When a rookie Magic Johnson “replaced” an injured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in an NBA (basketball) finals match, he didn’t really play Kareem’s center position most of the time. (Magic normally played point guard, which is generally considered “furthest” from center, in skills and in average height. However, Magic was unusually tall for a point guard, and was capable of “posting up,” a skill more common to centers but not unheard of among point guards. These days, such muddling of traditional positions would seem even less remarkable, thanks to almost-all-positions players like LeBron James.)
Don Denkinger’s blown call at first in the bottom of the 9th in Game 6 of the 1985 World Series. A lot of Cardinals fans remember that the blown call lost game 6 for St Louis, when in fact it would have only been the first out of the inning.
Henry Cooper v Muhammad Ali - 1963 in London, one of the most famous knockdowns in boxing when Cooper properly sits Ali down with a left hook right at the end of the fourth round. Beats the count, but is still on Queer St as he returns to his stool.
Widely held belief in the UK that what saved the fight for Ali is Dundee making a small tear in Ali's gloves much bigger, meaning new gloves had to be fetched and the intervening time period (minutes) allowing Ali to recover. He then stopped Henry on cuts in the fifth. Have heard this said many times, but it's a myth, albeit a murky one. Dundee did in fact do this with the gloves, but it only resulted in a very slight delay (seconds) and wasn't a factor in the result. Ali proved throughout his career that he could shake off the hardest of shots.A lot of Cowboys fans act as if the referee’s failure to call pass interference on Deion Sanders in the fourth quarter of the 1994 NFC Championship Game cost Dallas the victory. In fact the Cowboys were trailing by 10 points at the time.
That Gazza cried after getting a red card in the Italia 90 semi final. He didn’t get a red, he got a yellow. He cried because it would have meant he would miss the final if England went on to win the game.
Also that a Denis Law back-healed goal relegated United in 1974. It was irrelevant, they would have been down anyway.
You’d think the announcer repeatedly shouting, “THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!!” would have been a clue. 
Maybe some people heard SERIES!
Like that Yanny/Laurel thing. 
This is an interesting one, and in the spirit of this thread, I believe. So, in the Seattle case, Seattle had 3 downs (attempts) to score remaining. However, due to how little time was remaining in the game and the peculiarities of timekeeping in American football, Seattle had to pass on either the current (second) down, or the following (third) down. So the argument goes that if Seattle had ran on second down and failed to score, then their opponents would have known that they would be passing on third down, which would be a minor advantage. It’s an argument that I’m sympathetic to, personally. A lot of people say flat-out that passing in that situation was stupid, but I disagree.
However, Seattle completely screwed the pooch here by (a) using a formation that they could only pass out of, not run, taking the element of surprise off of the table, (b) choosing a pass play with a higher chance of a (game-losing) interception than other potential plays and (c) choosing a pass play that they had ran over and over and over again in similar situations in the past, against a coach who is legendary for his preparation. New England, as it turns out, had been drilled on exactly how to recognize and defend against the precise play that Seattle ran, leading to the disastrous outcome.
The greatest tennis match of all time was Federer vs. Nadal at the 2008 Wimbledon. It’s almost non-debated at this point. Both men, probably the top two of all time, at their very best.
However:
Very few people talk about the 2009 Australian Open final that took place 5-6 months later. A rematch between the two and honestly, it’s almost an equal. Uh…it might have been its equal or even better.
If you want to see two titans of a sport at their absolute top form, watch the Australian Open final from 2009. Less interruptions due to weather and an absolute beast of a match. In fact, it may be the true greatest tennis match of all time.
Federer was in tears, genuine tears, after the match. It was amazing and brutal.
The equivalent time-killer play in the 1970’s was quarterbacks “falling on the ball”. The quarterback would take the snap, take a step back from center, and flop down on top of the ball in a fetal position. The baffling thing about the Pisarcik play is that he didn’t fall on the ball; he attempted a handoff in a situation where, quite obviously, none was necessary.
At some point in the 1980’s, QB’s switched from “falling on the ball” to the modern kneeldown, where the quarterback simply drops a knee and waits for the whistle to blow. I don’t know of any particular reason for this switch; falling on the ball and kneeling down are both perfectly safe and I know of no case in which a quarterback has botched either one. The important point, relative to Pisarcik, is that QB time-killers (first flopping, then kneeling, with no handoff) were always the preferred strategy for running out the clock–before, during, and after the Miracle at the Meadowlands. The Miracle was a Miracle because the Giants inexplicably failed to use the preferred strategy.
At some point–if you say it was 1987, I believe you–the kneeldown was “enhanced” by running it from “Victory Formation” with a deep back to guard against fumble returns. This was inspired, I suppose, by the memory of the Miracle, even though by that time it was almost a decade in the past. But it’s quite unnecessary; the QB would have to be incredibly incompetent to fumble a kneeldown (unlike the Miracle, which involved an attempted handoff).
The original Stephen Jay Gould article about the false memory of the Bill Buckner incident (in a 2000 issue of Natural History) is paywalled, but is well described in his obituary in SI.
And yet, it still happens sometimes.
That’s different; that’s a fumbled snap on an ordinary play. That will happen sometimes because the quarterback is trying to execute the play before he secures possession of the ball.
On a kneeldown, it’s just take the snap and do nothing. I’ve never seen, or heard of, a QB fumbling the snap in that situation.
I’ve heard it as being a World Series homer from younger people who weren’t there and I think just assumed because of its monicker it was a World Series play by later generations.
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Something else that is frequently misremembered about this inning was the ground ball to Gonzalez. The grounder was likely hit too slowly for him to be able to start a double play. A forceout at second base was the more likely outcome. Thom Brenneman (the Fox broadcaster) acknowledged this right after the play. Yet I hear people say so often that he botched a certain double play ball.
Another thing people misremember is, that game against Finland was not a “gold medal game”; had it ended in a tie or a Finland win, the USSR would have won the gold medal. This would have led to a lot of headscratching had that game been a tie, as the USA and USSR would have had the same number of points (USA would have been 1-0-2; USSR, 2-1-0) and most people in the USA probably would have thought, “Isn’t the first tiebreaker head-to-head?”
Early 80s … NBA game… Celtics vs Hawks, everyone seems to remember Danny Ainge biting Tree Rollins’ finger during a fight.
but Tree bit Ainge.
But Boz didn’t make the tackle. It isn’t a tackle once the play is over, and the 2 yds he got was after direct contact with Boz, both men kept moving, Bo forward, and Boz backwards.
But yeah, he did not drive him through the end zone, as many seem to think.
Rene Higuita - colourful goalkeeper for the Columbian national team in the 90s, is remembered for pulling off an outrageous scorpion kick to save a wayward cross against England in a friendly match. What is less remembered, is that the linesman had raised his flag for offside so the ball was dead, rendering the save meaningless [as far as that game goes, Higuita has dined out on it for 25 years].
What is up for debate is whether Higuita clocked the flag, so pulled out his party piece knowing there was nothing at stake. Or whether he hadn’t noticed and was awesome enough just to do it anyhow.
Scorpion kick, but linesman not visible
Not sure if this counts. Before Carlton Fisk hit his walk-off homer in the 12th inning of Game 6 of the 1975 Series, Bernie Carbo had tied the game in the 8th with a pinch-hit, three-run homer. On the pitch just before, he looked awful, swinging at a ball in the dirt.
