Scores On This Historic Day

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, 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...

May 31, 1889: The Johnstown Flood kills 2,208 people, one of the worst man-made disasters in history. Johnstown, Pennsylvania is 67 miles east of Pittsburgh. It sits at the confluence of the Little Conemaugh River and the Stonycreek River, as they form the Conemaugh River. That river eventually flows into the Kiskiminetas River, which flows into the Allegheny River, which combines with the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. Like so many other Pennsylvania towns in the 19th Century, Johnstown became a producer of iron, coal and steel. But it flooded pretty much every year. On May 30, 1889, they had a Memorial Day parade, and got it done before the rain came. But the rain kept coming, and coming. The next day, at 2:55 PM, the South Fork Dam, which had formed Lake Conemaugh, burst. The City of Johnstown, 14 miles downriver, never had a chance: It was hit with over 14 million cubic meters of water, about the average annual flow of the Mississippi River, coming at 40 m...

May 30, 1982: The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Baltimore Orioles, 6-0 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. The Jays get a 1-hit shutout from Jim Gott (6 innings) and Roy Lee Jackson (3). The only hit is a single by Rick Dempsey in the 5th inning. Playing shortstop for the Orioles, and batting 8th, is Cal Ripken Jr., the 20-year-old son of a team coach. He goes 0-for-2, but does draw a walk. Although he had been featured on the Orioles' "Future Stars" card in the 1982 Topps baseball card set -- along with shortstop Bob Bonner and pitcher Jeff Schneider -- he had, to this point, appeared in a grand total of 65 major league games. And the Orioles' most recent one hadn't been one of them. He must have impressed manager Earl Weaver, because Earl put Cal in the next game as well. And the next. And so on. By the time Ripken next missed a game (for reasons other than a strike), he was 38, and had played in 2,632 in a row, breaking the record of 2,130 set from 1925 to 1939 by ...

May 30, 1979: Nottingham Forest Football Club win the European Cup, the tournament now known as the UEFA Champions League. It is the crowning achievement of their manager, Brian Clough. Less than 5 years earlier, Clough looked finished as a top-flight manager. Now, he was the boss of the Champions of Europe. Clough was a native of Middlesbrough, in the North-East of England, and had starred as a striker for the hometown soccer team, Middlesbrough FC. Don Revie was also a Middlesbrough native, and had also starred as a striker, for Manchester City. Both men subsequently played for Sunderland FC, ostensibly Middlesbrough's arch-rivals, and for the England national team -- albeit Clough only twice, and Revie only 6 times, as that period, the late 1950s and early 1960s, was when the forward position on the England team was dominated by Tom Finney of Preston North End, Johnny Haynes of Fulham, Bobby Charlton of Manchester United, and Jimmy Greaves of Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. Both...

May 30, 1968: The inevitable fall of the government of France has come. But not in the way that was expected: Through an election, not a revolution. In February, the French Communist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International  formed an electoral alliance. Communists had long supported Socialist candidates in elections, but in the "February Declaration," the 2 parties agreed to attempt to form a joint government to replace President  Charles de Gaulle and his Gaullist Party. This was a bold move. de Gaulle had already been seen by the French public as having saved the country twice: Helping to liberate it from the Nazis in 1944, and settling the unrest that brought the Fourth Republic down in 1958, founding the Fifth Republic. The 6-foot-5 de Gaulle was, figuratively, the biggest man in the country. But he was 77 years old, and increasingly conservative. A lot of people thought it was time for a change, and he didn't seem ready to hand the Presidency o...