Cold Hard Football Facts: 10 Days That Shook The Sports World

(Credit for this entire article goes out to Cold Hard Football Facts.)

The United States surprised Team Canada, 5-3, in Olympic hockey Sunday night. We wake up today, meanwhile, on the 30th anniversary of the "Miracle on Ice," Team USA's utterly shocking win over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics.

The confluence of the two events, like a riverbend of hockey in the interminable football off-season, prompted us to take a look back at 10 days that shook the sports world. These aren't necessarily the biggest upsets, per se, but the most shocking outcomes that reverberated most strongly throughout the American sports world.

In each case, we tried to weigh the entertainment or upset value of each event with its impact upon sports, culture, politics or, in some cases, all three.

So here goes, CHFF's 10 days that shook the sports world:

10. N.C. State 54, Houston 52 (1983 NCAA men's basketball final)

North Carolina State’s rival North Carolina had sunk Georgetown and launched a sporting legend just one year earlier, when sophomore phenom Michael Jordan nailed the game-winner in the final seconds.

But N.C. State’s thrilling victory over mighty Houston in 1983 is what officially made March synonymous with madness in American sports.

The Wolfpack was a decent basketball team; but Houston was known as the Phi Slamma Jamma fraternity, led by Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, two basketball legends. The game could not have ended more dramatically, as Lorenzo Charles lifted a brick by Dereck Whittenburg out of the air and slammed it home for the victory as the buzzer sounded.

The video of N.C. State coach Jimmy Valvano running around the court like a madman is the other enduring image of the game—and it’s an image that’s only grown in stature, like the game itself, after the beloved Valvano died of cancer years later.

See the video here.

9. Boston College 41, Notre Dame 39 (November 1993, college football)

The Fighting Irish are the singular franchise in American sports—surpassing the New York Yankees, because they've been around longer, play a more popular game and boast their own national broadcasting contracts, something nobody else can claim. The fact that they come out of a podunk Midwestern town instead of the Big Apple is a testament to the historic power of the Notre Dame brand in American culture.

The Fighting Irish dominated college football for 80 years, with only small hiccups here and there, and it looked like the dynasty would last forever heading into the final game of the 1993 season. The Irish had won a title in 1988, should have won a title in 1989, and had just topped No. 1 Florida State a week earlier in one of the most exciting most heavily anticipated games in college football history.

Unbeaten, top-ranked Notre Dame would cruise to the national title and further the school's legend with a win over No. 17 Boston College—a team they destroyed 54-7 just one year earlier.

Instead, the Eagles dominated, taking a 38-17 lead into the fourth quarter. But then Notre Dame ripped off 22 unanswered points to take a 39-38 lead in the final seconds. The Irish magic had returned. But Boston College pieced together one last drive, which ended on a wobbly, looks-like-it-will-never make it 41-yard field goal by a terrible kicker named David Gordon.

It’s a game that rocked the college football power structure to its very core: nearly 20 years later, the mighty Fighting Irish have never regained the No. 1 ranking they enjoyed that day. And, right now, as they struggle from yet another bad season behind yet another ineffective coach, college football's most famous program looks like it will never regain the lofty standing it enjoyed in November 1993, the last of 80 years of unmatched football dominance.

Check out the video here.

8. USC 42, Alabama 21 (September 1970, college football)

For those of us who have recently joined the 40-plus club, it’s hard to fathom that segregated sports existed in our lifetime.

But Alabama, like many southern football powers, entered the 1970 inter-regional battle against USC with an all-white squad.

It’s actually even more amazing when you consider that Alabama dominated the 1960s, winning three national titles and, from 1961 to 1966 posting a remarkable record of 60-5-1. (Hell, even gangly dim-wit Forrest Gump starred for Alabama in the 1960s!)

But the 1970s would be different: in the first game of the decade for either squad, USC destroyed the Tide in Alabama, 42-21. Sam Cunningham, a black running back who later starred with the NFL's Patriots, paved the way, with 135 yards and two touchdowns.

Cunningham’s effort convinced Alabama and other southern schools that it was time to integrate their football programs—something they’ve done rather successfully, if their dominance of college football these days is any indication. SEC schools Florida, LSU and Alabama have combined to win the last four national titles. Florida integrated its school in 1958 and its football team in 1969. Alabama integrated its school in 1963 and its team 1971.

The Tide did have one black player on its freshman team when they lost to USC in 1970. But football fanaticism soon trumped segregationist politics and the floodgates opened at Alabama and throughout the South.

Check out the video here.

 

7. Baltimore Colts 23, N.Y. Giants 17 (1958 NFL title game)

Known today as “The Best Game Ever” (or by similar labels), the victory by small-town Johnny Unitas and the Colts over the mighty Giants of Gotham is remembered as the game that officially put the NFL on the map, and proved that the sport was perfectly suited to the growing medium of television.

The game itself was a thriller, punctuated by the Unitas-Raymond Berry-led game-tying scoring drive in the fourth quarter and by Alan "The Horse" Ameche’s game-winning TD in the first sudden death football game in NFL history.

