I must confess, while researching this piece, I listened to the 1949 ‘novelty’ recording of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ by Brother Bones and His Shadows – which, for the uninitiated, was the signature of the Harlem Globetrotters – and was instantly transported back to the days of my childhood in the seventies. Readers of a certain age will understand what I mean when I say that, in their heyday, the Globetrotters, with whom the name Meadowlark Lemon was synonymous, were ‘everywhere’. Indeed, Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, once said that Lemon was ‘an inspiration not only to me, but to kids all around the world’.
Born Meadow Lemon III in Wilmington, North Carolina on April 25, 1932, the man who became known as the ‘Clown Prince of Basketball’ was first chosen to play for the Harlem Globetrotters. At 6’3″, Lemon was not especially tall for a basketball player but, while he never played in the National Basketball Association (NBA), his combination of athleticism, charisma and showmanship made him a fixture of a star-studded Globetrotters’ lineup for over two decades. All told, he played over 16,000 games for the world famous basketball exhibition team, including a 50-game ‘comeback’ season in 1993, when into his sixties. Such was his standing with the Globetrotters that he was one of such eight players to have his shirt number, 36, retired. In 2003, Lemon was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Facing perennial, and deliberately hapless, opponents, the Washington Generals on a nighly basis, Lemon had carte blanche to demonstrate his repertoire of half-court hook shots, no-look passes and other stunts. Comedic though his antics may have been, the late, great Wilt Chamberlain called him ‘the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen’.
The sport of badminton takes its name from Badminton House, the family seat of the Duke of Beaufort, in Gloucestershire, South West England. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, badminton was first played in that locale circa 1873, but its origin can be traced back to antiquity.
Traditional folk games involving hitting a shuttlecock back and forth have been popular in Asia, Europe and the Americas for centuries, if not millenia. In England, for example, the game of battledore and shuttlecock, a.k.a. jeu de volant, is depicted in a Medieval engraving held by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Initially a children’s pastime, the game involved taking turns to hit a rudimentary feather-trimmed shuttlecock with small rackets, known as battledores, without allowing it to fall to the ground.
The evolution of modern badminton took another step forward in the second half of the nineteenth century, when army officers stationed in the city of Poona, now Pune, in Western India during the days of the British Raj improved battledore and shuttlecock by introducing a net and a court and drew up the rules for a new game known, unsurprising, as ‘poona’. Returning officers subsequently re-imported the revised, competitive game to England, where it gained trained traction in various locations including, of course, Badminton House.
The original rules and regulations of badminton, as the game became known, were revised in 1887 and again in 1890 before being published by the newly-formed Badminton Association of England, now Badminton England, in 1893. Nowadays, badminton is the second most popular participation sport globally, behind only association football, or soccer, with an estimated 220 million players worldwide.
Of course, Sir Bradley Wiggins is best known as a former professional cyclist, on the track and, in the later part of his career, on the road. Indeed, he was knighted for services to cycling in the 2013 New Year Honours, having becoming the first cyclist to win the Tour de France and a Olympic gold medal – in the men’s individual time trial at the London Games – within the space of ten days the previous year. In fact, Wiggins won a total of eight Olympic medals, including gold medals at four successive Games, in Athens, Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro, and was, until August, 2021, Britain’s most decorated Olympian.
Nevertheless, Wiggins called time on his 16-year professional cycling career in December, 2016 and, initially, took up indoor rowing ‘just to keep fit’. However, encouraged by the times he was recording, he took up the sport professionally and began training full-time, under the coaching and mentorship of double Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell. In June, 2017, Wiggins revealed that he would be competing at the British Rowing Indoor Championships (BRIC) the following December and, in the meantime, was attempting to increase his body weight to 100kg, or 220lb.
On December 9, 2017, Wiggins did indeed compete in the elite 2,000-metre race at the Lee Valley VeloPark, with Cracknell predicting a time between 6:01 and 6:05. However, Wiggins reportedly misheard an announcement early in the race and, believing a false start had been called, backed off for a stroke. He quickly realised his error and resumed rowing, but the damage was done and he finished with a time of 6:22.5, thereby placing twenty-first of 99 competitors. Clearly frustrated, he shook his head and left without comment and never returned to serious competition.
Nowadays the preeminent professional basketball league in the world, the National Basketball Association (NBA) was founded on August 3, 1949, when the National Basketball League (NBL), established in 1937, and the Basketball Association of America (BAA), established in 1946, set aside their differences and finalised a merger. That merger coincided with the creation of the Indianapolis Olympians, a franchise that would last just four seasons but, in its brief existence, had the distinction of being one of the teams that played in the longest game in NBA history.
The other team to play in the historic contest at Edgerton Park Arena in Rochester, New York on January 6, 1951 was Rochester Royals, who, the following April, would win the NBA title for the first time, beating the New York Knicks in the finals. However, on this occasion, despite 6-foot 9-inch centre Arnold ‘Stilts’ Risen top-scoring with 26 points, the Royals would eventually suffer a 75-73 defeat by the Olympians.
For the uninitiated, barring overtime, a basketball game consists of four quarters, of ten minutes apiece. However, if the scores are tied at the end of regulation play, teams play multiple periods of overtime, each lasting five minutes each, until a result is decided. The Royals and the Olympians were tied 65-65 at the end of regulation and, in the absence of a ‘shot clock’, which did not become a feature of the NBA until three years later, needed six periods of overtime to settle the outcome. Much of the additional 30-minute period was uneventful, with the players content to run down the clock in the hope of making a last-gasp winning shot; after 78 minutes, Olympians power forward Bob Lavoy did just that, breaking away to score with a layup and win the game.
For readers unfamiliar with the nitty-gritty of gridiron football, ‘rushing yards’ is a metric calculated by adding up the number of yards a player gains, or loses, when carrying the ball, without first catching a forward pass. If a player does catch a forward pass, any yardage gained, or lost, relative to the line of scrimmage – including the distance the ball travels in the air – is attributed to that player as ‘receiving yards’.
Anyway, in the history of the National Football League (NFL), which celebrated its centenary in 2019, the player who holds the record for the most yards gained rushing in a single game is former Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. Now 38 and, since January 17, 2022, a free agent, Peterson was playing just the eighth game of his professional career when, on November 4, 2007, he set the single-game rushing record against the San Diego Chargers at the now-demolished Metrodome in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
On that occasion, Peterson made 30 carries, for a total of 296 yards – equivalent to the length of two and a quarter football fields – and scored three touchdowns. In the second half alone, he gained 253 yards and scored two touchdowns, thereby carrying the Vikings to a 35-17 victory, after they had trailed 14-7 at half-time. In so doing, he beat the previous record, 295 yards, set by Baltimore Ravens running back Jamal Lewis in a 33-13 victory over the Cleveland Browns at the Cleveland Browns Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio on September 14, 2003.
As a slightly bizarre footnote, on September 10, 2022, Peterson fought an exhibition boxing match, scheduled for five rounds, against former Pittsburgh Steelers star running back Le’Veon Bell at the Banc of California Stadium in Los Angeles, California. Bell won, by technical knockout, in the final round.