Sport, at its Finest
I was catching up on this week’s worth of fun facts and was struck by the variety of emotions you all made me feel—I was whimsically bemused by Brian’s portrayal of Charles Bronson, cackling along with Davis’ account of Agent Garbo’s Level 100 trolling, fascinated and amazed with Adil’s descriptions of the tremendous powers of the human brain, and simultaneously chuckling and terrified by Lefko’s Russian extravaganza. So I figured I should contribute an emotion not yet covered this week.
I often wonder why I am, and really all five of us are, so captivated by sports. Part of it, certainly, for me is the heartwarming nature of it all. Even though I love sports for the endless data they churn out that I can gloriously export to Microsoft Excel, there is nothing better than the moments where sport transcends a simple game and reveals genuinely wonderful human moments. So for my fun fact today, I present five of my favorite sports stories ever — not for any reasons reflected by a scoreboard, but because they made me smile, tugged at my heartstrings, brought a tear to my eye, or all of the above.
(I realize y’all may know some of these already, but I’ve tried to include video and such wherever possible so that you can at least re-live it.)
“That was in, if you want to challenge it”
We’ll start off with something nice and light, but buckle up for the later ones, boys. In the 2016 Hopman Cup, Jack Sock, considered one of the young hopes for American tennis, was playing Lleyton Hewitt, the seasoned Australian. Sock was leading in the first set 5–4, but Hewitt had a 30–0 lead in the 10th game. Hewitt served to Sock and his would-be ace was called out by the linesman. Sock stopped him there and yelled across the court, “That was in, if you want to challenge it.” Hewitt was dumbstruck, yelling back, “What’s that?” The audience was roaring along in laughter, never having seen anything like this. Sock responded, again, “That was in if you want to challenge it.” The referee was bewildered and Hewitt thought Sock was trolling him. Sock, now smiling, yelled across, “Go ahead, challenge it.” Hewitt was certain at this point that Sock is just screwing with him, and shook his head. Finally, at the last second, he turned to the referee and asked for the challenge. The crowd was truly in wtf mode at this point. Sure enough, the challenge was successful, and Hewitt took the 40–0 lead. The crowd roared in delight at the sportsmanship they were witnessing. Hewitt went on to win the game and match, but remains amazed to this day that Sock was so gracious. Here’s the video — the exchange is priceless.
“Tougher for you than happier for me”
The 2009 Wimbledon Final was an epic that I still remember watching to this day. As you all know, Wimbledon has a rule that a tiebreaker cannot be used to determine the outcome of the fifth set. If tied at 6–6, the match continues until one player reaches a 2-game advantage. (This was how the famous Isner-Mahut match lasted for three days. In fact, the fifth set of that match lasted 8 hours and 11 minutes, longer than the previous record for the longest match in tennis history). In 2009, this rule came up in the final between Andy Roddick, searching for his elusive second major win after the 2003 US Open, and Roger Federer. The match went 7–5, 6–7, 6–7, 6–3, resulting in a fifth set after Federer won back to back tiebreaks in the 2nd and 3rd sets. The final set went tied 6–6, and continued on from there. Finally, in the 30th game of the fifth set, Federer broke Roddick for the first time in the entire match, to win 16–14 and seal the Wimbledon championship. This was a pretty meaningful win for Federer, as it was his 15th major title, breaking Pete Sampras’ all-time record and solidifying Federer’s GOAT status.
So you’d think he’d be going pretty crazy, right? After one of the great finals matches in tennis history in which he became the most decorated men’s tennis player of all time? Nope, not at all. Federer momentarily jumped for joy after Roddick skied his shot to hand Federer the win, but quickly toned it down and ran to the net to give Roddick a hug. Afterwards, he raised his arms in joy, but only after Roddick had left the court. He accepted his trophy and retreated back to the locker room (which oddly enough in tennis is shared by the two competitors). So Roddick and Federer are both in there with their respective teams of coaches, family, and friends. According to Roddick, Federer was very deliberate about conveying to his team not to be overly jubilant in the locker room, out of respect to Roddick. As Roddick described, Federer would only go so far as to give a silent fist bump or a halfway hug to anyone on his team that was looking to congratulate him. A few years later, when asked about this extremely kind gesture, Federer said to Roddick:
The moment is probably tougher for you than it was happier for me. I think it’s so important to respect your fellow athletes and competitors. And I know how hard you’ve tried and how difficult it must be. But seriously, you deserve it so much and I just think that was a totally normal thing for me to do and nothing extraordinary.
Classy stuff from Roger. And this is but one example of his nature in these scenarios. When Nadal came back from a series of injuries and beat him at Indian Wells a few years ago, Federer again raced to the net to greet him, this time on the losing side of the equation. Nadal says that Federer simply told him, “I’m very happy you’re back. Congratulations, my friend.”
Forever Linked on 334
Modern cricket has been marked by many legends, and the debate on who the greatest of all time is rages on. However, most would concede that the argument should really be “who is the greatest modern cricketer?” because in the full context of history, the answer is pretty clear. There was a player named Don Bradman who played for Australia in the 1930s and 40s who regularly made a mockery of any team he faced. As another Australian captain once described him, “he was worth, to Australia, what any three men combined could have ever meant to a side.” In cricket, one of the easiest statistics to cite when comparing batsmen is their average. It is calculated by the number of runs scored by a batsman, divided by the number of times he’s gotten out. For a specialist batsman, an average of 30 is good, 40 is great, 50 is unbelievable, and 60 is impeccable. An average of 60 in cricket would be equivalent to a batting average of 0.350 or so in baseball. If you sort cricketers by their career average, you get a who’s who of the all-time greats.
As you can see, there’s not much that separates these all-timers at the top. But where is Don Bradman? All alone at the very peak.
