Scores On This Historic Day

May 31, 2002: Game 6 of the NBA Western Conference Finals is played at the Staples Center (now the Crypto.com Arena) in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Sacramento Kings, 106-102. Shaquille O'Neal scored 41 points and had 17 rebounds. Kobe Bryant added 31 points in support. Almost immediately, there were allegations that this game was fixed by the referees. In 2008, as part of the scandal that involved him betting on games he had officiated, fired NBA referee Tim Donaghy said that two of the referees in this game were told to fix it so the NBA and televising network NBC could make more money on a Game 7. The officials for this game were Dick Bavetta, Ted Bernhardt and Bob Delaney. Bavetta holds the record for most NBA games officiated, with 2,635, having never missed a game from his 1975 hiring until his 2014 retirement. Early in his career, he was considered one of the worst refs in the game. He decided to do something about it, and practiced with Summer league games,...

May 31, 1989: The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Jim Wright of Texas, resigns his post, which he had held for the last 2 years. He also resigns the seat in Congress, representing Fort Worth, Texas, to which he was first elected in 1954. The reason? He used bulk purchases of his book, Reflections of a Public Man , to earn speaking fees in excess of the maximum amount allowed by a Congressional ethics resolution. That's it. No actual crime. Nobody died. Nobody got hurt. Nobody's rights -- civil or human -- were violated. As he admitted in his resignation speech: "Have I made mistakes? Oh, yeah, I've made a lot of mistakes, mistakes in judgement." But, apparently, some people thought he had to resign over it. Leading the charge against Wright and his ethics violations was a feisty young Republican Congressman, originally from Pennsylvania, but representing a district in Georgia. His name was Newt Gingrich, and he, too, would become Speaker... and have...

Moses Malone (left) and Julius Erving. Big Mo and Dr. J. May 31, 1983: The Philadelphia 76ers, and Julius Erving, finally win an NBA Championship, on the massive shoulders of the man who, for most of the early 1980s, was the best basketball player in the world. Not Erving. Not Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers, whom the Sixers beat in these Finals. Not Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics, whom the Sixers beat to get into the Finals. His name was Moses Malone. It was a story of 2 men, who couldn't have been more different in style, but who combined to get a precious result for one of basketball's greatest cities. Both players started out in the American Basketball Association. Erving began with the Virginia Squires in 1971, and went to the New York Nets in 1973. Known as "Doctor J," his stunning moves led the Long Island team to the ABA Championship in 1974 and 1976. But when the Nets were invited into the NBA for the 1976-77 season, the terr...

May 31, 1972: North London soccer team Arsenal play in America for the first time, at the Orange Bowl in Miami. Here's the starting lineup for "The Gunners": 1 Goalkeeper (GK) Geoff Barnett (in place of the injured Bob Wilson) 2 Right Back (RB) Pat Rice 3 Left Back (LB) Sammy Nelson (in place of Bob McNab) 4 Midfielder (MF) Peter Storey 5 Centreback (CB) Frank McLintock (sub: 14 John Roberts) 6 CB Peter Simpson 7 MF George Armstrong 8 MF Alan Ball (sub: 12 Eddie Kelly) 9 Forward (FW) John Radford 10 FW Ray Kennedy 11 FW Charlie George. The Arsenal (the "The" is not official, but it is common) had won the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1970, both England's Football League Division One and its FA Cup ("The Double") in 1971, and had just finished a season in which they finished 5th in the League and lost in the FA Cup Final. The "club" had played all over the world from the 1930s onward, including the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and South...

May 31, 1970: Terry Sawchuk, perhaps the greatest goaltender hockey had ever seen, dies from a pulmonary embolism at Long Beach Memorial Hospital in Long Beach, Long Island, New York. Still an active player with the New York Rangers, he was now 40 years old and backing up Eddie Giacomin, but had made no indication that he was about to retire. He and Ron Stewart, his teammate and roommate, got into a fight over expenses for the house they were renting in Long Beach. He was hospitalized, and doctors found that his gallbladder had to be removed. They also discovered serious liver damage, from years of heavy drinking, bad enough that he might not have lived much longer anyway. He lived long enough to tell the police that he accepted full responsibility for what happened. A grand jury was convened, and Stewart was exonerated. Sawchuk's 447 career wins and 103 shutouts remained NHL records long after his death. Both are now held by Martin Brodeur. He won the Stanley Cup with the Detroit...

May 31, 1964: For the New York Mets, to borrow the title of a 1962 movie about the D-Day invasion, this was The Longest Day. For one of their players, to borrow the title of a 1945 movie about alcoholism, it was The Lost Weekend. The day before, the Mets' top farm team, the Buffalo Bisons of the Class AAA International League, had played a doubleheader. This team had several players from the original Met team of 2 years earlier, which had gone 40-120, suggesting that these players weren't even ready for the major leagues at this point, and might never be: Craig Anderson, Larry Burright, Elio Chacon, Cliff Cook, Sammy Drake, and the man who became the unwilling symbol of Met ineptitude, Marv Throneberry. But the '64 Bisons also had 3 players who turned out to be not only good enough to make the major leagues, but good enough to help the Mets find glory in 1969: Cleon Jones, Ron Swoboda, and one player who fell into both categories, '62 and '69: Ed Kranepool. Kranepo...

May 31, 1921:  The Tulsa Race Massacre begins, and continues into the next day. M obs of White residents, some of them deputized and given weapons by city officials,  attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  The attacks burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood – at the time one of the wealthiest Black communities in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street." More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 Black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them were interned for several days.  The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. The actual death toll may have been as high as 300. The massacre began when 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a Black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old White elevator operator  in the nearby Drexel Building. He was taken into custod...

May 31, 1902: The Boer War ends, in a British victory. This was actually the Second Boer War. The First Boer War, also known as the Transvaal Rebellion, was fought from December 16, 1880 to March 23, 1881, and resulted in a Boer victory and the eventual independence of the South African Republic. The Second Boer War was the 2nd war to be captured on film, after the Spanish-American War the year before. It was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the 2 Boer Republics: The South African Republic and the Orange Free State. The Boers were, and are, the descendants of the Dutch-speaking Free Burghers of the Eastern Cape Frontier in southern Africa during the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries. The word "Boer" means "farmer" in Dutch and its offshoot, Afrikaans. Following the discovery of gold in the Boer republics, there was a gold rush. These incoming "foreigners," mostly British from the Cape Colony were regarded as unwelcome visitors. The Boers prote...