Perry actually achieved his first home run within minutes after Apollo 11 touched down on the moon but Neil Armstrong would step onto – with his left foot first – the lunar surface only 6 hours and 16 minutes later.

But while the timing of Perry’s first home run is well proven the fact that Perry himself uttered those famous words are not. It is also suggested that his manager Alvin Dark suggested, “They’ll put a man on the moon before he hits a home run.” Whoever said it, it has become one of the most famous moments in baseball history.

Gaylord Jackson Perry (born 1938), a right-handed pitcher, was known for allegedly throwing spitball. He pitched 5352 innings with 3534 strikeouts and ERA of 3.10. He scored 6 home runs in his career. He was inducted into the National Baseball hall of Fame in 1991.

On average, people can hold their breath for one minute, maybe two. The world record, however, is 11 minutes 35 seconds, set on June 8, 2009 by Stéphane Mifsud. In that time, even if you held your breath for a minute, you would have had to breathe 170 times because you breath 23,000 times a day!

Stéphane Mifsud‘s amazing feat is the Static apnea record as established by the International Association for the Development of Free Diving. Inhalation of pure oxygen before the diving attempt is not allowed, which the Guinness World Record association does allow. They report the record for holding breath at 20 minutes 10 seconds, set on April 1, 2010 by Stig Severinsen. Also an amazing feat.

Free diving

Scientists used to believe that lungs would collapse at  164 ft (50m). At depths of  328 ft (100m), the underwater pressure could shrink lungs to the size of an egg, it was thought. After all, water is 800 times thicker than air and weighs 8.3 pounds per gallon (1kg per liter). Even today, advanced scuba divers have a limit of  130 ft (40m). But in 1961 Sicilian Enzo Maiorca descended to 177 ft (54m) without breathing equipment.

The first person to free-dive (with assistance but no breathing equipment) to 100m (328 ft) was Jacques Mayol, in 1976. On December 13, 2010, New Zealander William Trubridge became the first person to reach a depth of 100m without any assistance of any kind, even without fins.

Legendary free-diver Italian Umberto Pellizzari, who can hold his breath for more than 6 minutes, was the first to free-dive to 150m (492 ft), in October 1999. In 2007, current record holder  Herbert Nitsch reached an astounding 214m (702 ft). Now, that should take your breath away!

The role of oxygen in breathing

Discovery explains how is it possible to hold a breath for long

In 1866, Mark Twain visited Hawaii, noting, “In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing.” Note that he mentioned that just male and female adults and children surfed.

Surfing became popular worldwide after European and US soldiers who were posted on the Pacific islands took the sport home.

The above image represents an artistic impression of surfing in Hawaii. See the history of surfing at Surfing For Life. The latest international surfing news can be found at Surfing Magazine.

The first Olympic games were held in 776BC – and then every 4 years until 339BC. The first Olympic race was won by Corubus, a chef. For many years the Olympics consisted of only one race, a sprint of 192 metres (210 yards, the length of the stadium) called the “stadion.” A second race of 400 metres was added 50 years later. The pentathlon, wrestling, boxing, single-horse and four-horse chariot races were included later still. There also was a special event in which runners competed in hoplite armor, helmet, shield, and greaves that weighed 20-25 kg (50-60 lbs). There were no team events, relay races or the long distance race of Marathon – these events were introduced in the modern Olympics.

Go for silver
No medals were awarded in the ancient Olympics. A winner received an olive wreath to wear on his head. Second and third placings received nothing. When the Olympics were revived in 1896 in Athens, Greece, winners received silver medals instead of gold medals. Eight years later, at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, gold replaced silver for first place. Today’s gold medals actually are sterling silver covered with a thin coat of gold.

Olympic medals since 1928 have featured the same design on the front: a Greek goddess, the Olympic Rings, the coliseum of ancient Athens, a Greek vase known as an amphora, a horse-drawn chariot, and the year, number of the Olympiad, and host city.

Games for all
At the first modern Olympic Games there were 311 male but no female competitors. Women were allowed to take part in the next Olympics in Paris. In the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games there were 3543 female competitors.

The oldest Olympic athlete at the Sydney Games was a 62-year-old archer representing Vanuatu. But he has some years to go to be the oldest ever Olympian. That title is held by Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn who won his sixth Olympic medal at the 1920 Antwerp Games at the age of 72 years and 280 days old. The youngest ever Olympian is Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras, who competed in the 1896 Athens Olympics. He was 10 years old.

The first ever perfect score of 10 in Olympic gymnastics was achieved at the 1976 Montreal Olympics by Romanian Nadia Comaneci. She won 3 gold medals.

