Former Michigan Wolverine Tom Brady is appearing in his fifth Super Bowl.

Fielder’s kid comes to town and Inge cries foul
The Tigers pulled the rabbit out of the hat, signing their “Prince,” Mr. Fielder” for $214 million dollars. This signing does a few things. First, Brandon Inge is “not a happy camper”. This according to Jim Leyland at the press conference unveiling the Prince. Who the hell cares if Brandon Inge is upset? He’s a 180 hitter. Never has a .180 hitter received so much attention. Can he make this team? I guess when you have the Prince and Cabrera you can “carry” a guy who really hasn’t belonged in the big leagues for more than a few years. We were fed up with Inge a few years ago, when he returned from an injury and stated (and I paraphrase): “they can’t win without me.” Inge can stop this whining any time. Most people are tired of it. Leyland said he has to hit to make our team. He got lucky. Now he just has to mop up for Cabrera when the Tigers are leading in a game. All Inge is trying to do is position himself to get a Tiger job in the organization when he more than likely is released or quits. Want some advice, Brandon? Just do as they say, stay quiet as a mouse, and they will get you a ring. There’s nothing like that ring!

The third base situation
Cabrera may not be Brooks Robinson at third base, but who would you want to play there, a guy who hits over .300 with power or a guy who hits .180? No brainer, huh? By the way, Cabrera has great hands, has played first base like a gold glover, and with his athleticism, the big guy can play the position. Cabrera is going to boot a few more than likely, but he won’t boot so many that he will cost the Tigers the division.

Prediction for 2012
I am going to also tell you that the Tigers are “LOCKS” for their division. They could have the division tied up by the end of May, that is how potent they are at this time. The Tigers start the season with everyone they picked up last year and all are healthy with the exception of Victor Martinez, who may not be ready to play next year cause he needs at least two operations now for his injuries. They’ll miss him, but not half as much as they would have had Fielder not arrived on the scene.

Stafford and the Pro Bowl flap
There has been a lot of complaining about the fact that Matthews Stafford failed to make the NFL All Pro team. Folks, in the interests of all of us who are pulling for the Lions after these past 55 years, let’s only have him play in games that count. The Lion QB has been hurt a couple times already, and let’s not allow him to do anything stupid like playing in an All-Star Game, especially the way that they play the Pro Bowl. The game is purely an exhibition, no one is putting out at a 100%, and when you are not playing 100%, just kind of going through the motions, injuries have a tendency to occur. If he stays healthy and gets some help on the offensive line, he could pit up Tom Brady numbers, and possibly – if he stays healthy – do things that no one around here ever thought about.

Super Bowl XLVI and Brady’s place in history
How can you not bet on Tom Brady? If he wins this one, he becomes without argument the greatest QB of all time, in my opinion. You know his stats, he is all everything, and he promised his owner that he would play better in the Super Bowl than he did in the last playoff game. The most amazing feat of his career is how he takes mediocre players and makes them great and sustains that greatness while they are catching his pinpoint passes. If he leads the Patriots to victory in Super Bowl XLVI, don’t be too surprised if he retires on top. He has been one hell of a gladiator, and a gladiator with super intelligence, that is what makes him so different from all of the others. I’m not saying that Eli Manning hasn’t been a great QB, but he is more the working man’s QB than Brady. Tom kind of sits back there and just does it smoothly and quickly. Eli kind of “works” at it on every play, but he too has been great this post-season. I think it will be a 38 -27 game in favor of New England, who have too many weapons and experience for the Giants. Plus, they have Tom Brady!

A future Hall of Famer, Bennie Friedman was an early football star in Detroit.

This is part 2 of Richard Bak’s series on professional football in Detroit in the 1920s. Read Part 1 here.

After the collapse of the Heralds/Tigers, Detroit had to wait another four years, until 1925, before the National Football League returned to the city.

