Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball game played between two opposing teams who take turns batting and fielding. The game proceeds when a player on the fielding team, called the pitcher, throws a ball which a player on the batting team tries to hit with a bat; the objectives of the offensive team are to hit the ball into the field of play, to run the bases—having its runners advance counter-clockwise around four bases to score what are called "runs". The objective of the defensive team is to prevent batters from becoming runners, to prevent runners' advance around the bases. A run is scored when a runner advances around the bases in order and touches home plate; the team that scores the most runs by the end of the game is the winner. The first objective of the batting team is to have a player reach first base safely. A player on the batting team who reaches first base without being called "out" can attempt to advance to subsequent bases as a runner, either or during teammates' turns batting; the fielding team tries to prevent runs by getting batters or runners "out", which forces them out of the field of play.
Both the pitcher and fielders have methods of getting the batting team's players out. The opposing teams switch forth between batting and fielding. One turn batting for each team constitutes an inning. A game is composed of nine innings, the team with the greater number of runs at the end of the game wins. If scores are tied at the end of nine innings, extra innings are played. Baseball has no game clock. Baseball evolved from older bat-and-ball games being played in England by the mid-18th century; this game was brought by immigrants to North America. By the late 19th century, baseball was recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball is popular in North America and parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, East Asia in Japan and South Korea. In the United States and Canada, professional Major League Baseball teams are divided into the National League and American League, each with three divisions: East and Central; the MLB champion is determined by playoffs. The top level of play is split in Japan between the Central and Pacific Leagues and in Cuba between the West League and East League.
The World Baseball Classic, organized by the World Baseball Softball Confederation, is the major international competition of the sport and attracts the top national teams from around the world. A baseball game is played between two teams, each composed of nine players, that take turns playing offense and defense. A pair of turns, one at bat and one in the field, by each team constitutes an inning. A game consists of nine innings. One team—customarily the visiting team—bats in the top, or first half, of every inning; the other team -- customarily the home team -- bats in second half, of every inning. The goal of the game is to score more points than the other team; the players on the team at bat attempt to score runs by circling or completing a tour of the four bases set at the corners of the square-shaped baseball diamond. A player bats at home plate and must proceed counterclockwise to first base, second base, third base, back home to score a run; the team in the field attempts to prevent runs from scoring and record outs, which remove opposing players from offensive action until their turn in their team's batting order comes up again.
When three outs are recorded, the teams switch roles for the next half-inning. If the score of the game is tied after nine innings, extra innings are played to resolve the contest. Many amateur games unorganized ones, involve different numbers of players and innings; the game is played on a field whose primary boundaries, the foul lines, extend forward from home plate at 45-degree angles. The 90-degree area within the foul lines is referred to as fair territory; the part of the field enclosed by the bases and several yards beyond them is the infield. In the middle of the infield is a raised pitcher's mound, with a rectangular rubber plate at its center; the outer boundary of the outfield is demarcated by a raised fence, which may be of any material and height. The fair territory between home plate and the outfield boundary is baseball's field of play, though significant events can take place in foul territory, as well. There are three basic tools of baseball: the ball, the bat, the glove or mitt: The baseball is about the size of an adult's fist, around 9 inches in circumference.
It wound in yarn and covered in white cowhide, with red stitching. The bat is a hitting tool, traditionally made of a solid piece of wood. Other materials are now used for nonprofessional games, it is a hard round stick, about 2.5 inches in diameter at the hitting end, tapering to a narrower handle and culminating in a knob. Bats used by adults are around 34 inches long, not longer than 42 inches; the glove or mitt is a fielding tool, made of padded leather with webbing between the fingers. As an aid in catching and holding onto the ball, it takes various shapes to meet the specific needs of differ
National Football League
The National Football League is a professional American football league consisting of 32 teams, divided between the National Football Conference and the American Football Conference. The NFL is one of the four major professional sports leagues in North America, the highest professional level of American football in the world; the NFL's 17-week regular season runs from early September to late December, with each team playing 16 games and having one bye week. Following the conclusion of the regular season, six teams from each conference advance to the playoffs, a single-elimination tournament culminating in the Super Bowl, held in the first Sunday in February, is played between the champions of the NFC and AFC; the NFL was formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association before renaming itself the National Football League for the 1922 season. The NFL agreed to merge with the American Football League in 1966, the first Super Bowl was held at the end of that season. Today, the NFL has the highest average attendance of any professional sports league in the world and is the most popular sports league in the United States.
