I want to hear any and all CT’s you have either read about and found interesting, heard about in a conversation with others, or have made up in your own mind for fun.
You can talk about the probability of any CT being true if you’d like, but I don’t want anyone taking this too seriously or calling someone an idiot for posting something that you personally think is crazy. Have some fun with these.
What am I looking for? Here are some examples.
It has been widely suggested and rumored that the NBA rigged the lottery in 1985 for the NY Knicks to get Patrick Ewing. - this has been around since 1985, and you can find a lot of opinions on it.
Another -
Babe Ruth supposedly missed a few weeks of the 1925 season because he had an STD.
I heard this one a long time ago, and have no idea if it is well known.
A current one -
The NFL contacted the St.Louis Rams and asked them to draft Michael Sams so the league would not have a homophobic label attached to it. The Rams made sense because Missouri is the state that Sams played his college football in, so he has a lot more support there than in other cities.
I have a few more but I will save them for future posts if this thread has any life.
-I heard once that Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth’s feud really started due to Gehrig’s wife was drinking in Ruth’s cabin on a cruise. Apparently Gehrig was a very jealous man. I also heard Ruth used cocaine…not sure how true this is.
-Ty Cobbs mother was found not guilty of killing her husband but I think she was having an affair and she shot her husband when he was sneaking into the house to try and catch her.
Don Shula helped throw Super Bowl III, which gave the AFL instant credibility. Shula’s reward? He was given every break possible to give his Dolphins their perfect season in 1972.
The AFL-NFL merger had already been announced. What better way to prove to the fans of pro football that the merger was going to be a success and the leagues were on equal footing than to have the AFL’s New York team win the first Super Bowl for an AFL franchise? (The Chiefs beat the Vikings the following year, making the official AFL-NFL Super Bowl tally 2 wins for each league.)
The Colts were a juggernaut in 1969 and were heavily favored. Shula should have been a laughing stock for losing that game, especially since the Colts were 13-1 heading into the playoffs that year, and beat the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL Championship Game. But instead, he takes the Dolphins job 2 years later, and in 1972 the Dolphins go undefeated.
All the embarrassment Shula suffered for being the coach of the first NFL team to choke against an AFL team was erased with his perfect season, something he STILL won’t shut up about.
And how perfect was it that the first AFL team to beat an NFL team in the Super Bowl were the Jets in 1969, the team in the largest market in both the AFL and NFL, and the team with the most difficult task going up against the established Giants of the NFL in the same market. And don’t forget, the Jets had arguably the biggest, most marketable star in either league in Joe Namath.
That one game changed the course of the NFL forever.
If the Colts would have won like they were supposed to, Namath is not raised to his mythical, god-like status, and the AFL limps into the merger with the more powerful NFL.
Stink Fish Pot made up some of the details, but he’s right- there have long been conspiracy theories about the Colts throwing SUper Bowl 3. COlt fans who still remember Earl Morrall throwing an interception while Jimmy Orr was wide open in the end zone are tempted to believe that.
Colts lineman Bubba Smith believed the rumors, and helped spread them (even though he himself underachieved in the game!). And the rumors were helped along by the mysterious drowning of former Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom (he eventually swapped the Colts for the Rams; his widow, Georgia Frontiere, inherited the Rams).
Rosenbloom’s death led to all kinds of conspiracy theories, about him being killed by the Mob for gambling debts or to keep him quiet about SUper Bowl 3.
Conspiracy theorists have long insisted that Michael Jordan’s 2 year hiatus from the NBA after the death of his father was actually a suspension- that Jordan was suspended from the game due to his ties to gamblers and Mafiosi (under this theory, the Mob killed Jordan’s father for non-payment of debts).
One conspiracy theory that may have some validity: the 1951 New York Giants made a big comeback, capped by Bobby Thomson’s famous homer, to win the National League pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The theory (which certainly has some basis in fact) is thta the Giants had an elaborate system of stealing signs… meaning Thomson may have been cheating when he hit his homer.
I’m neither SA nor NZ and everything I have read on both sides of that suggests that it actually happened, which lifts it clear of “theory” in my book.
astorian, thanks for posting this. I had heard the “Colts throwing Super Bowl III” idea, but as you correctly pointed out, I made up all the details in my post.
The play you speak of when Morrall threw the interception while Orr was famously waving for the football is usually pointed to as “proof” that something was wrong that day. I had never heard what you posted, though. I did not know that Rosenbloom’s death was ever considered mysterious.
In the first Liston vs. Clay fight, Clay was blinded in the 5th round by a foreign substance. Some people have speculated that Liston’s corner rubbed something on his gloves to purposely blind Clay.
In the classic Aaron Pryor vs Alexis Arguello fight, between the 13th and 14th round, Pryor’s trainer Panama Lewis told the other cornerman, “Give me the other bottle, the one I mixed,” and Pryor drank from that bottle. When round 14 started, Pryor seemed reinvigorated and battered Arguello to win a TKO. There’s long be a lot of speculation about what may have been in that bottle.
FIFA loves the kind of money the United States can bring in but is afraid of the US becoming too good at men’s soccer. So every four years there are all sorts of terrible calls in favor of the other team (things like blatant diving and terrible offsides calls) that piss off the casual American soccer fan in order to keep the US from contending beyond the group stage.
This one is interesting, especially after I saw a show that focused on this theory for the entire program.
Ralph Branca, the man who threw the pitch, obviously believes Thomson had a tip, and he makes an interesting case.
The first pitch was apparently right over the plate. The second pitch, (the one Thomson hit out of the park) was high and tight, and Thomson tomahawks it. Branca feels like Thomson knew what pitch he was throwing, and was aggressively swinging at it, no matter where it was pitched. It sure looks like that is possible in the replays, but who knows?
Thomson, even if he DID get a tip, still had to hit it, and the pitch was not an easy pitch to hit period, yet alone hit a home run with.
Thomson of course denies knowing anything. He needs to, because it would (in his mind, anyway) taint the one thing he is known for. But if I remember correctly, one of his own Giant teammates admitted the sign stealing system and explained how signals were sent from the outfield to the batter.
Brett Favre allowed himself to get sacked so Michael Strahan could break the single season record. Everyone assumes it’s true but as far as I know Farve has never said it happened that way.
In truth, I don’t know if Rosenbloom’s death really WAS “mysterious.” He drowned while swimming at a Southern California beach and I have no particular reason to suppose his death was anything but an accident (some accounts suggest he had a heart attack while swimming).
But to people who were already suspicious about Super Bowl 3, this was only another “eerie coincidence.”
