I always said, “This guy better parlay this into something big, quick, because no one will remember or care about him in 6 months”. Anybody care to guess? How about speed-skater Apollo Ono?
Gets spanked by the Korean for the gold medal, and nobody wanted that to happen, so lets just DQ the Korean! God, that was embarrassing!
And where is he now?
While I agree with the above calls, I remember two incredibly bad calls in NCAA football.
Ok vs Ok State. I don’t care about either team, so I’m unbiased. This was back when Jimmy Johnson coached OSU and they had either Thurman Thomas or Barry Sanders at TB. Ok punts. The OSU return man runs way in front of the ball waving his hand for a fair catch. The ball lands twenty yards behind him. Ok downs the ball by jumping on it. The regs rule it a fumble and give the ball to Ok.
This is the game in which I started hating Notre Dame more than Miami. In this case, I was routing for ND. I believe this occurred in the 80’s, but it may have been the early 90’s. Miami has a 4th and about 1, somewhere around the 11. They hand off. The RB gains over 10 yards, and almost scores. He is tackled below the knees, so no ND player is near the ball when it comes out and the ball is in plain view. He stretches out as he goes down and the ball pops out as it hits the ground. The correct call would have been Miami first and goal. Instead, they rule that the RB fumbled and that it is ND’s ball. The Miami coaches successfully argue that the ground can’t cause a fumble. (That’s a first all by itself!) So, the refs give the ball to ND on downs!!!
A few more involving the Michigan Wolverines football team:
–The “one more second” that Michigan State got to score the winning TD a few years ago.
–1979 Rose Bowl, USC’s Charles White fumbles on the three yard line and Michigan recovers. But wait, in USC Bizarro World, this is a touchdown for the Trojans!
–1990 Rose Bowl. In Bo Schembechler’s last game as Michigan coach, Michigan fakes a punt with the score tied in the fourth quarter and picks up a first down. But wait…we can’t have Michigan win this game! Must make a bogus holding call (the USC defender who was supposedly held admitted it was a horrible call). The play is called back, Bo throws a fit and draws an additonal unsportsmanlike conduct flag, USC takes over and scores the winning TD.
–1973, Michigan and Ohio State play to a 10-10 tie and end up tied for the Big Ten championship. The Big Ten athletic directors vote to send OSU to the Rose Bowl, with the no-good so and so from East Lansing casting the deciding vote.
Any event in which USC gets screwed up the poop shoot is okey-dokey in my book.
Sticking with Pac-10 football, I was in the end zone–the Stanford fans’ end zone–during the 1982 Big Game in Berkeley, which ended on the craziest college football play ever, the 5-lateral “The Play”. There were penalty flags thrown, forward laterals, dogs and cats living together . . . and the play stood as called.
I’m not too worked up about it now because I ended up attending another Pac-10 school which counts Cal, Stanford, and USC as its despised in-state rivals. But it still ranks as one of the most amazing things I will ever see on a sporting field.
The last race of the '94 season at Suzuka… Schumacher leads the championship by 1 point from Damon Hill, and is leading the race when he loses it and breaks his front suspension on a barrier. His race is clearly finished; he coasts along the side of the track a few feet and Hill comes up to overtake. Schumacher steers into Hill, knocking him out of the race and winning himself the driver’s title.
And the FIA does… nothing. Schuey gets his first championship; Hill gets screwed.
Worst call ever, though- Lewis v. Holyfield I. Lewis dominated that fight for all but one round, and they called it a draw. Utterly ridiculous… Larry Merchant and Jim Lampley threw replica heavyweight title belts into the trash to express their disgust at the non-decision. If I had one, I would have too.
The rational person in me wants to tell myself that we still had Game 7 to win the '85 Series, and Game 7 was blown by some horrific managing decisions by Whitey. But ask any Cards fan about 1985, and watch how calmly and rationally they answer you. 
In the late Seventies, Muhammad Ali was clearly outpointed on a regular basis, but kept his title almost every time. In fact, I was astonished when Leon Spinks was given the decision in their first match, because even though Spinks was clearly the winner, je didn’t beat Ali as decisively as Ken Norton, Earnie Shavers, or (especially) Jimmy Young did.
Ali didn’t just lose to Jimmy Young, he lost in embarrassing fashion. Young was a mere journeyman fighter, but he jabbed Ali at will, making Ali look as slow and feeble as the young Ali used to make other fighters look.
Of course, the boxing establishment knew which side their bread was buttered on, and there was no way they were going to take the title from a proven box office draw like Ali and hand it to a nobody like Young. That was outrageous enough. But MORE outrageous was the media reaction. I remember clearly that Spoirts Illustrated said, essentially, "Yes, Ali lost, but that’s no reason to take his title away. " (Believe me, I am NOT exaggerating- that’s almost EXACTLY what SI wrote!)
I wonder if the manure-for-brains writer who put out that drivel looks at Ali today, and regrets what he wrote. MAYBE, just maybe, if Ali had lost the fights he plainly deserved to lose, he’d have retired sooner and saved some of his brain cells. Instead, judges and sportswriters lied to the public. Worse still, they lied to Ali. They told him that he was still “the Greatest” and that he should keep on fighting, long after he should have packed it in.
Proud of yourselves now, judges? Proud, SI?
I’m voting for this one, as it was clearly a deliberate screwing rather than a mere screwup.
I just have to second this. Still sticks in my craw after all these years…
Don’t tell Dennis Erickson or a Seattle Seahawks fan that game wasn’t all that meaningful. Because of that “touchdown”, the Jets won the game, the Seahawks missed the play-offs, and–at season’s end–Erickson was fired as coach.
We have a joke in Spartan country: What’s the difference between a puppy and a Wolverine? Eventually the puppy stops whining.
Things even out. Didn’t the Wolverines benefit from a terrible call against Illinois a few years ago? Michigan State was a victim of a clock mishap themselves- remember the NCAA BB game in Kemper Arena vs. Kansas?
This is more of a tangent and I really don’t watch sports (I’ll play, I’ll even shag balls but I won’t sit down in front of the tube), but if I mentioned Art Modell’s name, how many Browns fans would still want to hit somebody? My wife’s family is from Ohio, and I’m sure that Modell’s pulling out of Cleveland still ranks as their biggest sports bullshit moment.
As much as this one-time Browns fan would like to agree, “Tiger” Irsay and the Midnight Mayflower vans in Baltimore trump anything Modell did.
I’d include the pine tar call on George Brett on the list, except that it got reversed by cooler heads.
I’d also not ignore all the other times Schumacher punted drivers who had the temerity to think they could beat him - Villeneuve, Frentzen, just look at the entire 1998 season for examples. It’s almost a pity that he’s finally grown up into a bore, not an ass - it’s harder to hate him anymore.