The Super Bowl is among the biggest club sporting events in the world and individual Super Bowl games account for many of the most watched television programs in American history, all occupying the Nielsen's Top 5 tally of the all-time most watched U. S. television broadcasts by 2015. The NFL's executive officer is the commissioner; the players in the league belong to the National Football League Players Association. The team with the most NFL championships is the Green Bay Packers with thirteen; the current NFL champions are the New England Patriots, who defeated the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LIII for their sixth Super Bowl championship. On August 20, 1920, a meeting was held by representatives of the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles at the Jordan and Hupmobile auto showroom in Canton, Ohio; this meeting resulted in the formation of the American Professional Football Conference, a group who, according to the Canton Evening Repository, intended to "raise the standard of professional football in every way possible, to eliminate bidding for players between rival clubs and to secure cooperation in the formation of schedules".
Another meeting was held on September 17, 1920 with representatives from teams from four states-Akron, Canton and Dayton from Ohio. The league was renamed to the American Professional Football Association; the league elected Jim Thorpe as its first president, consisted of 14 teams. The Massillon Tigers from Massillon, Ohio was at the September 17 meeting, but did not field a team in 1920. Only two of these teams, the Decatur Staleys and the Chicago Cardinals, remain. Although the league did not maintain official standings for its 1920 inaugural season and teams played schedules that included non-league opponents, the APFA awarded the Akron Pros the championship by virtue of their 8–0–3 record; the first event occurred on September 26, 1920 when the Rock Island Independents defeated the non-league St. Paul Ideals 48–0 at Douglas Park. On October 3, 1920, the first full week of league play occurred; the following season resulted in the Chicago Staleys controversially winning the title over the Buffalo All-Americans.
On June 24, 1922, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League. In 1932, the season ended with the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans tied for first in the league standings. At the time, teams were ranked on a single table and the team with the highest winning percentage at the end of the season was declared the champion; this method had been used since the league's creation in 1920, but no situation had been encountered where two teams were tied for first. The league determined that a playoff game between Chicago and Portsmouth was needed to decide the league's champion; the teams were scheduled to play the playoff game a regular season game that would count towards the regular season standings, at Wrigley Field in Chicago, but a combination of heavy snow and extreme cold forced the game to be moved indoors to Chicago Stadium, which did not have a regulation-size football field. Playing with altered rules to accommodate the smaller playing field, the Bears won the game 9–0 and thus won the championship.
Fan interest in the de facto championship game led the NFL, beginning in 1933, to split into two divisions with a championship game to be played between the division champions. The 1934 season marked the first of 12 seasons in which African Americans were absent from the league; the de facto ban was rescinded in 1946, following public pressure and coinciding with the removal of a similar ban in Major League Baseball. The NFL was always the foremost pro
Ernie Nevers
Ernest Alonzo Nevers, sometimes known by the nickname "Big Dog", was an American football and baseball player and football coach. Regarded as one of the best football players in the first half of the 20th century, he played as a fullback and was a triple-threat man known for his talents in running and kicking, he was inducted with the inaugural classes of inductees into both the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963. He was named in 1969 to the NFL 1920s All-Decade Team. Nevers played four sports for Stanford University from 1923 to 1925 and was a consensus first-team All-American in football in 1925, he played professional football in the National Football League for the Duluth Eskimos in 1926 and 1927 and the Chicago Cardinals from 1929 to 1931. In 1929, he set an NFL record. Nevers played professional baseball as a pitcher for the St. Louis Browns of the American League from 1926 to 1928 and the Mission Bells of the Pacific Coast League in 1928 and 1929.
