Scores On This Historic Day

December 31, 1999:  The Millennium arrives. The people of planet Earth made it. At a terrible cost. But we hadn't destroyed ourselves. It felt like a great achievement. January 1, 2000:  As time zone after time zone turned over from 11:59 to 12:00, there was great joy -- literally, all over the world. It didn't last. So far, the 21st Century has been a bust. In words that have been attributed to Yankee Legend Yogi Berra, then 74 years old, "The future ain't what it used to be." December 31, 1999 was a Friday. It was the day that Boris Yeltsin resigned as President of Russia, handing the office over to the Prime Minister -- Vladimir Putin. It was the day that Elliot Richardson died. He remains the only person to serve the President of the United States in 4 different Cabinet posts, including Attorney General, an office he resigned rather than follow Richard Nixon's unconstitutional order in "the Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973. It was also the day th...

December 31, 2011:  The last American combat troops leave Iraq. It had been 8 years, 9 months and 11 days since the first ones got there. And what did America get out of it? Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein, and replaced him with... a government that we're still not sure is trustworthy. And we emboldened neighboring Iran, who were glad to see Saddam out. And we emboldened terrorists in the Middle East, ditto. Over 1 million Iraqis, the vast majority of them civilians, died as a result of this war. American combat deaths were, officially, 4,507; with another 32,292 wounded, another 47,541 listed under "Injured/diseases/other medical." How many have psychiatric issues as a result of being sent there, we may never know. In his 1988 book  1968 In America , Charles Kaiser reasoned that the only good thing about the Vietnam War was that America had apparently learned its lesson, and had never had another "Vietnam." That was before George W. Bush, who actively sought...

December 31, 1993: Brandon Teena is murdered by bigots in Humboldt, Nebraska. He was 21 years old, and unwittingly becomes perhaps the first famous pre-surgery transgender person – not post-surgery, what was then called a "transsexual." The subject of this essay was born on December 12, 1972, in Lincoln, Nebraska, with female characteristics, and the name Teena Brandon.  The child's father died before the birth, and was raised, along with an older sister, by a single mother. Both children were abused by an uncle. Teena was described by others as a "tomboy," and, in adolescence, began identifying as male. He was kicked out of a Catholic high school for dressing like a boy, and rejected by the U.S. Army by listing "male" on his enlistment form. In 1993, Teena began dating a woman named Lana Tisdel, who was 2 years younger. Teena was arrested for forging checks, and it was only upon going to bail him out and seeing "her" in the female section o...

December 31, 1988:  The Chicago Bears host the Philadelphia Eagles in an NFC Divisional Playoff at Soldier Field in Chicago. It was Mike Ditka coaching the team he'd led to a Super Bowl win 3 seasons before, against a team coached by Buddy Ryan, who'd been the defensive coordinator for those Bears, and with whom he'd never gotten along. Chicago is known for nasty Winter weather, and plenty of games at Soldier Field, both at its 1924 original (as this one was) and at its 2003 replacement, have had bitter cold, or snow, or rain, or wind blasting in off Lake Michigan, just 2 blocks away, or some combination thereof. But they'd never been hit by fog before. San Francisco is the American city best known for fog, and while Giants games at Candlestick Park had to be called due to fog, 49ers games there never have. Cleveland Municipal Stadium had seen some Indians games called due to fog, but not Browns games. Chicago? Fog was one weather condition they were not used to. At kic...

December 31, 1984: Rick Allen, the drummer for British hard-rock band Def Leppard, is badly injured in a car crash, outside the hometown of most of the band's members, Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Allen, himself from Dronfield, in Derbyshire, in the East Midlands, was thrown from his Chevrolet Corvette. He had a seat belt on. The belt did not restrain him. It did restrain his left arm, severing it. Until this moment, Allen seemed to be living a charmed life with one of the biggest bands in the world.  On his 15th  birthday, November 1, 1978, he was admitted to the band, after responding to their classified ad for a new drummer. On his 16th  birthday, they opened for one of the biggest rock bands in the world, AC/DC. On December 31, 1984, a few miles outside of Sheffield, the hometown of most of the band’s members, he lost his left arm in a car crash. As lead singer Joe Elliott said, "If I lose my arm, I can still sing. If he loses his voice, he can still play drums." How ...

