In April of 1989, Mike Tyson received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. ‘‘Mike demonstrates that hard work, determination and perseverance can enable one to overcome any obstacles,’’ said Arthur Thomas, the school’s president, who cited the heavyweight champion’s influence on young people.
Mike Tyson voiced himself in the cartoon, Mike Tyson Mysteries. He solved mysteries with the help of his adopted daughter and the ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry, who codified the rules of boxing. He also had an alcoholic pigeon.
Future President of the United States Gerald Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. His mother Dorothy Gardner left his father when he was abusive towards her and threatened them both with a knife. Her second husband was named Gerald Ford; he never formally adopted his stepson, but the name change was made official when the young man was 23.
Gerald Ford was a star center and linebacker on the University of Michigan football team in the 1930s. After graduating, Ford received offers to play in the NFL, from both the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, but turned them down, to become a full-time coach at Yale University (he coached boxing and football), while applying at Yale Law School, from which he received his law degree in 1941.
The Detroit Lions have appeared in 82 games played on Thanksgiving Day (US), compiling a record of 37-43-2. Next are the Dallas Cowboys with a record of 31-22-1 in 54 games. Green Bay and Chicago have played in 37 games, 20-15-2 and 15-20-2 respectively. Tampa Bay and Cincinnati are the two winless teams with 0-1 records, while the Jacksonville Jaguars have never played on Thanksgiving Day.
Fritz Pollard was the first African-American player in the NFL, in 1920. No other African-American players were signed for the NFL until 1946.
Unlike Gerry Ford, Byron White played for two different NFL teams, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Detroit Lions, before also attending Yale Law School. White went on to be Deputy Attorney General of the United States under Kennedy, and then was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Like Byron White, Alan Page played for two different NFL teams, the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears. Page earned his BA degree from Notre Dame, and, while still playing pro football, graduated from Law School in Minnesota in 1978. After retiring from football, he practiced law and was appointed to the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1993, serving until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2015.
Page was the first defensive player in NFL history to win the MVP award. Only Lawrence Taylor has won it as a defensive player since Page.
Alan Alda played a moderate U.S. senator, Arnold Vinick, on the last few seasons of The West Wing. A Republican of California, Vinick nearly won the show’s presidential election of 2006. He lost to Jimmy Smits’s character, U.S. Rep. Matt Santos (D-Texas), who named him Secretary of State.
Alan Page, Carl Eller, Jim Marshall, Gary Larsen, and Doug Sutherland were members of the 1968-1977 Minnesota Vikings’ fearsome defensive line. The nickname came from a popular 1958 song “The Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley.
Sheb Wooley later did some acting. One role he played was in Hoosiers (1986) where he played the high school principal who hired his old friend, the coach Norman Dale played by Gene Hackman who, by the way, served in the Marine Corps in 1946-1951.
Here is Corporal Gene Hackman, USMC:
Hoosiers is very loosely based on “The Milan Miracle,” the story of the 1954 Milan High School basketball team, which won the state championship on a last-second shot by Bobby Plump. Milan also made it to the state championship game in 1953. The town of Hickory is fictional, and is based off New Richmond, Indiana, a town of 333 in Montgomery County. The town has multiple signs paying homage to its fictional name, including, “Welcome to New Richmond, AKA ‘Hickory,’ movie Hoosiers filmed here 1985”. New Richmond’s downtown was used for the town scenes in the movie.
A modified version of the Indiana state flag appears as the City of Gotham flag in the first Batman movie (1989), directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger.
In the ‘semi-state’ round of the 1954 Indiana state basketball tournament, Milan played Crispus Attucks High School from Indianapolis. Attucks was led by sophomore guard and future hall-of-famer Oscar Robertson. Milan won the game 65-52 and went on to win the state title.
Attucks went 31-1 the next season and won the state tournament, the first for any all-black school in the country. The following season, 1956, Attucks went 31-0 and won its second straight state title, becoming the first team in Indiana to post an undefeated record. Attucks set a state record by winning 45 consecutive games.
Crispus Attucks was a sailor and stevedore from Massachusetts, who is traditionally regarded to have been the first person killed during the Boston Massacre in 1770, and thus, one of the first American casualties in the Revolutionary War.
Attucks has become an icon of Black history in the U.S., though it is generally believed that he was of mixed race, and at least part Native American.
Boston Massacre victim and early patriot hero Crispus Attucks was honored with a one-dollar silver commemorative coin struck by the U.S. Mint in 1998.
The Boston Marathon bombing was a domestic terrorist attack that took place during the annual Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. Brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted two homemade pressure cooker bombs, which detonated near the finish line of the race 14 seconds and 210 yards apart. Three people were killed and hundreds injured, including 17 who lost limbs.
The Turko-Mongol warrior Timur, also known as Tamerlan, is regarded as one of the greatest military leaders and tacticians in history, as well as one of the most brutal. The playwright Christopher Marlowe wrote a successful play, Tamburlaine the Great, loosely based on his life, in 1588, inspiring Shakespeare’s historical dramas.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane”, a poem written when he was 22, is based more on Poe’s experience of lost love than on the historical record. It shows the ambitious title character rejecting his beloved, a peasant girl. On his deathbed, he regrets this decision to create “a kingdom [in exchange] for a broken heart”.
One famous scene in Tamburlaine has him entering in a chariot drawn by two Asian kings, with bits in their mouths, and him holding the reins and whipping them:
John DeLancie, who has played the morally ambiguous, superpowerful alien Q in various versions of Star Trek since 1987, has likened the character to the British poet Lord Byron, of whom it was said he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
John de Lancie is also known as the voice of Discord in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. de Lancie was connected to a project to create a documentary on Bronies, adult fans of the show.