Nevers had a long career as a football coach, including stints with Stanford, the Chicago Cardinals, Lafayette and the Chicago Rockets. Nevers parents and Mary Ann Nevers, were immigrants to the United States from New Brunswick, Canada. In addition to Ernie, they had one daughter. By the time Nevers was born, the family had moved from New Brunswick to Willow River, where Nevers was born in 1902; the family moved again to Superior, where Nevers grew up and attended Central High School. In 1920, the family moved to a ranch and fruit farm in the Rincon Valley section of Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, California. Nevers graduated from Santa Rosa High School where he was a star athlete, he led the Santa Rosa football team to the NCS championship. In 1921, Nevers was the star of the school's football team. In a game against Petaluma, he kicked six extra points and a field goal. In 1922, Nevers enrolled at Stanford University, he played for the freshman football team at fullback and halfback in the fall of 1922.
As a sophomore, Nevers became a star for the 1923 Stanford varsity football team. He was described as "a sweet punter and a general all-around backfield star" and "the backbone of the Stanford offense."In the final game of the 1923 season, the dedication game for California Memorial Stadium, Nevers gained more yards than the entire California team. After the game, the Los Angeles Times wrote: "The desperate drive of Ernie Nevers... will go down in history as one of the greatest individual efforts seen on a gridiron."At the end of the 1923 season, Nevers was selected by the United Press as the first-team All-Pacific Coast fullback. He was selected by Walter Camp as the third-team fullback on the 1923 College Football All-America Team. After the 1923 football season was over, Never demonstrated his overall athletic ability by starring for Stanford's basketball and track teams, he was rated as the Pacific coast's best player in both football and basketball, the best college pitcher, one of the leading track performers, "a crack swimmer" as well.
In April 1924, Stanford's assistant director of physical education, Harry Maloney, called Nevers "a freak genius" who excelled in the classroom. As a junior, Nevers was sidelined for most of the football season after suffering two broken ankles. Under head coach Pop Warner, the 1925 Stanford football team won the Pacific Coast Conference championship with a 7–0–1 record in the regular season before losing to Notre Dame and the famous Four Horsemen backfield in the 1925 Rose Bowl. Five days after having a cast removed from one of his ankles, Nevers played all 60 minutes of the Rose Bowl, averaged 42 yards on his punts, carried the ball 34 times for 114 yards, only 13 yards less than all the Four Horsemen combined. Nevers again proved to be a multi-sport star, competing for Stanford's basketball and baseball teams in the winter and spring of 1925. A newspaper account from February 1925 stated that he was "pressing for honors as the best all around athlete in the annals of the west." During the summer of 1925, Nevers worked for the Starrett Meat Company in Guerneville and pitched for the town's baseball team.
As a senior and Pop Warner led the 1925 Stanford football team to a 7–2 record. At the end of the 1925 season, Nevers was a consensus All-American, receiving first-team honors from, among others, the All-America Board, the Associated Press, Collier's Weekly, the International News Service, Liberty magazine, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, Athlete & Sportsman magazine. In December 1925, Nevers received between $25,000 and $35,000 to play professional football for a team in Jacksonville, Florida. Nevers' team played two exhibition games against NFL opponents: the Chicago Bears, led by Red Grange, on January 2, the New York Giants on January 9. However, meager crowds forced the team to fold after only two games. After his first venture with professional football ended, Nevers joined the St. Louis Browns of Major League Baseball, he appeared in 12 games, 11 as a pitcher, for the 1926 Browns, compiling a 2–4 win-loss record and a 4.46 earned run average in 74-2/3 innings pitched. At the plate, he had a.185 batting average in 27 at bats.
