This Month in Sports History

By BRUCE LOWITT

1511: Liam McCardle of Stirling, Scotland, getting rid of a year’s worth of accumulated junk in his estate house, throws a large rock out of his front door and along a walkway where his mother, Aileen, is trying to sweep away pieces of ice, inadvertently inventing curling.

1651: The first horse race in France is contested between steeds owned by two noblemen, Lecompte Edouard Francois avec Merde of Paris and Marquis Guillaume Henri du Foutre of Le Havre. There is no record of the name or time of the winning thoroughbred, nor does it matter, but the owner of the loser gives it to his wife, and the inventive marchioness creates aperitifs criniere, ragout de garrot, and pur-sang enrobe de grains de poivre concasses – the beginning of what France will claim to be its nouvelle cuisine.

1884: The first Stanley Cup is created after Joe Stanley, an outfielder for the Baltimore Monumentals of baseball’s Union Association, taking over as a substitute catcher, is struck between the legs by a foul ball in the last of his six games as a ballplayer. He never wears the device he invents but has a second successful career as a soprano with the Maryland Lyric Opera Company.

1886: The first Boston Marathon is held, 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, visits his cousin, moonshiner Skeeter Johnson. Duryea, driving a Daimler, the world’s first pickup truck, outruns a squadron of revenuers 132 miles from Skeeter’s still in Boston across the Kentucky state line and into Cincinnati to deliver 80 gallons of corn liquor.

1910: President William Howard Taft starts a baseball tradition by throwing out a pitch at a Washington Senators home game. He does 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, who at 170 pounds was literally half the weight of the 340-pound Taft, makes it a home-opener pregame tradition.

1963: Heavyweight boxer Charles “Sonny” Liston is born in Sand Slough, Arkansas, and immediately knocks out the obstetrician with a straight right to the jaw. Fifteen months later, Allie Muhammad, the doctor’s OBGYN nurse, tracks down Liston in Lewiston, Maine, and flattens him with what she calls a “phantom punch,” which turns out she delivered using a bedpan wrapped in a towel.

1975: In a 27-minute span, Gordie Hull is penalized for elbowing, cross-checking and high-sticking Bobby Howe, who is penalized for roughing, slashing and spearing – all on the first hole of the first round of the Byron Nelson Golf Classic in Dallas, Texas. They are immediately banned for life from the PGA Tour.