Maybe not quite in the same category, but I’ve always meant to read more about Ramanujan.
I suspect certain elements of the story may frequently be exaggerated in the retelling, but in some respects he certainly seems to have responded to a relatively chance influence to burst out of nowhere to become a relatively major player.
Another hard to believe sports achievement–the New York Mets winning the World Series in 1969. Before that, the Mets had never even come close to a .500 season and considered it a major achievement to avoid finishing in last place (like they barely had in 1968). The franchise had also only been around since 1962 and nobody in the pre-free agent era expected a team that new to suddenly become competitive let alone win the World Series.
The one that gives me chills is what happened on September 26, 1983. Russian Colonel Stanislav Petrov assumed his post in a nuclear command bunker. Some sources say he filled in for a superior that night. The Cold War was at its height and recent incidents had pushed U.S. - Soviet tensions almost to a breaking point. The movie War Games had come out earlier in the year reminding Americans what could happen if any systems indicated a nuclear launch from either side. The only defense against nuclear strikes was a strict MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) policy. If either side launched any nuclear weapons at all a complete volley would initiate and wipe out much of the civilized world within the hour.
Just past midnight, the Soviet early warning systems detected an incoming nuclear strike from the United States. Colonel Petrov’s orders were to contact superiors to begin retaliatory launches and probably start World War III. However, he was a rational man and they had seen minor systems glitches in the past. He also reasoned that there was no way that the U.S. would launch just one missile. Suddenly, the early warning systems detected another launch and another and another. All procedures and systems indicated that the U.S. had just initiated WWIII and it was now his job to carry out his part of the MAD strategy.
He wouldn’t do it. He still refused to believe that the U.S. would be so stupid so he told those under his command to stand down and abandon their nuclear command procedures. A little while later, the blips were supposed to hit the Soviet Union but they didn’t just like in the movie War Games. It was all a systems glitch probably caused by solar activity.
The world was supposed to end that day but one man saved it because he refused to believe that people could be so stupid.
Read The Man Who Never Was by Ewen Montagu. It details British Naval Intelligence’s “Operation Mincemeat” which convinced the Nazis that the Allies were going to invade Sardinia rather than Sicily.
They did this by procuring a dead body, dressing him as a Major, planting on his body all of the usual junk people carry around in their pockets, chaining a briefcase with fake ‘secret plans’ to his wrist, and dumping him (from a submarine) into the Mediterranean off Spain with some aircraft debris.
Because of the great care they took with the details and by just the right ‘official response’ from the British Embassy in Spain, the Germans bought the whole story and moved huge numbers of troops away from the actual invasion target.
I would have found a fiction story along these lines to be less than believeable.
Absolutely. That was a thing of beauty. However, I’d still give Boise St. the nod by virtue of the fact that the guy who scored the winning two-point conversion in OT then ran over and asked his girlfriend, the head-cheerleader, to marry him.
Man landing on the moon and returning safely.
Argh! I tried to post Operation Mincemeat for thirty minutes and kept getting timed out!
How about Kim Jong IL’s eleven hole-in-ones in his first round of golf he ever played? That’s impressive.*
OK, how about a 5 foot tall Finnish soldier recording over 500 sniper kills using a late 30’s Russian knockoff rifle with an iron scope in freezing conditions over the one-year long Winter War?
*[sub]According to North Korean publications. :)[/sub]
Here are a few
Kurt Warner and his rise to fame as a QB
The book/movie Alive
The 1972 Olympic gold medal Basketball game
Josiah Harlan,
Also, for sheer badassness it’s hard to beat this guy…
That was the first game in a long, long time that I was jumping up and down screaming. Three trick plays to win it, all perfectly executed.
The Long Walk documents the story of six people who escaped a Siberian gulag, walked across Siberia, the Gobi Desert, and the Himalayas, to freedom in India. I think 4 of the 6 made it.
To be a bit of a downer, I remember thinking on 9/11 that it seemed just like a sequence of events out of a bad thriller. But if I’d read it in a thriller, it wouldn’t have seemed plausible.
This would be a fairly mundane topic for fiction (a book about a really really successful author of children’s fantasy books?), but the totally unprecedented success of the Harry Potter franchise would certainly seem implausible were it not in fact real.
Been awhile since I read it but I only remember two of them making it.Interesting thing about that book, the guy who wrote it was going to write a book about yetis and interviewing people who claimed to have seen them which led him to the main guy from The Long Walk and realized he had quite the story so he wrote The Long Walk instead of his yeti book.
Darn, you beat me to it. Watch the movie with the mindset that it’s fiction and you’ll find yourself going, “Oh, puhleeeze!” more than a few times.
The Onion agreed.
Sir Francis Drake had a pretty remarkable series of adventures, from circumnavigating the globe, defeating the Spanish armada, and sacking Spain.
The saga recounted in Band of Brothers, especially the seige of Bastionge.
I finished the Patrick O’Brian novels a while back and thought I’d read about Jack’s idol, Lord Nelson. I was prepared to be disappointed by the comparison, but Lord Nelson had more guts than any fictional hero I’ve ever read about.
The biography was Nelson: Love and Fame, by Edgar Vincent. It was a thrilling read.
Sorry to be a spoilsport but it turns out Rawicz’s story may have contained a lot more fiction than fact. I’m guessing this lingering doubt about the veracity of “The Long Walk” is also the reason why nobody’s ever filmed it despite the fact that the story (if true) would be tantalizingly ripe subject for a movie.
I disagree; fantasy’s popularity with the public has historically cycled on an orbit, and the Harry Potter books arrived at just about the time that it should have been cycling back into the public consciousness. If it hadn’t been them, it would have been another franchise.