The city of Birmingham, England is home to two major association football (soccer) teams: Birmingham City F.C. (nicknamed “the Blues”), and Aston Villa F.C. (nicknamed “the Villans” and “the Lions”).
Aston Villa is currently a member of the Premier League (the highest level of English football), while Birmingham City is currently in the EFL Championship, having been relegated down from the Premier League after the 2010-11 season.
In the United States of America, the Superbowl is the most-watched show with all the performances from the world’s biggest artists. It is the finale of the NFL games and attracts one of the biggest audiences when it comes to sports, their lowest audience so far is 39.1 million, and the highest being 114.4 million. These audiences are from the US since the competition originates from there, but on the global level, the Champions League has more attention, with the 2018 game attracting about 380 million people. The Superbowl is a huge advertising platform, with brands paying about $4.5 million for a 30-second slot during halftime alone. The champion’s league, however, reserves slots for the brands that committed to the whole tournament as sponsors.
Up With People performed in five Super Bowl halftime shows, although the first time they were not the headliners, the Southeast Missouri Marching Band and Anita Bryant were.
Here’s a video of the 1982 halftime show. The highlight (?) is the crowd joining the performers in a rousing rendition of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”
In play:
The first Super Bowl was known as the AFL-NFL Championship Game, played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in January of 1967. The Green Bay Packers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10. The game was televised by both NBC (which had the rights to AFL games), and CBS (which had the rights to NFL games.) Al Hirt was the featured performer at the halftime show.
Max McGee was a star wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, under coach Vince Lombardi. By the 1966 season, however, McGee was 34 years old, and no longer a starter – he caught only 4 passes during the regular season that year.
When the Packers were set to play the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFL-NFL Championship Game that season, McGee didn’t expect to play, and so, he went out and partied for the entire night prior to the game. The next morning, a hung-over McGee remarked to Boyd Dowler (one of the Packers’ starting receivers), “I hope you don’t get hurt. I’m not in very good shape.” Dowler wound up being injured early in the game, forcing the hung-over, unprepared McGee into the lineup; McGee responded by catching seven passes for 135 yards and two touchdowns.
In Game Five of the 1997 NBA Finals, Michael Jordan led the visiting Chicago Bulls to a 90-88 victory over the hometown Salt Lake City Jazz. Jordan claimed he had the flu, and was “almost dehydrated” and felt like he couldn’t breathe. In later accounts, Jordan claimed he was stricken with food poisoning, and blamed it on a pizza he ate the night before. The restaurant that sent over the pizza denies this, and no one but Jordan ate that pizza.
Not in play. That game is known as the Michael Jordan flu game.
In play.
The NBA 75 Team is the 75th anniversary of the NBA. 75 topmost players were selected.
ESPN stack ranked the top 10:
No. 1: Michael Jordan
No. 2: LeBron James
No. 3: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
No. 4: Magic Johnson
No. 5: Wilt Chamberlain
No. 6: Bill Russell
No. 7: Larry Bird
No. 8: Tim Duncan
No. 9: Oscar Robertson
No. 10: Kobe Bryant
“Do You Believe in Magic?” was the first single released by the Lovin’ Spoonful and became a top-ten hit, jump starting their career.
Notable fictional practitioners of magic include Circe, Merlin, Glinda, Gandalf, Dumbledore, Rincewind and Harry Dresden, among others.
The original Broadway cast of the musical Wicked included Idina Menzel as Elphaba, Kristin Chenoweth as Galinda/Glinda, Joel Grey as the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Carole Shelley as Madame Morrible.
Wicked Strong is an American Thoroughbred racehorse, a contender in the 2014 Kentucky Derby. He finished fourth in both the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes before winning the Jim Dandy Stakes.
Jim Dandy was mostly a forgettable racehorse, whose racing career began in 1929. He won two of his nine starts that year, but started the next year with 10 consecutive losses. The horse was entered in the Travers Stakes, which featured Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox. The favorite went off at 1-2, while Jim Dandy had odds of 100-1. But a heavy rain turned the track into a quagmire, and Jim Dandy pulled off the major upset, winning the race by eight lengths.
Jim Dandy would never win another stakes race, retiring at the age of 12 with a record of just seven wins in 141 races. In his last four seasons of racing, he never finished in the top three in any race.
Silver Blaze was a famous but fictional British racehorse in the Sherlock Holmes short story of the same name. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle admitted after the story’s publication that he didn’t know much about horse-racing, and probably made enough mistakes to be warned away from every racetrack in the country.
Silver Blaze is the origin of this exchange:
A blaze on a horse is a white stripe that goes down the middle of the face.
The genus Equus, of which the horse is a member, originally evolved in North America. However, these animals became extinct about 10,000 years ago. It wasn’t until 1493 that horses returned to the continent, brought by Christopher Columbus to Hispaniola on his second voyage. The first horses who came to the mainland United States arrived in 1519, brought by Herman Cortes.
Hispaniola is an island in the Greater Antilles chain in the Caribbean Sea. The island is divided into two separate nations: the Dominican Republic, and the Republic of Haiti.
The term “republic” comes from Latin, res publica, which can be translated as “the public thing”.
New Republic is a thoroughbred horse born in Australia in 2018. Race horse New Republic is by Dissident (sire; AUS) out of Apprise (dam; AUS). His dam sire is Redoute’s Choice (AUS).