Sports' Forgotten Heroes

There are figures in sports who are larger than the game whom people know so little about. One of the biggest of those names is Chuck Taylor. In fact, almost everyone who has ever laced up a pair of sneakers has worn a pair of Chuck All Stars, Converse’s best-selling shoe. Interestingly, very few people can tell you anything about Chuck Taylor. Many think Chuck Taylor is a fictional character, a p...

For four years, 1946 through 1949, the NFL faced stiff competition from an upstart league, the All America Football Conference. The AAFC was the real deal. Rosters featured such stars as Otto Graham, Joe Perry, Frankie Albert and Y.A. Tittle. It’s champion team, the Cleveland Browns, could compete with any NFL team and its coach, Paul Brown, created a passing attack that NFL teams just couldn’t de...

Blanton Collier was the last coach to lead the Cleveland Browns to an NFL Championship; and he did so in 1964. Amazingly, if you ask most Browns fans who the last coach was to lead the team to a Championship most will say Paul Brown. Of course, Brown, for whom the team is named, was at the helm for a combined seven AAFC and NFL Championships. But his last title with Cleveland came in 1955. Sure, h...

On November 28, 1929, Ernie Nevers scored six touchdowns for the Chicago Cardinals and kicked four extra points. That’s 40-points in one NFL game by one player, and that’s still the record. And Nevers did NOT do this against a pushover franchise. He scored all of the Cardinals points in a 40-6 win over the Chicago Bears. That’s only part of the story. Ernie Nevers was a phenomenal athlete. Not onl...

Joe Bauman was the first player in professional baseball history to hit more than 70 homeruns in a season. Bob Crues nearly hit 70 homeruns in a single season but came up just short with 69. Joe Brovia had nothing left to prove in the minor leagues and finally realized his dream of playing Major League Baseball when the Cincinnati reds called him up in 1955 at the age of 33. All three were stars f...

Baseball outlawed the spitball in 1920. However, each team was allowed to designate two pitchers (if they already threw the spitter) to throw it until they retired. Burleigh Grimes of the Brooklyn (Dodgers) Robins was one of those pitchers. His spitball was quite unique in that he “coated” the ball with a special sap from a type of tree in Polk County, Wisconsin. Grimes continued to use his spitte...

Ray Billows was one of golf’s greatest players of his generation. But, instead of trying to make a living as a professional, Billows decided to remain an amateur and compete as such. Of course, this was at a time when amateur golf was considered a bigger game than professional golf and when the U.S. Amateur was much larger in stature than it is today. In fact, over the years some of the game’s mos...

Ken Williams was one of baseball’s most feared sluggers of the 1920s. A star for the St. Louis Browns, Williams was a career .319 hitter who hit 196 home runs for his career while toiling in relative obscurity for a team that usually finished near the bottom of the standings. Williams, who never revealed his real age, was reportedly five-years older than what he claimed; and his career was shorten...

When you are competing for notoriety against the likes of Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenberg, you have to be really good … great … to grab headlines. You need to hit a ton of homeruns. You need to rack up the RBI’s and you better have a terrific batting average to go along with all of that. Well, that’s exactly what Hal Trosky of the Cleveland Indians did. In fact, in his first four full y...

So many baseball players have had their careers cut short by injury. Some of those careers might be considered marginal, and others might be considered a tragedy based on the fact that the career was on an upward trajectory and headed for greatness. Ray Collins, who pitched for the Boston Red Sox from 1909 and into the 1915 season had one of those careers. His last full season, 1914, at the age of...

Three golf champions. Three remarkable championships. Three very unique stories about three guys who had never won before: Mungo Park, 1874 Open Championship; David Brown, 1886 Open Championship; Jack Fleck, 1955 U.S. Open. Each have very unique stories and joining Sports’ Forgotten Heroes to help tell their stories is Connor Lewis from the TalkinGolf History podcast. Connor is one of the foremost...

Hank O’Day is one of the most unique and important figures in the history of Major League Baseball. He broke into the game as a pitcher in the American Association for Toledo in 1884. He finished his career seven years later with the New York Giants. During his career, on occasion, O’Day stepped out onto the field as an umpire and when his playing days concluded, he turned to umpiring permanently....

