Robinson’s success in leading Brooklyn to the National League pennant in 1947, other teams quickly started signing black players, and by the mid-1950s, they had also begun mining Latin American nations of talented players, giving the game an even more colorful flavor.

But Robinson was the first, and his legacy is honored by each Major League team by retiring Robinson’s No. 42. The last player to wear the number in a game was Hall of Fame relief ace Mariano Rivera.

Opening baseball to non-white players was, in my view, the most important story of the 20th century, and it thus tops this list.

Stan Caldwell is a sportswriter with more than 35 years of experience in the Hattiesburg area, including a long career at the Hattiesburg American and a stint as sports information director at Pearl River Community College.