November 30th, 2008 12:33am
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As a rookie out of Abilene Christian, Clint Longley came off the bench to replace an injured Roger Staubach on Thanksgiving Day 1974 and rallied the Dallas Cowboys from a 16-3 third-quarter deficit to a 24-23 win over the Washington Redskins. His performance included a game-winning 50-yard touchdown pass to Drew Pearson in the closing seconds.
Why does Longley come to mind? Well, Abilene Christian isn’t exactly a football factory. And …
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November 29th, 2008 04:08am
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That was a popular bumper sticker in Boston in the 1970s, and it spoke to a city’s love fest with Bobby Orr, who revolutionized the hockey position of defenseman and helped transform the Bruins from an NHL also-ran to Stanley Cup champions. A recent news item about Orr, now 60, being on hand for a ceremony in which his old junior hockey team in Oshawa, Ontario, retired his number brought …
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November 28th, 2008 02:57pm
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The Detroit Lions have lost all 12 games they’ve played in the 2008 regular season and have a shot at becoming the NFL’s first team to lose all its games in a season since the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of 1976, who went 0-14. The Raiders of 1962 seemed certain to finish 0-14 but they went out and did something astounding: They won their final game.
The Lions looked particularly bad on …
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November 27th, 2008 04:27pm
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Jimmy Connors’ fiery, competitive temperament served him well when he was a top-ranked tennis player and eight-time Grand Slam champion in the 1970s and early ’80s. But now that same personality trait has gotten him arrested for causing a disturbance at a UC Santa Barbara basketball game after a confrontation with another spectator and not vacating the premises when directed to do so by campus police.
Connors and John McEnroe, of …
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November 26th, 2008 03:44pm
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For those of us who grew up when the Detroit Lions’ traditional Thanksgiving Day game was played outdoors and the opponent was always the Green Bay Packers, the 1962 game nourishes the memory.
The Packers came into the game with a 10-0 record and had beaten the Lions earlier in the year, 9-7. The Lions came in with an 8-2 record, their two losses by a combined five points. The crowd …
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November 25th, 2008 05:40pm
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It’s not farfetched at this point in the season to imagine a N.Y. Giants-N.Y. Jets Super Bowl, which would pit two teams from the same metropolitan area in the NFL championship game for the first time.
In the 27 years the NFL championship game was played when Chicago had both the Bears and the Cardinals (1933-59), those teams never matched up. The Bears certainly did their part during that span, getting …
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November 25th, 2008 02:32am
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When Darren McFadden scored on a 1-yard run in the third quarter Sunday in the Raiders’ 31-10 win at Denver, it broke a streak of 15 quarters without an offensive touchdown. But the argument here is that the Raiders’ 12 consecutive scoreless quarters in 1981 represent a more severe drought. Here’s why.
Unlike this year, when we all know the Raiders are awful, in 1981 they were defending Super Bowl champions. …
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November 24th, 2008 01:49pm
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Mike Martz of the 49ers might be the highest-profile offensive coordinator in the NFL, but he’s got a long way to go to outperform a previous Mike who was SF’s offensive coordinator. That would be Mike Shanahan, now in his 14th year as head coach of the Denver Broncos. From 1992 through 1994, Shanahan helped the 49ers produce offensive numbers that still, to this day, are jaw-dropping awesome.
The 49ers’ offensive …
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November 24th, 2008 02:58am
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Florida State safety Myron Rolle and Parker Goyer, a former player on the Duke women’s tennis team, are the latest athletes to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship, generally considered the most prestigious postgraduate academic honor in the world. The news reminded some old-time fans of a couple of other true scholar athletes, a rare breed: Bill Bradley and Pat Haden.
Bradley was the NCAA basketball player of the year at Princeton …
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November 23rd, 2008 01:42am
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The Warriors’ recent trade of Al Harrington to the New York Knicks for Jamal Crawford is intriguing, no doubt about it. But for old-time Warriors fans, when it comes to trades, the blockbuster of 21 years ago is hard to beat.
That’s when the Warriors sent 7-foot center Joe Barry Carroll (much maligned, with some justification, as an underachiever) and guard Sleepy Floyd to the Houston Rockets for 7-foot-4 Ralph Sampson, …
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Robert Rubino has been a daily copy editor for nearly 30 years and a weekly sports columnist for 15 years. 