Nevers threw the ball in an unusual underhand delivery. On August 13, 1926, in the highlight of Nevers' 1926 season, he pitched a complete game victory over the Detroi
Basketball
Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular court, compete with the primary objective of shooting a basketball through the defender's hoop while preventing the opposing team from shooting through their own hoop. A field goal is worth two points, unless made from behind the three-point line, when it is worth three. After a foul, timed play stops and the player fouled or designated to shoot a technical foul is given one or more one-point free throws; the team with the most points at the end of the game wins, but if regulation play expires with the score tied, an additional period of play is mandated. Players advance the ball by bouncing it while walking or running or by passing it to a teammate, both of which require considerable skill. On offense, players may use a variety of shots -- a dunk, it is a violation to lift or drag one's pivot foot without dribbling the ball, to carry it, or to hold the ball with both hands resume dribbling.
The five players on each side at a time fall into five playing positions: the tallest player is the center, the tallest and strongest is the power forward, a shorter but more agile big man is the small forward, the shortest players or the best ball handlers are the shooting guard and the point guard, who implements the coach's game plan by managing the execution of offensive and defensive plays. Informally, players may play three-on-three, two-on-two, one-on-one. Invented in 1891 by Canadian-American gym teacher James Naismith in Springfield, United States, basketball has evolved to become one of the world's most popular and viewed sports; the National Basketball Association is the most significant professional basketball league in the world in terms of popularity, salaries and level of competition. Outside North America, the top clubs from national leagues qualify to continental championships such as the Euroleague and FIBA Americas League; the FIBA Basketball World Cup and Men's Olympic Basketball Tournament are the major international events of the sport and attract top national teams from around the world.
Each continent hosts regional competitions for national teams, like FIBA AmeriCup. The FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup and Women's Olympic Basketball Tournament feature top national teams from continental championships; the main North American league is the WNBA, whereas strongest European clubs participate in the EuroLeague Women. In early December 1891, Canadian James Naismith, a physical education professor and instructor at the International Young Men's Christian Association Training School in Springfield, was trying to keep his gym class active on a rainy day, he sought a vigorous indoor game to keep his students occupied and at proper levels of fitness during the long New England winters. After rejecting other ideas as either too rough or poorly suited to walled-in gymnasiums, he wrote the basic rules and nailed a peach basket onto a 10-foot elevated track. In contrast with modern basketball nets, this peach basket retained its bottom, balls had to be retrieved manually after each "basket" or point scored.
Basketball was played with a soccer ball. These round balls from "association football" were made, at the time, with a set of laces to close off the hole needed for inserting the inflatable bladder after the other sewn-together segments of the ball's cover had been flipped outside-in; these laces could dribbling to be unpredictable. A lace-free ball construction method was invented, this change to the game was endorsed by Naismith; the first balls made for basketball were brown, it was only in the late 1950s that Tony Hinkle, searching for a ball that would be more visible to players and spectators alike, introduced the orange ball, now in common use. Dribbling was not part of the original game except for the "bounce pass" to teammates. Passing the ball was the primary means of ball movement. Dribbling was introduced but limited by the asymmetric shape of early balls. Dribbling was common by 1896, with a rule against the double dribble by 1898; the peach baskets were used until 1906 when they were replaced by metal hoops with backboards.