This is a staggering difference between all the other top batsman in the game’s history. To put this in context, scoring 100 (a century) in a match is considered a tremendous effort, somewhat akin to a 40-point game in basketball or a 4–4 day at the plate in baseball. Bradman averaged a century over his long career. Many sportswriters would say that his career average is the greatest career achievement in sports history.
When Bradman retired, he essentially had every batting record in the books. One of them, scoring 334 in a single innings, has since been broken, but not by an Australian. So long after he retired, he still held this tremendous personal record in his home country. In 1998, another phenomenal Australian batsman had come to the forefront of the game, named Mark Taylor. Taylor led his team to a test match tour of Pakistan, and played out of his mind in the second test match. He batted for two full days without getting out, and on the last ball of this second day, he scored a run to bring his total for that innings to 334. The day’s play ended and Taylor had to wait until the morning to break the illustrious record held by the Babe Ruth of Australian cricket. However, the next morning, Taylor went to the umpires and declared his innings over, essentially forfeiting his chance to break Bradman’s record. When asked about it later, he said that he declared out of respect to Bradman and that this record would mean much more to him if he could share it with Bradman for as long as it remained unbeaten.
“I ain’t ever hit a ball that far”
In September 2016, one of baseball’s great young stars, Jose Fernandez, passed away in a tragic boating accident. His team, the city of Miami, and baseball fans everywhere were stunned. In particular, one of his best friends on the team, Dee Gordon, was crushed. As Gordon and his teammates walked out for their game against the Mets just two days after Fernandez passed away, they all wore #16 jerseys with Fernandez’s name on the back. After the Mets’ Curtis Granderson lined out to left field for the third out in the top of the first, Gordon, the Marlins’ slight, 160-pound lefty second baseman and leadoff hitter, gathered himself and walked out to face Bartolo Colon. For the first pitch, Gordon switched his lefty stance to mirror Jose Fernandez’s characteristic right hand stance. He ran the count to 2–0, switched back to his normal stance, and then this happened.
This was Dee Gordon’s first homerun of the season, and just his ninth in his 6-year MLB career. The rest of his homeruns have barely creeped over the wall — this one was a moon shot to the upper deck. When asked about the homer after, he said:
I ain’t never hit a ball that far, even in batting practice. I told the boys, ‘If you all don’t believe in God, you better start.’ For that to happen today, we had some help.
Gordon, and multiple Mets players, started crying as soon as he rounded first base, and he sobbed all the way to his seat in the dugout. He finished the game with a season-high four hits.
Jack’s Run
In 2011, 6-year old Jack Hoffman of Atkinson, Nebraska, had a 30-minute seizure while eating breakfast with his family and had to be rushed to the hospital. Soon after, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor the size of a golf-ball. His first surgery was unsuccessful, as only a small part was excised. This part, however, was biopsied and determined to be a cancerous glioma. All the while, he was suffering 10–12 seizures a day and confined to his hospital bed.
As he waited for a second surgery, his dad contacted the University of Nebraska, Jack’s favorite football team, to see if there was any way Jack could get a picture with his favorite player, Rex Burkhead. Rex was all in on the idea and met with Jack and his family in September, giving them a tour of the stadium and of course taking pictures with Jack. Rex also decided he wanted to keep in touch with Jack to see how he was doing. In October 2011, Rex called Jack before his second surgery, which was able to remove 90% of the tumor. The next day, Nebraska played Ohio State on national TV. Jack was watching as Nebraska went down 20–6 going into halftime. However, in the locker room, Rex, a captain and leader of the team, ripped into his teammates and said “Jack’s not giving up and neither are we.” 30 minutes of play later, Nebraska emerged victorious 34–27, completing the largest comeback in Nebraska football history.
In Septmeber 2012, Jack was an honorary captain for the Cornhuskers in their Big 10 game against Wisconsin and led them out of the tunnel. But the real goodness happened 6 months later, as Nebraska prepared for their annual spring game. The Nebraska AD and coach invited Jack to the game and gave him a uniform with Rex Burkhead’s #22 on the back. In the 4th quarter, as time was running out, Team Red faced 4th and 1 on their own 31 yard line. Bo Pelini, the head coach, called timeout, and sent in a new running back — Jack Hoffman. I won’t even describe the following play cause it’s just worth watching.
Right in the feels, man.
Jack’s story isn’t done, either. When Rex Burkhead first introduced him to the team, the players started an initiative called Team Jack to raise money for cancer research. They sold 30,000 “Team Jack” t-shirts, and donated the $275,000 of proceeds to the Dana Farber Institute in his name. The Hoffman family has since started the Team Jack Foundation, which has raised $1.5 million for pediatric cancer to this day.
As you would expect, Jack is a total homie. In April 2013, Jack, his family, and Rex Burkhead met President Obama (miss you, Barry O), an encounter that Jack described as “pretty awesome.” Upper Deck Trading Cards made a “Star Rookie” card for Jack, and its sales raised another $50,000 in donations. In May 2014, Jack met Dick Vitale, who asked for Jack’s autograph on one of the trading cards he keeps with him.
In 2013, Jack’s run was nominated, and won, the award for Best Moment ESPY. Check out this incredible video:
Best of all, Jack is still crushing life to this day. As of April 2014, his cancer was deemed to be in remission. What a goddamn champion.
J-Mac
You all may know this story, but I implore you to watch again (apologies for potato quality of the first video). I thought about writing up this section but: A) it’s honestly too good for me to write out and B) I just watched the videos again and I’m a full-on puddle of tears right now.
I cannot properly express how much I love this story and these videos. I can safely say it is my favorite sports moment of all time. As SportCenter anchor John Anderson put it, this is about “a kid, his class, his coach, and the best in sports. All of it.” Enjoy.