A band of businessmen were so inspired by the spectacle of the 1958 title game that they pulled together a new football league, the AFL, and began play in 1960. Pro football has never looked back, racing past baseball as the national pro sports pastime.

 

6. Boston Red Sox 10, New York Yankees 3 (Game 7, 2004 ALCS)

No team ever rose from the dead quite like the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series. The Yankees had utterly dominated the rivalry for 85 years, ever since acquiring Babe Ruth from the Red Sox before the 1920 season. You know the story: the Yankees would win 25 World Series after that; the Red Sox would win zero.

So when the Yankees took a 3-0 lead in the best-of-seven ALCS, it was all over. After all, no team in baseball, and a few in North American sports, had ever rebounded from a 3-0 deficit.

But in arguably the most improbable turnaround, either historically or within an individual series, that sports had ever seen, the Red Sox eked out a 12-inning win in Game 4 thanks to a David Ortiz walk off home run; the Red Sox outlasted the Yankees once again in Game 5, winning a 5-4 14-inning thriller with another walk off RBI (a single) by Ortiz.

The drama was just beginning: Game 6 was the legendary “Bloody Sock” game with Curt Schilling pitching seven innings of one-run ball at Yankee Stadium with torn tendon in his right ankle. The bloodstained sock became the symbolic centerpiece of the effort. The Red Sox held on for a 4-2 win.

Red Sox-Yankees is always big in the Northeast; but Game 7 became the rare modern baseball game that had the anticipation of a Super Bowl: the drama was shortlived. Boston took a quick 6-0 lead after two innings and held on for a 10-3 win and the most miraculous comeback in a postseason series in American sports.

The New York Post summed up the improbability without words the next morning. The paper merely showed a full page picture of Babe Ruth with a tear running down his cheek. Even those Americans who were not sports fans understood the cultural significance of Babe in tears.

The Red Sox would go on to crush the Cardinals, 4-0, to win their first World Series in 86 years.

 

5. Notre Dame 35, Army 13 (November 1913, college football)

College football ruled the national consciousness for the better part of the 20th century, before being supplanted nationally (but not as a regional exercise) by pro football in the 1960s.

Pro football existed in 1913, but was largely disorganized bands of players and leagues across the Midwest. College football, meanwhile, had been big business since the 1880s and would provide the sport its greatest innovations.

No game symbolized that innovation better than upstart Notre Dame’s visit to West Point on Nov. 1, 1913. Army was one of the sport’s great powers at the time, while Notre Dame was a rising force in the “West” – as the Midwest was considered back then.

The Ramblers (as the Irish were known back then because they'd travel to play anybody) had a secret weapon: the mind of end Knute Rockne. He and Notre Dame back Gus Dorais had worked on the forward pass in the offseason, trying to perfect a play that had been introduced to football just a few years earlier.

The Irish unleashed the aerial onslaught against the mighty Cadets: Dorais completed what seemed like a miraculous 14 of 17 passes for 243 yards and three touchdowns. Hell, Peyton Manning never plays that well in a big game. His 40-yard TD to Rockne was the longest pass play in history at the time.

Others had tried the forward pass, but nobody had done it so successfully on such a large stage.

Other than upsetting Army, smacking the Eastern football establishment in the face, forging Notre Dame as the century’s signature sports franchise, launching the legend of Knute Rockne and ushering in the era of the forward pass, it was your ordinary, everyday, run of the mill college football game.

 

4. Jesse Owens and Joe Louis knock out the Nazis (1936 and 1938)

The 1936 Olympics in Munich and the bouts between American Joe Louis and German Max Schmeling in 1936 and 1938 were awash in political and racial overtones. The world was gripped by global depression and the Germans were arming for global conquest, while the U.S. was overwhelmed by isolationist fever and troubled by its own racial issues.

(The Nazis tried to use America’s awkward effort to deal with race to their own propaganda advantages. But here’s the difference: America fought World War II with a segregated military; the Germans segregated its minorities, loaded them into cattle cars and shipped them off to death camps in an effort to wipe them from the nation’s bloodlines. So that’s kind of a big difference.)

Owens, a star at Ohio State, dominated the 1936 Munich Olympics, winning four gold medals and squashing Hitler’s claim of the superiority of the Aryan race. Hitler reportedly said that blacks should be banned from future games, though the German people publicly embraced Owens after his spectacular performance.

Louis, meanwhile, lost his first bout with Schmeling in 1936, but then destroyed the German by TKO in the first round of their 1938 rematch at Yankee Stadium, setting off a celebration across America, but especially in the black community, where it was one of the defining sports events in history. According to some reports, Schmeling could hear the cheers as he was taken through Harlem to a Manhattan hospital after he was pummeled.

Hitler took the losses pretty badly. He responded by invading Poland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Russia, North Africa...well, you know the story

Ironically, Louis and Schmeling were united politically: Schmeling publicly opposed the Nazis, while Louis served in the Army in World War II, saying that Hitler "wasn't going to fix the problems" with race that plague the United States. The two became lifelong friends after the war.

