“First” isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be

When Masters champion Hideki Matsuyama became the first man from Japan to win a major golf tournament, he sent commentators and fans scurrying to the record books to find other “firsts” in sports.

Who knew that:

Although there have been nearly two dozen South Koreans to play Major League Baseball, starting with pitcher Chan-ho Park with the 1994 Dodgers, North Korea’s Sen-trahl Park played two games for the 1954 Senators before he was discovered taking photographs of the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard. His whereabouts since then are unknown.

While Joe Fortenberry is generally credited with basketball’s first “dunk” while training for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the real first -ever dunk belongs to Morris “Mr. J” Irving of the 1933 American Basketball League’s Philadelphia Sphas. However, Irving was banned from the ABL the following year and all his statistics were deleted from the record books when he admitted to wearing elevator sneakers that added nine inches to his 5-foot-6 frame.

On April 14, 1910, President William Howard Taft started a baseball tradition by throwing out a pitch at the Washington Senators’ home opener, a 3-0 victory over the Philadelphia Athletics. He did it in the middle of the fourth inning after spending 52 minutes trying to extricate himself from a turnstile. Three years later, President Woodrow Wilson, far skinnier than the 340-pound Taft, made it a pregame tradition.

Liz Heaston is best known for becoming the first woman to play and score points in a college football game when, on Oct. 18, 1997, she kicked two extra points in Willamette University’s 27-0 victory over Linfield College. Lesser known is Melvin Feinbein, who became the first and only man to play for the Florida Avengers of the Women’s National Football Conference. Feinbein, an offensive tackle, was moved to center against the Carolina Queens on April 18, 2020, but when quarterback Leeza Cubbage reached down to take the first snap, she said, “Hey, wait a minute …” Feinbein was then beaten to a pulp by the Avengers’ offensive line.

Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb were the first players voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939, while catcher Sockless Joe Johnson was the first player voted out of the Hall of Fame that year when he admitted to using not only a corked bat but also a corked glove, shoes, mask and chest protector.

The Amaury Sport Organisation decreed that the first official winner of the Tour de France, in 1903, was Maurice Garin, when Henri Tricheur, who claimed to have won the inaugural race the year before, actually had taken his bicycle on le metro from Chatou-Croissy to the finish line in Paris. Rosie Ruiz said Tricheur had been her inspiration when she jumped on the subway and “won” the 1979 New York City Marathon before being disqualified.

Although April 19, 1897, is the accepted date of the inaugural Boston Marathon, the first one was actually “run” on Nov. 17, 1896, starting in Boston, Kentucky, 35 miles south of Louisville, when James Frank Duryea, winner of the first automobile race in the United States the previous year, visited his cousin, moonshiner Skeeter Johnson. Duryea, driving a Daimler, outran a squadron of revenuers 132 miles from Skeeter’s still in Boston across the Kentucky state line and into Cincinnati to deliver 40 gallons of corn liquor.

Ruthless was the winner of the first Belmont Stakes, in 1867, Survivor won the inaugural Preakness in 1873 and Aristides captured the first Kentucky Derby two years later. What is not generally known is that Monday, the last-place horse in the Belmont, and Gold Mine, last in the Derby, was actually two guys in a horse suit. Nathan and Birnbaum, a couple of Vaudeville comedians, missed the Preakness because they were booked into Koster and Bial’s Music Hall to open for Sarah Bernhardt and Lillian Russell in New York that night.

The Stanley Cup, best known as hockey’s most prestigious award, was commissioned in 1892 as the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup and named after Lord Stanley of Preston, the governor general of Canada. But the first Stanley Cup was created the night of July 4, 1884, after Joe Stanley, an outfielder for the Baltimore Monumentals of baseball’s Union Association, taking over as a substitute catcher in a game against the St. Louis Maroons, was struck between the legs by a foul ball in the last of his six games as a ballplayer. Stanley never wore the device he invented that night but had a successful second career as a soprano with the Maryland Lyric Opera Company.