Left to right: Peter Mahovlich, Vladislav Tretiak, Yvan Cournoyer December 31, 1975: A hockey game is played at the Montreal Forum. It not only ends up getting labeled "The Game of the Century," but it is often credited with "saving the sport." Super Series '76 was scheduled, with 2 Soviet club teams taking on NHL teams. One was the reigning Soviet Champions, CSKA Moscow. Translated into English, "CSKA" (pronounced "CHESS-kah") became "Central Sports Club of the Army." It was a team sponsored by the country's Red Army, and that's what they were called in the American media: "The Red Army." The other was Krylya Sovetov, translated as "Soviet Wings." This suggests they were sponsored by the country's Air Force. Not quite: They were sponsored by the country's aircraft builders. The Super Series began on December 28, 1975, at Madison Square Garden, and the Red Army pounded the New York Rangers, 7-3. ...

December 31, 1974:  The era of baseball free agency begins, as the Yankees "hook a Catfish." James Augustus Hunter was signed out of Perquimans High School in North Carolina by the Kansas City Athletics on June 8, 1964. Team owner Charles O. Finley thought "Jim Hunter" was too ordinary a name, and that he needed a nickname. Charlie asked "Jimmy" (as he was always known to his family) what he liked to do. Jim said he liked to hunt and fish, a common pair of passions for baseball players from rural areas in those days. So Finley made up a story about how, when he was a boy, Jimmy caught a whole bunch of catfish, and that he had been nicknamed "Catfish Hunter" -- or, sometimes, just "Cat" -- from then on. Of course, no one had ever called him "Catfish" -- or "Cat" -- until June 8, 1964. Hunter made his debut with the A's in 1965. In 1966, he made the 1st of what turned out to be 8 All-Star Games. The A's moved t...

December 31, 1972:  Roberto Clemente is killed in a plane crash, trying to get relief supplies from his native Puerto Rico to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua. Eight days earlier -- the same day as the football play known as the "Immaculate Reception" -- an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale struck the Nicaraguan capital of Managua. As with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, there were fires started, and the city's firefighting equipment was damaged. Between the initial quake and the fires, the disaster killed about 11,000 people, and left about 300,000 of the city's 1 million or so people homeless. The city's top 4 hospitals were destroyed, and there were food shortages. The world responded with relief, but the country's right-wing dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle -- my autocorrect poignantly tried to turn that into "Debacle" -- had it distributed according to his own purposes, much like an old-style American city "machine politicia...

Lambeau Field as it appeared in 1967. Note the shadow cast by the scoreboard at the south end. This will matter later on. December 31, 1967:  As the narrator for a 1987 NFL Films production put it, "On a day savage enough to make a Saint Bernard whimper, they played the 1967 NFL Championship Game." Or, as it has become known in football lore, The Ice Bowl. I don't know who the narrator was -- the Internet has failed me in this regard -- but the film was made in 1987, so it wasn't John Facenda, the voice of NFL Films from 1966 until his death in 1984. Let the record show that Facenda never actually spoke the words "the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field." ESPN's Chris Berman, imitating Facenda, made that up. The Ice Bowl isn't even the coldest game in NFL history anymore. The 1981 AFC Championship Game, played at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati on January 10, 1982, was 9 degrees below zero without the wind chill factor, and 37 below with it. The San Dieg...

December 31, 1962: The American Basketball League folds, early in its 2nd season. Since the Basketball Association of America took on some teams of the National Basketball League in 1949, and took on the name of the National Basketball Association, the NBA had been the only major league in the sport. But when Abe Saperstein, founder and owner of the all-black Harlem Globetrotters, was denied a Los Angeles-based expansion team, and Minneapolis Lakers owner Bob Short was allowed to move his team to Los Angeles for the 1960-61 season, Saperstein acted. Saperstein contacted George Steinbrenner, the Cleveland shipbuilding executive who owned the Cleveland Pipers, champions of the Amateur Athletic Union, and Paul Cohen, who owned the Tuck Tapers of the National Alliance of Basketball Leagues, and they formed the ABL. Saperstein hired Bill Sharman, a former star for USC and the Boston Celtics, to coach the Los Angeles Jets. Their star player would be Los Angeles native George Yardley, who ha...