Considered by many to have been the world’s greatest athlete, Thorpe persevered through triumphs and tragedy.
TR’s zeal for athletics helped lead to the emergence of modern sports in America including interscholastic competition, the NCAA, the World Series, and the First Olympics in the U.S.
50 YEARS AGO serious pro basketball was born. Or at least they tried to be serious.
A CENTURY AGO a tiny American team arrived in Athens drained from an awful journey and proposing to take on the champions of Europe with—among other handicaps —a discus thrower who had never seen a real discus
That’s what everyone agreed. Jim Thorpe was at the 1912 Olympics, but legend had to make him even more—and draconian rules had to take it all away
When you’re lining up a putt on the close-cropped green, there are ghosts at your shoulder. More than any other game, golf is played with a sense of tradition.
Remember the excitement of the 1924 Olympics in Chariots of Fire? That was nothing compared with what the U.S. rugby team did to the French at those games.
SMU isn’t playing this season; men on the team were accepting money from alumni. That’s bad, of course; but today’s game grew out of even greater scandal.
In 1904 the Olympics took place for only the third time in the modern era. The place was St. Louis, where a world’s fair was providing all the glamour and glitter and excitement anyone could ask. The Games, on the other hand, were something else.
The Florida Speed Carnivals at Daytona lasted less than a decade, but they saw American motoring grow from rich man’s sport to national obsession
Forget football, basketball, and all the other sports that are artificially regulated by the clock. Only baseball can truly reveal our national character. Only baseball can light our path to the future.
It was a hundred years ago, and the game has changed a good deal since then. But there are plenty of people who still hold that cranky old Hoss Radbourn was the finest that ever lived.
The largest Gothic cathedral in the Western Hemisphere has the strangest stained-glass windows in the world
In 1984 Los Angeles will once again play host to the Summer Olympics. It’s got to be easier that the first time. That was just fifty years ago, when, in the teeth of the Great Depression, a group of local boosters boldly set about planning
Was it science, sport, or the prospect of a round-the-world railroad that sent the tycoon off on his costly Alaskan excursion?
It was fifty years ago that Bobby Jones won his Grand Slam, making him the only man who ever has—or probably ever will—conquer the “Impregnable Quadrilateral” of golf
They went to the woods with rod and gun—and gloves, servants, caviar, and champagne
How I Beat Jess Willard
“Your body is a temple,” our ancestors told their pubescent youngsters. ‘Now go take a cold bath”
Riding to hounds has been as much of a sport among well-to-do Americans as among the British gentry
What started as fun and games at spring roundups is now a multi-million-dollar sport called rodeo
Pilgrims and Puritans, naturally, hated the water, but by the turn of the century certain pleasures had been rediscovered
Introduced not quite a century ago under a name born for oblivion, the game of tennis promises to last forever
Concerning the long life, fast times, and astonishing fecundity of Man o’ War
They had no chair lifts, and they called their skis snowshoes, but they were the fastest men alive
Baseball’s rules and rituals are much as they were fifty years ago and anything to win still goes.