The record for the most Olympic medals ever won is held by Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina. Competing in three Olympics, between 1956 and 1964, she won 18 medals: 9 gold, 5 silver and 4 bronze. Thus she also tops the list of gold medals winners, beating Olympic stars such as US swimmer Mark Spitz and Finnish long distance runner Paavo Nurmi.

The Olympic Games is the largest single broadcast event in the world, broadcasted in 220 countries to more than 3.5 bilion people.

The Olympic Games

Ancient Greeks and Romans also played a game that resembled football – although the Greeks permitted carrying of the ball. Olympic games in ancient Rome featured a 50-minute football game with twenty-seven men on a side.

The early days

How the sport spread from the East to Europe is not clear but England became the home of modern football. At first the game had a bad reputation among English royalty – possibly because of the noise the fans made – by whose insistence the government passed laws against it. King Edward (1307-1327) proclaimed, “For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid, we forbid on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city.” In 1365 King Edward III banned football because of its excessive violence and for military reasons playing took time away from archery practice the game had become too popular to be curtailed. King Henry IV and Henry VIII passed laws against the sport, and Queen Elizabeth I “had football players jailed for a week, with follow-up church penance”

Laws failed to slow the popularity of football and by 1681 it received official sanction in England. The games were still ruff and noisy, with players hardly ever leaving the field without broken bones or even being spiked. There was no standard set for the size of teams or the field; the earliest organized games, usually bitter confrontations between teams from two or three parishes, had goals as far as 5 km (3 miles) apart. It was only by 1801 that it was (somewhat) agreed that teams should have an equal number of players and that the playing area should be about 91 metres (100 yards). Records show that Eton college drew up the first written rules of football in 1815. (The modern standardized rules are known as the Cambridge rules.)

Until the mid-1800s football rules still varied across regions. Team sizes ranged from 15 to 21. The 11-player team was standardized in 1870. The crossbar between two goal posts became mandatory in 1875. The goalkeeper was formally distinguished in the 1880s.

FIFA

The first football club was formed in Sheffield, England in 1857. The Football Association was founded on 26 October 1863 by 11 clubs meeting in London. (The word association was abbreviated to assoc., which became “soccer.”)

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded in the rear of the headquarters of the Union Française de Sports Athlétiques at the rue Saint Honoré 229 in Paris on 21 May 1904. The first World Cup was held in 1930 in Uruguay.

Where does the word “soccer” come from?

In the 1880s students of Oxford university abbreviated words by adding “er” to the end; for instance, breakfast became “brekkers” and “rugby rules” was referred to as “rugger.” When one student, Charles Wreford Brown, was asked if he’d like to play rugger, he was the first to abbreviate “association rules” (Football Association rules) by answering, “No, soccer.” Brown later became an England international and Football Association vice-president.

“The Beautiful Game”

Football is the biggest spectator sport in the world, with angling as the world’s biggest participant sport. While Formula 1 is the sport most watched on television, the World Cup is, after the Olympics, the most watched sporting event on television globally.

List of Football World Cup champions

U.S. Soccer Federation

European Football Association

England Caps – Everything about the England Team

John B Gagnon (1883-1939) was born in Caribou, Maine. He was 5′ 10” tall, and weighed 230 pounds. He could tear a horseshoe apart with his bare hands; bend a railroad spike into a U; pick up 794 pounds with one finger. The only man to do more weight than John B Gagnon in a back lift is the late great Paul Anderson, who held the World Guinness Record of 6,270 pounds.

John B Gagnon’s recorded lifts, all accomplished in 25 minutes:

Finger lift………………………………………….794 pounds
One-hand lift……………………………………..1,111 pounds
Two-hand lift……………………………………..1,575 pounds
Two-hand & knees lift………………………….2,195 pounds
Neck lift…………………………………………..1,317 pounds
Harness lift……………………………………….2,689 pounds
Teeth lift…………………………………………..627 pounds
One-arm lift………………………………………924 pounds
Two-arm lift………………………………………1,248 pounds
Back lift (persons on platform)………………4,170 pounds

TOTAL WEIGHT LIFTED…………..16,650 lbs. . .in 25 minutes

The Strongest Man Alive organizers believe the strongman title should go to John Wooten of Massachusetts. At 51 years old, he had towed a Mississippi river boat against the current, piggybacked an elephant, stopped two jet planes from taking off by holding them down, and pulled a 280-ton train along a track. John Wooten is 1,86 m (6’1″) tall and weighs 132 kg (290 lb). He got his start in the strongman business in 1969 when he happened to meet a 79 kg (175 lb) man in his 70s who could bend 60-penny railroad spikes in his bare hands and taught him how to back-lift elephants.

Modern strong man legends

One of the most popular strongmen of all time is Jouko Ahola of Finland. Named the strongest man in the world in 1997 and 1999, he held the record for lifting the heaviest stone: the stone weighed 215 kg (414 lb). The 1,85 m (6 ft) tall Jouko also was the world’s car-carrying champion.