A further change was soon made, so the ball passed through. Whenever a person got the ball in the basket, his team would gain a point. Whichever team got; the baskets were nailed to the mezzanine balcony of the playing court, but this proved impractical when spectators in the balcony began to interfere with shots. The backboard was introduced to prevent this interference. Naismith's handwritten diaries, discovered by his granddaughter in early 2006, indicate that he was nervous about the new game he had invented, which incorporated rules from a children's game called duck on a rock, as many had failed before it. Frank Mahan, one of the players from the original
Black panther
A black panther is the melanistic color variant of any big cat species. Black panthers in Asia and Africa are leopards, those in the Americas are jaguars. Melanism in the jaguar is conferred by a dominant allele, in the leopard by a recessive allele. Close examination of the color of these black cats will show that the typical markings are still present, but are hidden by the excess black pigment melanin, giving an effect similar to that of printed silk; this is called "ghost striping". Melanistic and non-melanistic animals can be littermates, it is thought that melanism may confer a selective advantage under certain conditions since it is more common in regions of dense forest, where light levels are lower. Preliminary studies suggest that melanism might be linked to beneficial mutations in the immune system. Frequency of melanism appears to be 11% over the species range. Data on the distribution of leopard populations indicates that melanism occurs in five subspecies in the wild: Javan leopard, African leopard, Indian leopard, Indochinese leopard, Sri Lankan leopard, has been documented in two other subspecies: Arabian leopard and Amur leopard in captivity.
Black leopards are common in the equatorial rainforest of the Malay Peninsula and the tropical rainforest on the slopes of some African mountains such as Mount Kenya. Melanistic leopards are common in Java, are reported from densely forested areas in southwestern China, Myanmar and Nepal, from Travancore and some parts of southern India where they may be more numerous than spotted leopards. In North Africa, dark leopards have been reported in the Atlas Mountains. A black leopard was reported from the alpine zone of Mount Kenya. Black leopards occur in Kenya's Aberdare Mountains and in Ethiopia. Unconfirmed reports of black leopards exist in South Africa and in northern Iran. Based on records from camera-traps, melanistic leopards occur foremost in tropical and subtropical moist forests. In 2019, a black leopard was recorded in Kenya's Laikipia County; the taxonomic status of captive black leopards and the extent of hybridization between different subspecies is uncertain. Therefore, coordinated breeding programs for black leopards do not exist in European and North American zoos.
Black leopards occupy space needed for breeding of endangered leopard subspecies and are not kept within the North American Species Survival Plan. A pseudo-melanistic leopard has a normal background color, but the spots are more densely packed than normal and merge to obscure the golden-brown background color. Any spots on the flanks and limbs that have not merged into the mass of swirls and stripes are unusually small and discrete, rather than forming rosettes; the face and underparts are dappled like those of ordinary spotted leopards. In jaguars, the melanism allele is dominant. Black jaguars may produce either black or spotted cubs, but a pair of spotted jaguars can only produce spotted cubs. Individuals with two copies of the allele are darker than ones with just one copy, whose background colour may appear to be dark charcoal rather than black; the black jaguar was considered a separate species by indigenous peoples. English naturalist W. H. Hudson wrote: The jaguar is a beautiful creature, the ground-colour of the fur a rich golden-red tan, abundantly marked with black rings, enclosing one or two small spots within.
This is the typical colouring and it varies little in the temperate regions. They scout the notion that their terrible "black tiger" is a mere melanic variation, like the black leopard of the Old World and the wild black rabbit, they regard it as wholly distinct, affirm that it is larger and much more dangerous than the spotted jaguar. Naturalists have been obliged to make it one with Felis onca, the familiar spotted jaguar, when stripped of its hide, it is found to be anatomically as much like that beast as the black is like the spotted leopard. A black jaguar named "Diablo" was inadvertently crossed with a lioness named "Lola" at the Bear Creek Wildlife Sanctuary in Barrie, Canada. There are no authenticated cases of melanistic cougars. Melanistic cougars have never been photographed or killed in the wild, none have been bred. Unconfirmed sightings, known as the "North American black panther", are attributed to errors in species identification by non-experts, by the mimetic exaggeration of size.
Black panthers in the American Southeast feature prominently in Choctaw folklore where, along with the owl, they are thought to symbolize Death. In his Histoire Naturelle, French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, wrote of the "Black Cougar": M. de la Borde, King’s physician at Cayenne, informs me, that in the Continent there are three species of rapacious animals.