Roy Sievers was one of the most clutch hitters in baseball history. In fact, Sievers, who won the 1949 American League Rookie of the Year with the St. Louis Browns, hit nearly a quarter of his 318 career homeruns in the eighth inning or later. But, becoming a clutch hitter almost didn’t happen. After winning the ROY in 1949, Sievers fell into a slump and that was followed by a devastating right-sh...

In 1969, Major League Baseball expanded to four cities: San Diego, Montreal, Kansas City and Seattle. Montreal moved to Washington and became the Nationals and Seattle moved as well. Yes, there was a team in Seattle before the Mariners – the Seattle Pilots. The Pilots played in Seattle for just one season – 1969 – and at the end of spring training, 1970, they were officially sold and relocated to...

Dolf Luque won 194 games over the course of his 20-year Major League career. In 1923, he put together one of the greatest seasons ever for the Cincinnati Reds going 27-8. Luque, however, never again won 20-games in a season, but remained extraordinarily consistent. In fact, in 1925 he went 16-18 and finished in the top-15 (13th) in MVP voting and in 1933, at the age of 42, he went 8-2 for the New...

Jimmy Demaret won 31 times on the PGA TOUR … was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame … and was the first golfer to win the Masters three times. Yet, when the discussion of the game’s greats rolls around, Demaret’s accomplishments are severely overlooked. He is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the same breath as Hogan, Nelson and Snead. Never is he spoken about when the names Nicklaus, Palmer, P...

The NHL expanded to two cities for the 1974-75 season: Kansas City and Washington. Washington, of course, has turned into one of the National Hockey League’s marquee teams having won the 2017-18 Stanley Cup Championship. Kansas City, however, is one of the least-known teams in the history of sports. The Scouts, a team that lasted just two years, were moved to Colorado and played six years as the R...

Ron McDole had the great fortune of playing for two of football’s greatest defensive minds: Lou Saban and George Allen. McDole, who graduated from Nebraska before the Cornhuskers became such an elite program, played 18 years of professional football. He started off with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1961 and then moved on to the Houston Oilers in 1962. However, he suffered from migraine seizures whil...

The Kentucky Colonels were one of the original franchises of the American Basketball Association (ABA) and one of just three teams to play all nine years of the ABA’s existence. However, when the ABA folded, the Colonels were not one of the teams to merge with the NBA. Owner John Y. Brown did not want to pay the NBA’s entry fee and instead took a payment from the NBA to disband the team; and only...

One of the NBA’s original teams was the Rochester Royals. In fact, the Royals won an NBA Championship in 1951. But, Rochester was not an ideal location as the NBA was trying to grow and establish itself in larger cities. So, after the 1956-57 season, the Royals packed up and left for Cincinnati. Cincinnati welcomes the Royals with open arms – at least at first. Tragedy struck the team early on as...

2019 an honor long overdue was finally righted, the retirement of the No. 4 by the Detroit Red Wings, the sweater worn by Red Kelly, one the greatest to ever lace-up a pair of skates. Kelly, who joins me on this episode of Sports’ Forgotten Heroes, along with Waxy Gregoire, co-author of “The Red Kelly Story,” played over 12 years for the Red Wings and helped lead them out of doldrums into becoming...

The NBA has played witness to several teams packing up an moving to new cities. The Lakers went from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, the Warriors moved from Philadelphia to San Francisco to Oakland where they play right now (they’re moving back to San Francisco), The Jazz moved from New Orleans to Utah … there have been many, but the one team few know the history of is the Atlanta Hawks. In fact, the...

While Jackie Robinson is known to so many for being the first man to cross the color barrier in Major League Baseball, few, very few, know who the first African-American was to be drafted by an NFL Team. George Taliaferro, a record-breaking running back who played ball at Indiana University, was drafted in the 13th round of the 1949 NFL Draft by the Chicago Bears, thus becoming the first African-A...

George H.W. Bush, the 41st President of the United States, was not only a man who devoted his life to serving his country; but before he dedicated his life to such service, he studied at Yale University and while there, played firstbase for the Eli’s. While he wasn’t necessarily the greatest of hitters, in fact, he was what you would call a “light-hitting first baseman”, he did put the ball in pla...

Every April the National Hockey League enters its second season, the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It is one of the most exciting times in sports. But unlike Major League Baseball, the National Football League or the National Basketball Association, hockey’s playoff season is actually named after a person, Frederick Arthur Stanley. But why? Who was the man who later became known as “Lord Stanley”? Why is...