Modern-day strongman legend Mariusz Pudzianowski from Poland has won more World’s Strongest Man competitions than anyone else, taking the title a record fifth time in 2008.

Story contribution by Philip L. Gagnon, Sr.

More strongest men

“Louis Cyr, French-Canadian born in the Province of Québec in 1868 was stronger than Gagnon, 5′ 11” / 315 pounds: his back lift reccord was 4 335 pounds, two hands record was 1885 pounds. The best was Victor Delamarre, born in Prov of Quebec in 1888, weight 160 pounds (only) 5’7”, back lift almost 7 000 pounds ( 30 man, average 230 pounds), more than Cyr and Paul Anderson and Hector Decarie. Decarie a French Canadian 5′ 7” 180 pounds, born in 1880 back lift 3 885 and 4 269 pounds and bent press 317 pounds.”

“Gagnon was an amazing strong man but not the best of his time, the special one was Victor Delamare who bent press 309 pound in 1914.”  – as per comment by charlesfelixvalois, 9/30/2010.

Sports cater to multiple psychological and physiological deep-set needs. In this they are unique: no other activity responds as do sports to so many dimensions of one’s person, both emotional, and physical. But, on a deeper level, sports provide more than instant gratification of primal (or base, depending on one’s point of view) instincts, such as the urge to compete and to dominate.

1. Vindication

Sports, both competitive and solitary, are morality plays. The athlete confronts other sportspersons, or nature, or his (her) own limitations. Winning or overcoming these hurdles is interpreted to be the triumph of good over evil, superior over inferior, the best over merely adequate, merit over patronage. It is a vindication of the principles of quotidian-religious morality: efforts are rewarded; determination yields achievement; quality is on top; justice is done.

2. Predictability

The world is riven by seemingly random acts of terror; replete with inane behavior; governed by uncontrollable impulses; and devoid of meaning. Sports are rule-based. Theirs is a predictable universe where umpires largely implement impersonal, yet just principles. Sports is about how the world should have been (and, regrettably, isn’t). It is a safe delusion; a comfort zone; a promise and a demonstration that humans are capable of engendering a utopia.

3. Simulation

That is not to say that sports are sterile or irrelevant to our daily lives. On the very contrary. They are an encapsulation and a simulation of Life: they incorporate conflict and drama, teamwork and striving, personal struggle and communal strife, winning and losing. Sports foster learning in a safe environment. Better be defeated in a football match or on the tennis court than lose your life on the battlefield.

The contestants are not the only ones to benefit. From their detached, safe, and isolated perches, observers of sports games, however vicariously, enhance their trove of experiences; learn new skills; encounter manifold situations; augment their coping strategies; and personally grow and develop.

4. Reversibility

In sports, there is always a second chance, often denied us by Life and nature. No loss is permanent and crippling; no defeat is insurmountable and irreversible. Reversal is but a temporary condition, not the antechamber to annihilation. Safe in this certainty, sportsmen and spectators dare, experiment, venture out, and explore. A sense of adventure permeates all sports and, with few exceptions, it is rarely accompanied by impending doom or the exorbitant proverbial price-tag.

5. Belonging

Nothing like sports to encourage a sense of belonging, togetherness, and we-ness. Sports involve teamwork; a meeting of minds; negotiation and bartering; strategic games; bonding; and the narcissism of small differences (when we reserve our most virulent emotions – aggression, hatred, envy towards those who resemble us the most: the fans of the opposing team, for instance).

Sports, like other addictions, also provide their proponents and participants with an “exo-skeleton”: a sense of meaning; a schedule of events; a regime of training; rites, rituals, and ceremonies; uniforms and insignia. It imbues an otherwise chaotic and purposeless life with a sense of mission and with a direction.

6. Narcissistic Gratification

It takes years to become a medical doctor and decades to win a prize or award in academe. It requires intelligence, perseverance, and an inordinate amount of effort. One’s status as an author or scientist reflects a potent cocktail of natural endowments and hard labor.

It is far less onerous for a sports fan to acquire and claim expertise and thus inspire awe in his listeners and gain the respect of his peers. The fan may be an utter failure in other spheres of life, but he or she can still stake a claim to adulation and admiration by virtue of their fount of sports trivia and narrative skills.

Sports therefore provide a shortcut to accomplishment and its rewards. As most sports are uncomplicated affairs, the barrier to entry is low. Sports are great equalizers: one’s status outside the arena, the field, or the court is irrelevant. One’s standing is really determined by one’s degree of obsession.

Excerpt from The Madness of Playing Games by Sam Vaknin, Ph. D.