Scores On This Historic Day

May 1, 1872: Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 is put on display at the 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in London. It gets mixed reviews, although it probably didn't help that the artist was an American. But why would anyone give a bad review of someone's mother? Anna Matilda McNeill was born on September 27, 1804 in Wilmington, North Carolina. In 1831, she married civil engineer George Washington Whistler. On July 10, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts, she gave birth to her 1st child, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Anna Whistler, 1858 James flunked out of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and became a painter, with "art for art's sake" as his motto. He tended to give his paintings musical titles, such as "Arrangement" and "Nocturne." He studied art in Paris, and moved to London permanently in 1858. Soon after, his paintings began to sell. By then widowed, his mother eventually joined him there. James McNeill Whist...

April 30, 2011: The White House Correspondents' Dinner -- a.k.a. "Nerd Prom" -- is held. A good time was had by all -- except for one man. This led to unintended consequences -- terrible ones. The White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner, begun in 1921,  has become a Washington, D.C. tradition. Starting with Calvin Coolidge in 1924, every President had attended at least one of them. It  is traditionally held on the evening of the last Saturday in April, at the Washington Hilton. The event was canceled in 1930, due to the death of Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft; in 1942, due to America's recent entry into World War II; and in 1951, over what President Harry Truman called "the uncertainty of the world situation." In 1962, at the urging of UPI reporter Helen Thomas, President John F. Kennedy announced that he refused to attend the dinner unless the ban on women attending was dropped. It was. In 1981, President Ron...

April 30, 1993: Tennis star Monica Seles is stabbed at the Citizen Cup tournament in Hamburg, Germany. The stabbing itself was not caught on video, but her scream was caught on audio. Although her wound was not life-threatening, it cut enough muscle to put her out of action for a few months. It disturbed her enough mentally that she didn't come back for another 2 years after that. The native of Novi Sad, Serbia, but ethnically Hungarian, was 19 years old, and had already won 8 of the last 10 majors: The 1990, '91 and '92 French Opens; the '91, '92 and '93 Australian Opens; and the '91 and '92 U.S. Opens. Oddly, she hadn't yet won Wimbledon. Her attacker, Günter Parche, was obsessed with Steffi Graf, a fellow German whom Seles had replaced as the best female tennis player in the world. Prior to Seles' 1st major win, Graff had won the French Open in 1987, '88 and '93; the Australian Open in 1988, '89 and '90; Wimbledon in 1988, ...

April 30, 1986:  Steve Smith turns 23, and has the worst birthday in hockey history. In 1985, he made his NHL debut with the Edmonton Oilers. He played 2 regular season games, and was not put on their Playoff roster, as they won their 2nd straight Stanley Cup. But in 1985-86, he was one of the League's top defensive rookies. He looked like he had a good career ahead of him. On April 30, he took the ice with the Oilers against their Provincial rivals, the Calgary Flames, in Game 7 of the NHL Smythe Division Final, at the Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton. The Flames stunned their Alberta rivals by taking a 2-0 lead, early in the 2nd period. But before that period ended, the Oilers tied the game. At the 5:14 mark of the 3rd period, Smith took the puck near the side of his own net, and tried to pass it up the ice. But he made a mistake, and the puck went off the leg of Oiler goaltender Grant Fuhr, and into the goal. Perry Berezan was the last Flames player to touch the puck, so he got c...

April 30, 1975: The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN, representing "the Democratic Republic of Vietnam," a.k.a. North Vietnam) and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF, or "Viet Cong") capture the capital of the Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. South Vietnam, Saigon. The Vietnam War is finally over: Vietnam is united, and it is Communist. The capture of the city was preceded by Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of almost all American civilian and military personnel in Saigon, more than 2 years after combat operations there had ended; along with tens of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians who had been associated with the Republic of Vietnam regime. The sight of civilians climbing a staircase in a desperate attempt to reach the last helicopter, on the roof of the American Embassy, became a symbol of America's 1st true military defeat. The War of 1812 may have been a stalemate, but tends to get treated like a victory. There was no way to spin...

