Scores On This Historic Day

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.  (The evidence is murky: It could also have been in Montreal, or in Canada's Maritime Provinces.) 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 pro...

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. It was 3:30 PM, Central European Time, 9:30 AM U.S. Eastern Time. It was not announced by the remaining Nazi government until the next day. 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. On  April 22, he ordered General Felix Steiner to attack the Soviet troops attempting to encircle Berlin. Steiner could not raise enough troops to do so. Pretty much the only available fighters in Germany who weren't already in the Army were old men and children. Steiner was no hero. He was arrested for war cr...

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. There was 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 Soap Box Derby, and "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 sp...

April 30, 1939: The New York World's Fair opens in Flushing Meadow-Corona Park, in Queens. With a theme of "The World of Tomorrow," it remains the most celebrated of America's World's Fairs. The Fair was heavily promoted: In the 1938 baseball season, all 3 of the City's Major League Baseball teams wore patches advertising it, a year ahead of schedule. Oddly, none of them kept the patch for the 1939 or '40 season. Instead, in 1939, every Major League Baseball team wore a patch honoring the 100th Anniversary of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in Cooperstown, New York in 1939 -- which, of course, he didn't do, and this was already widely known. The "Tomorrow" in question was 1960. Of course, since, as political columnist Jack Germond taught us, "The future is never a straight-line projection of the present," it was a 1960 with the Great Depression over, but with World War II not having happened. President Franklin D. Roosevelt offi...

Thomas Woodrooffe April 30, 1938: The Football Assocation Cup Final is held at Wembley Stadium in West London. Both teams are from the North of England. Huddersfield Town, of West Yorkshire, had won the Football League in 1924, '25 and '26; finished 2nd in 1927, '28 and '34; won the FA Cup in 1922; and lost in the Final in 1920, '28 and '30. So they were a team that had seen greatness recently. But Preston North End, of Lancashire, had the greater history. In 1888, they reached the FA Cup Final. The following season, 1888-89, was the 1st season of the Football League, and they went unbeaten in 22 games, 18 wins and 4 draws, earning them the nickname "The Invincibles." As the League season was lengthened, there has only been one "Invincibles" since, the 2003-04 Arsenal team that had 26 wins and 12 draws in 38 games. Preston also won the FA Cup in 1889. Thus, in the 1st season that it was possible, they won the League and the Cup, which became...

April 30, 1938: Porky's Hare Hunt , a Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoon, premieres. It's 8 minutes long, black & white, and a virtual remake of Porky's Duck Hunt , in which Porky Pig, the stuttering character who would become more famous with his signoff of Looney Tunes cartoons, "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" pursued a duck. That film is considered the debut of Daffy Duck. Porky's Hare Hunt is considered the debut of what became Warners' most famous cartoon character, Bugs Bunny. According to Chase Craig, who wrote and drew the first Bugs Bunny comic Sunday pages and the first Bugs comic book, "Bugs was not the creation of any one man; however, he rather represented the creative talents of perhaps five or six directors and many cartoon writers including Charlie Thorson. In those days, the stories were often the work of a group who suggested various gags, bounced them around and finalized them in a joint story conference." Porky...