Scores On This Historic Day

Walter Eckersall November 30, 1905: The Championship of college football's Western Conference -- forerunner of the Big Ten -- is decided at Marshall Field in Chicago, named for the department store mogul who funded its construction. It becomes the 1st of many college football games referred to as "The Game of the Century." The University of Chicago, coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg, came into the game at 10-0. They had allowed only 5 points all season, in a 16-5 win over Indiana. They had scored 44 points against Illinois, 42 each against Iowa and Beloit College, 33 against Lawrence University, and 32 against Northwestern. They were led by Walter Eckersall, and, while quarterback was a very different position at the time, with the forward pass not legalized until the next season, he was widely regarded as the best player in the country.  Stagg, later to be known as "The Grand Old Man of Football," called Eckersall "a selfless performer, marked by complete dedi...

November 30, 1899: The first women to serve, in uniform, in the armed forces of any nation began service as part of the Canadian Militia Expeditionary Force to Cape Town to serve in the Boer War. Georgina Pope and three other women are enlisted as army nurses. As Patrick Robertson notes, "There was nothing new about female nurses serving in the military; they had done so in numerous campaigns since the Revolutionary War, but in every instance as civilian auxiliaries." And, in many examples throughout recorded history, women have fought in armies, navies, and even on pirate ships, disguised as men. Cecily Jane Georgina Fane Pope was born on January 1, 1862, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and trained as a nurse at New York's famed Bellevue Hospital. Placed in command of the first group of nurses to go overseas, she served for more than a year in South Africa. For the 1st 5 months, she and 4 other volunteer nurses served at British hospitals north of Cape Town.  A...

Artist's depiction. England in white, Scotland in blue. November 30, 1872: For the 1st time, soccer teams representing the best players in their respective countries play each other. As comedian Jason Sudeikis asked, when introducing the character of Ted Lasso, an American football coach who'd gotten a job coaching an English "football" (soccer) team, "How many countries are there in this country?" By "this country," he meant the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The answer is four: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- with the Republic of Ireland, since 1921, being its own nation, not in the United Kingdom. Charles Alcock, a soccer and cricket star of the era, had organized the 1st FA Cup in England the preceding year, and had also organized matches between teams representing the football associations of both his native England and Scotland. But these were matches between English players and Scottish players for te...

November 29, 2012: To paraphrase Boromir in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings : One does not simply blow an 11-point 2nd-half lead at home and lose, on national television, and still call oneself Conference Co-Champions. It is folly. With fifty thousand men, you could not do this. Rutgers University had played the 1st college football game in 1869, and won it -- and they hadn't done a damn thing since. That was an exaggeration, but not much of one. They had undefeated seasons in 1961 and 1976, but both came as independents, not as members of a conference. And, in so doing, they played what was, before such a classification became official, a schedule full of NCAA Division I-AA (now Football Championship Subdivision, or FCS) teams. It was only in the wake of not getting a bowl big despite going undefeated in 1976 that they decided on what was then called "bigger-time football," scheduling whatever Division I-A (now Football Bowl Subdivision, of FBS) team was willing ...

November 29, 1992: The New York Jets lose 23-7 to the Kansas City Chiefs at Giants Stadium – and nobody cares. The reason is the injury to Jet defensive tackle Dennis Byrd, the result of a freak accident on the field. Dennis DeWayne Byrd was born on October 5, 1966 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He grew up in Mustang, Oklahoma, played defensive end at the University of Tulsa (the Golden Hurricane), and was drafted by the New York Jets in the 2nd round of the 1989 NFL Draft. On November 29, 1992, Byrd was enjoying a modest, not particularly noteworthy career when he took the field against the Kansas City Chiefs at Giants Stadium.  Byrd and teammate Scott Mersereau attempted to sack Chiefs quarterback Dave Krieg, but Krieg got away, resulting in a collision between the Jet defenders. Byrd's helmet hit Mersereau straight in the chest, compressing Byrd's neck and breaking a bone in his neck the C-5 veretbra. This was 1 year and 1 day after Detroit Lions guard Mike Utley had broken hi...

November 29, 1981: Natalie Wood dies of a drowning at age 43, on Santa Catalina Island, California. She was born on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, as Natalie Zacharenko. Not yet 8 years old, she starred as Susan Walker in the original 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street . She played troubled teenagers in Rebel Without a Cause and The Searchers . She moved into musicals, starring in West Side Story in 1961 and Gypsy the next year. Being Russian, she didn't make a convincing Puerto Rican in West Side Story , and Marnie Nixon did her singing for the film. So, for Gypsy , she insisted on doing her own singing, and she was fine. I'd still like to know how Gypsy , a film about strippers, got past the Hays Code. Not to mention her 1964 film Sex and the Single Girl , based on the memoir of Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown. By 1969, the Code was gone, and she was able to star as Carol alongside Robert Culp as Bob, Elliott Gould as Ted, and Dyan Cannon as Alice i...

November 29, 1978: England, trying to rebound from not qualifying for the last 2 World Cups or Euro 76, defeats Czechoslovakia, winners of Euro 76, 1-0 at the old Wembley Stadium in London. Steve Coppell of Manchester United scores the goal. Vivian Alexander "Viv" Anderson of Nottingham Forest starts at right back, making him the 1st black player to start for the England senior national football (soccer) team. Paul Reaney of Leeds United had appeared as a substitute in a 1968 England match, making him the 1st black player for the side. However, he was mixed-race, and was light-skinned enough that he rarely faced racial abuse, and many fans didn't even realize that he was black, so that Anderson frequently got full credit later. Vivian Alexander Anderson was born on July 29, 1956 in Nottingham. He helped the Forest team, managed by Brian Clough, win the Football League and the League Cup in 1978, and the European Cup in 1979 and 1980. In 1984, he was sold to Arsenal, and ...