April 30, 1971: The Milwaukee Bucks win the NBA Championship, in only their 3rd season. It remains a record for the NBA. It took them half a century to win another. The Bucks and the Phoenix Suns had both come into the NBA as expansion teams for the 1968-69 season. Like most expansion teams, both of them struggled: The Bucks finished last in the Eastern Division with a record of 27 wins and 55 losses, while the Suns finished with the worst record in the entire league, at 16-66. By all rights, they should have had the top pick in the 1969 NBA Draft. But, at the time, a coin flip between the teams with the 2 worst records was held to decide who got the rights to the 1st overall pick. The idea was that a team trying to lose in order to get the top pick -- "tanking" would eventually become the expression -- might end up losing it to the team with the 2nd-worst record. The Bucks won the coin flip, and, naturally, they picked Lew Alcindor, the center who had led UCLA to the last 3...

April 30, 1956:  The NBA Draft is held in New York. With the 1st pick, the Boston Celtics -- having just completed their 1st 10 seasons, and not yet having appeared in an NBA Finals -- selected Tommy Heinsohn, forward from the nearby College of the Holy Cross. With the 2nd pick, the Rochester Royals selected Sihugo Green, a guard from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Green was a decent player, but hardly the kind of star you would expect to go as the 2nd pick overall. With the 3rd pick, the St. Louis Hawks drafted Bill Russell, a center who had led the University of San Francisco to back-to-back National Championships. It looked like the Hawks had gotten the best player. But later that day, the Hawks traded the rights to Russell to the Celtics, for center Ed Macauley and forward Cliff Hagan. Result: Over the next 13 seasons, Russell would lead the Celtics to 12 NBA Finals, and 11 NBA Championships. The Celtics became the most dominant team in North American sports history -- not ...

James T. Sutherland April 30, 1945: The first election for the Hockey Hall of Fame is held, in Toronto. It is announced at the National Hockey League's offices, since the Hall does not yet have a physical location, and won't until 1961. The Hockey Hall of Fame was established through the efforts of James T. Sutherland,  a former president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association  (CAHA). Sutherland sought to establish it in Kingston, Ontario,  as he believed that the city was the birthplace of hockey. In 1943, the NHL and CAHA reached an agreement that a Hall of Fame would be established in Kingston.  Originally called the "International Hockey Hall of Fame," its mandate was to honor great hockey players and to raise funds for a permanent location. The 1st 9 "honoured members" were, in chronological order: * Hod Stuart, star of America's 1st great professional team, the Pittsburgh Bankers, and a member of the Montreal Wanderers' 1907 Stanley Cup w...

April 30, 1945:  With the Soviet Union's Red Army having reduced his "Thousand-Year Reich" from most of Europe to the size of his bunker in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany, shoots himself in the head. He was 56 years old. His wife, Eva Braun, had also committed suicide, with a cyanide pill. She was 33. The Nazi regime came to an end with the rump government's surrender 8 days later. He knew the Red Army was closing in from the east. He knew the other Allies, America and Britain, were closing in from the west. He knew Berlin was surrounded. He had hoped to hold out until May 5, the anniversary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, his role model, who had come closer to conquering Russia than he had, actually reaching Moscow, but finding it burned and useless to him before returning. But the reports that Hitler was getting suggested that the Soviets would get there sooner. And when he found out how his former Axis partner, Benito Mussolini, had been treated af...

April 29, 1961: ABC Wide World of Sports premieres. The first events it covers are 2 of America's premier track & field meets: The Pennsylvania Relay Carnival, a.k.a. the Penn Relays, at Franklin Field on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; and the Drake Relays, at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. By the nature of its name, the show covers sports from not just all over America, but all over the world. This included sports often seen in the Olympic Games, like track & field, swimming, cycling, and Winter Olympic sports like ski racing, ski jumping, figure skating and speed skating. Lots of auto racing: The Indianapolis 500, NASCAR, and Grand Prix and Formula 1 events from Europe. Sometimes, there would be oddball competitions, like "The World Lumberjack Championships." (It's the kind of thing that can't really be explained: You have to see it to believe it.) The traditional North American sports were usually not shown. Baseb...