All Fun and Games

The ancient Egyptians played a game like bowling, with large stones set up as pins and small stones for a ball.

The only event in the first Olympic Games in Olympia, held in 776 B.C., was a footrace, slightly over 200 yards in length, down the stadium's centre. The winner, Coroebus of Elis, was awarded an olive branch. (source)

Around 600 B.C., a Greek athlete named Protiselaus threw a discus 152 feet from a standing position. That distance was not exceeded until over 2,500 years later, when Clarence Houser threw a discus 155 feet in 1928. (source)

The ancient Romans first played a game like golf using bent wooden sticks and a leather ball stuffed with feathers.

The oldest Major League Baseball teams are the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Cubs, formed in 1871 as the Boston Red Stockings and the Chicago White Stockings, respectively.

During the hundred days of the opening games at the Colosseum in Rome, in 80 A.D., over 5,000 animals were killed, including elephants, tigers, lions, elks, hyenas, hippopotamuses, and giraffes. (source)

There are 400 ways of playing the first move on each side in a game of chess, 197,281 ways of playing the first two moves on each side, an estimated 318,979,564,000 ways of playing the first four moves on each side, and an estimated 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 ways of playing the first ten moves on each side. (source)

Honey has been used both as a centre for golf balls and in antifreeze mixtures.

Brad Marsh played 83 games during the National Hockey League's 80-game-long 1981-82 season. Ross Lonsberry played 82 games in a 78-game NHL season in 1971-72. Blair MacDonald played 85 games in an 81-game World Hockey Association season in 1975-76. These players managed this feat by being traded in mid-season to a team that had played fewer games. Marsh played 17 games with the Calgary Flames before being traded to the Philadelphia Flyers, where he played 66 games. Lonsberry played 50 games with the Los Angeles Kings before being traded to the Flyers, where he played 32 games. MacDonald played 29 games with the Edmonton Oilers before being traded to the Indianapolis Racers, where he played 56 more games.

The longest major league baseball game on record was played on May 1^st, 1921, between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves. It was called at the end of 26 innings on account of darkness, with the score tied 1-1. Brooklyn's Leon Cadore and Boston's Joe Oeschger both pitched the entire 26 innings. The entire game lasted only 3 hours 50 minutes.

On June 29, 1916, the Chicago Cubs an Cincinnati Reds played a nine-inning baseball game with just one baseball. Nowadays, the average life span of a major league baseball is 7 pitches. (source)

Although "Shoeless Joe" Jackson was barred from baseball's Hall of Fame for his role in the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal, his shoes can be found there. (source)

Babe Ruth's last home run was hit in 1946, when the owner of the Veracruz Blues of the Mexican League hired Ruth, who was 51 years old at the time, for $10,000 to come and bat once in a game against the Mexico City Reds. The pitcher, Ramon Brazana, threw three balls before being replaced with a relief pitcher. The reliever threw his first pitch straight down the middle, and Ruth hit the pitch into the right-field bleachers. (source)

If the air conditioning at the Astrodome in Houston were turned off, it would rain inside the stadium due to the entrance of humid air.

Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia have built a golf course on the border between the three countries. It is a 27-hole course, with nine holes in each country. Much of the course was formerly a minefield. (source)

In his free time between 1938 and 1949, Robert Stilgenbauer of Los Angeles created a crossword with 3,149 across clues and 3,185 down clues. He distributed 125,000 copies, but none were ever returned completely worked out or even partially worked out. (source)

Parker Brothers prints more money each year for its Monopoly games than the U.S. Government issues in real currency.

American football has the highest injury rate of any sport, with a rate 12 times higher than basketball, the next most injurious sport. Most NFL players eventually suffer a career-ending or career-shortening injury sometime in their career. (source)

In a game of bridge, there are 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 possible ways in which the cards can be dealt. (source)

At the 1936 Olympics, the heavy favourite to win the women's 100-metre dash was Poland's Stella Walsh. At the previous Olympics, in 1932, she had run the 100-metres in 11.9 seconds, beating the second-place Hilde Strike, a Canadian. However, this time, a young American named Helen Stephens ran Walsh into the dirt, finishing with a time of just 11.5 seconds. Walsh and Polish officials cried foul, claiming that Stephens was a male ringer disguised as a woman. Officials eventually decided that the only way to settle the controversy was for Stephens to disrobe in front of female attendants. She did, proving that she was a woman, and won the gold medal. Walsh later moved to the United States, where she was killed by a bank robber in 1980. After "her" death, it was discovered that Walsh was, in fact, a man. Following this discovery, Strike was declared the gold medal winner in the hundred-metres in the 1932 Olympics. (source)

For the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, the Roman Olympic Organisation Committee made a deal with the Association of Roman Thieves not to engage in street thefts during the Olympics. So, during the games, occurrences of pickpocketing, purse snatching, and holdups were at a low. (source)

The highest score in a Scrabble game is 1,049, set by Phil Abbleby in 1989. His opponent scored 253 points in the game. The record score for one move was set by Dr. Saladin Karl Khoshnaw, who scored 392 points for playing "CAZIQUES" (meaning "native chiefs of West Indian aborigines"), in a 1982 competition in Manchester. (source)

According to the third edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, there are 20 valid words containing no vowels. (source)

Soviet Life once ran a feature article on Nikolai Syadristy, a craftsman from Uzhgorod, who hand-carved a set of chess figures so small that they can only be distinguished when magnified two thousand times with a microscope. (source)

Although 23 out of the 30 current National Hockey League teams are located in the United States (as of the 2011–2012 NHL season), all NHL jerseys are manufactured in Canada.

On November 28^th, 1942, the Boston College Eagles football team made a reservation for the entire squad to hold a victory party at the Terrace Room of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub that evening. Boston College, the year's best U.S. college football team with an 8-0 record, had outscored their opponents 249-19. They faced Holy Cross that afternoon, which should have been an easy win for Boston College. However, they lost, 55-12, in one of the biggest upsets of modern times. That night, at the Cocoanut Grove, some satin decorations ignited, causing the worst nightclub fire in U.S. history. A total of 491 people died, including everyone in the Terrace Room. However, the Eagles, defeated and depressed, had cancelled their reservation at the Cocoanut Grove, thus saving the lives of everyone on the team. (source)

On July 11^th, 2003, six Houston Astros pitchers combined to pitch a no-hitter in an 8-0 win against the New York Yankees. Starter Roy Oswalt was injured in the second inning, and relievers Pete Munro, Kirk Saarloos, Brad Lidge, Octavio Dotel, and Billy Wagner finished the game.

In 1981, baseball's Chicago White Sox moved their centre field wall in by 43 feet, hoping that Chicago's power hitters would hit a few more home runs. In the first two months of the season, four home runs were hit over the new wall, all by opposing teams.

If a nine-inning baseball game lasts around two and a half hours, only around eight minutes of that time is action time. (source)

The San Diego Chargers of the NFL are named after a credit card. (source)

Abner Doubleday did not invent the game of baseball. The story of his invention of the game was created many years later based on hearsay. Alexander Cartwright, a New York City bank clerk who devised several changes to the American form of rounders in 1844, is the best candidate for the inventor of baseball. (source)

In the late nineteenth century, the Duke of Beaufort learned a game called "poona" in India. Attempting to introduce the game into England, he found Englishmen reluctant to play a game called "poona". He renamed the game "badminton", after his estate in Somerset, and it caught on.