Swimming (sport)
Swimming is an individual or team sport that requires the use of one's entire body to move through water. The sport takes place in open water. Competitive swimming is one of the most popular Olympic sports, with varied distance events in butterfly, breaststroke and individual medley. In addition to these individual events, four swimmers can take part in either a freestyle or medley relay. A medley relay consists of four swimmers; the order for a medley relay is: backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle. Swimming each stroke requires a set of specific techniques. There are regulations on what types of swimsuits, caps and injury tape that are allowed at competitions. Although it is possible for competitive swimmers to incur several injuries from the sport, such as tendinitis in the shoulders or knees, there are multiple health benefits associated with the sport. Evidence of recreational swimming in prehistoric times has been found, with the earliest evidence dating to Stone Age paintings from around 10,000 years ago.
Written references date from 2000 BC, with some of the earliest references to swimming including the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible, the Quran and others. In 1538, Nikolaus Wynmann, a Swiss professor of languages, wrote the first book about swimming, The Swimmer or A Dialogue on the Art of Swimming. Swimming emerged as a competitive recreational activity in the 1830s in England. In 1828, the first indoor swimming pool, St George's Baths was opened to the public. By 1837, the National Swimming Society was holding regular swimming competitions in six artificial swimming pools, built around London; the recreational activity grew in popularity and by 1880, when the first national governing body, the Amateur Swimming Association was formed, there were over 300 regional clubs in operation across the country. In 1844 two Native American participants at a swimming competition in London introduced the front crawl to a European audience. Sir John Arthur Trudgen picked up the hand-over stroke from some South American natives and debuted the new stroke in 1873, winning a local competition in England.
His stroke is still regarded as the most powerful to use today. Captain Matthew Webb was the first man to swim the English Channel, in 1875. Using the breaststroke technique, he swam the channel 21.26 miles in 45 minutes. His feat was not replicated or surpassed for the next 36 years, until T. W. Burgess made the crossing in 1911. Other European countries established swimming federations; the first European amateur swimming competitions were in 1889 in Vienna. The world's first women's swimming championship was held in Scotland in 1892. Men's swimming became part of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens. In 1902, the Australian Richmond Cavill introduced freestyle to the Western world. In 1908, the world swimming association, Fédération Internationale de Natation, was formed. Women's swimming was introduced into the Olympics in 1912. Butterfly was developed in the 1930s and was at first a variant of breaststroke, until it was accepted as a separate style in 1952. Competitive swimming became popular in the 19th century.
The goal of high level competitive swimming is to break personal or world records while beating competitors in any given event. Swimming in competition should create the least resistance in order to obtain maximum speed. However, some professional swimmers who do not hold a national or world ranking are considered the best in regard to their technical skills. An athlete goes through a cycle of training in which the body is overloaded with work in the beginning and middle segments of the cycle, the workload is decreased in the final stage as the swimmer approaches competition; the practice of reducing exercise in the days just before an important competition is called tapering. Tapering is used to give the swimmer's body some rest without stopping exercise completely. A final stage is referred to as "shave and taper": the swimmer shaves off all exposed hair for the sake of reducing drag and having a sleeker and more hydrodynamic feel in the water. Additionally, the "shave and taper" method refers to the removal of the top layer of "dead skin", which exposes the newer and richer skin underneath.
This helps to "shave" off mere milliseconds on your time. Swimming is an event at the Summer Olympic Games, where male and female athletes compete in 16 of the recognized events each. Olympic events are held in a 50-meter pool, called a long course pool. There are forty recognized individual swimming events in the pool; the international governing body for competitive swimming is the Fédération Internationale de Natation, better known as FINA. In open water swimming, where the events are swum in a body of open water, there are 5 km, 10 km and 25 km events for men and women. However, only the 10 km event is included in the Olympic schedule, again for both women. Open-water competitions are separate to other swimming competitions with the exception of the World Championships and the Olympics. In competitive swimming, four major styles have been established; these have been stable over the last 30–40 years with minor improvements. They are: Butterfly Backstroke