Louis and Owens were belatedly adopted by almost all Americans as two of the nation's greatest sports heroes.

 

3. Francis Ouimet humiliates the golf establishment (1913 U.S. Open)

The 1913 U.S. Open remains one of the most shocking events in sports history, an event captured by the aptly named movie, “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”

Englishmen Harry Vardon and Ted Ray were two of the best professional  players in the exclusive world of golf. Vardon had won five British Opens. Ray was its defending champ. Ouimet, meanwhile, was the humble son of immigrants and an amateur golfer who grew up across the street from The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., site of the 1913 U.S. Open. Adding almost comical improbability, the amateur Ouimet had a 10-year-old caddy (named Eddie Lowery).

The three golfers battled to a dead heat after 72 holes (+8), forcing an 18-hole playoff the next day. It wasn’t even close. Ouimet and his pint-sized partner humiliated the two pro champs with an even round of 72 (his best of the tournament), while Vardon and Ray went +5 and +6 respectively.

The shocking upset captured the nation, led to the growth of public golf courses across the country and spawned huge new interest in a sport previously limited to the moneyed elite. Ouimet remains just one of four amateurs who have won the U.S. Open, the last in 1933.

 

2. N.Y. Jets 16, Baltimore Colts 7 (Super Bowl III, January 1969)

Jets over Colts was not the greatest upset in NFL history, as it’s often portrayed. Giants over Bears in the 1934 title game and Giants over Patriots in Super Bowl XLII were both larger upsets statistically speaking.

But Jets over Colts was a major, major upset just the same, and carried with it much more cultural impact. The Colts were the most dominant team the NFL had produced between the 1942 Bears and the 2007 Patriots (both of whom also lost in championship games).

They symbolized, rightly or wrongly, the staid, conservative old NFL and went 13-1 behind a shutdown defense and its crew-cut pair of old quarterbacks, Earl Morrall and Johnny Unitas.

The Jets, meanwhile, symbolized everything that was new and brash about the upstart AFL. They went 11-3 behind a high-scoring offense led by the overfed long-haired leaping gnome of a quarterback Joe Namath, and they did it amid the bright neon lights of Broadway and the media center of North America.

Few gave the Jets a shot to win, and when you look back at seasons of the respective teams, it’s easy to see why. The Colts looked invincible.

But for one day, the Jets could do no wrong: a team known for its offense rode a surprisingly stiff shutdown defense (four picks) and an efficient workmanlike effort from its marquee quarterback to a 16-7 victory.

The AFL was no longer a second-rate league. It was now the equal of the NFL. Pro football expansion continued in the years ahead, the two leagues fully merged in 1970, and the colossus that strides above North American sports today had officially come of age.

1. Team USA 4, Filthy Commies 3 (1980 Olympic hockey)

If the Cold, Hard Football Facts had emotions, there'd be only one thing we hate more than filthy hippies, and that's filthy Commies. Plus, from a sports perspective, was there ever anything better than the U.S. shocking the Soviets in the semifinals of the 1980 Olympics?

As far as pure physical upsets go, there have been few if any as big as this one. The U.S. team was comprised of college stars, few of whom were good enough to play in the NHL. The Soviet team was an unstoppable juggernaut of the nation’s best players, who rolled their opponents, including NHL teams, but who were kept out of the NHL only because of the filthy Commies who ruled the Soviet Union.

Team USA’s win is unmatched in its cultural impact, too: the United States was deep into economic decline and what President Carter called our “national malaise.” The U.S. was still licking its wounds from the fight against the filthy Commies in Vietnam and the humiliation of watching our ambassadors in Tehran taken hostage during the Iranian revolution. The Soviets, meanwhile, had just rolled into Afghanistan – to which the inept Carter responded with the bold move of boycotting the summer Olympics and dashing the dreams of our own athletes. The Soviets would also move to crush pro-Democracy forces in Poland later that year.

It looked and felt like it was all over for the United States.

But on a magical day in Lake Placid, New York, Uncle Sam lifted himself up off the floor and begin to fight back in the cultural and political wars on the Olympic ice; in a sport, rather ironically, played with much fervor in only a few farflung snowy outposts of the nation.

By the end of the decade, the Soviet Union was in tatters, much like it’s hockey team at Lake Placid, and the United States and the forces of freedom joyously threw their sticks into the stands of the geopolitical arena and stood above the planet with gold medals around their necks.

At a certain Chief Troll's elementary school in 1980, the victory over the Soviet Union was so big that the teachers gathered all the students together in the library to watch the game on old reel-to-reel tape.  

The arena at Lake Placid was absolutely electric, while the victory on TV was punctuated by what many consider the greatest play-by-play call in history, Al Michaels' thrilling, "Do you believe in miracles?...YES!!!!" 

That's one day that certainly shook the world, in the sports arena and beyond.