The Panthers were owned, coached, and quarterbacked by Jimmy Conzelman of St. Louis. The energetic Conzelman, one of pro football’s true pioneers, paid all of $50 to the NFL as a franchise fee and arranged to lease Navin Field for $1,000 a game. That was a healthy rent in 1925, and Conzelman immediately looked for ways to induce locals to come down to The Corner. He managed to interest Notre Dame’s famous “Four Horsemen” backfield in playing the 1925 season in Detroit.

As part of their contract, they agreed to perform skits and a clog dance on stage while their coach played the piano. Unfortunately for Conzelman, the proposed vaudeville act fell apart when one of the Horsemen, his nostrils evidently flaring at the smell of greasepaint, decided to take a job with the recreation department in Davenport, Iowa.

On another occasion, Conzelman vigorously promoted an upcoming game featuring Red Grange and the Chicago Bears. People turned out in droves to buy tickets to see the famous “Galloping Ghost.” But Grange suffered a leg injury and pulled out of the game. “A few hours before the game was to start,” Conzelman said, “I looked out the window and saw a long line at the box office. I remember thinking to myself, ‘What a great sports town. Grange isn’t going to play, but they’re still lining up to buy tickets.’ Then I got the news from the ticket man. They were lining up to get refunds.”

Famous names like Jim Thorpe, George Halas, and Curly Lambeau visited Navin Field during the Panthers’ two autumns at Navin Field. The Panthers’ lineup was heavy with local sandlotters and ex-collegiate stars, including the irrepressible tackle and placekicker, Gus Sonnenberg.

Sonnenberg, a stumpy, barrel-chested farm boy from Ewen, Michigan, had starred at the University of Detroit. He loved to show off by tipping over cars and yanking signposts out of cement. Like Robeson, a greater destiny awaited Sonnenberg after he left Navin Field’s gridiron. He would soon become the country’s best-known wrestler, a fixture at Olympia Arena and other venues, pulling down an estimated $1 million in ring earnings before his premature death of leukemia. The colorful Sonnenberg was dubbed “The Flying Dutchman” for a favorite football tactic that he transferred to the ring. He would leap at an opponent, wrap his arms around the fellow’s legs, then slam him to the mat.

The Panthers finished a respectable 8-2-2 in 1925. The following season they compiled a 4-6-2 record, averaging just 1,500 fans for nine home dates. Conzelman sold the franchise back to the league. “We were simply ahead of our time in Detroit,” he later reflected. “The town wasn’t quite ready for pro football.”

Two years later, in 1928, a syndicate of 20 local investors pooled $10,000 to back the third and final stab at establishing the NFL in the Motor City during the 1920s. The syndicate bought the Cleveland Bulldogs and moved them lock, stock, and jockstrap to Detroit. Coached by Roy Andrews and dubbed the Wolverines, the franchise owed its nickname, as well as its quarterback, to the University of Michigan.

Two-time All-American tailback Bennie Friedman, two years removed from U-M’s gridiron, had popularized the forward pass, regularly drawing gasps from the crowd for daring to throw the then balloon-shaped ball on first down. Sobered by Conzelman’s experience with trying to fill Navin Field, the Wolverines scheduled most of their games at the University of Detroit’s Dinan Field.

With Friedman, a future Hall-of-Famer, leading the circuit in scoring, passing yardage, and probably rushing (statistics are incomplete), the Wolverines lost only to the first- and second-place teams, finishing third with a 7-2-2 record. On Saturday, November 3, they were beaten by the Frankford Yellow Jackets, then took an overnight train from Philadelphia to Rhode Island, where they dropped a 7-0 verdict to the Providence Steamrollers on Sunday. At season’s end the Wolverines were sold to Tim Mara, owner of the New York Giants, who bought the entire team just to acquire the rights to Friedman. Each Detroit investor got back $350 of his original $500 investment.

The Wolverines did manage to set a still-standing record during their brief existence. Their .778 lifetime winning percentage is the highest of any franchise in NFL history. However, it would be another six years before local radio magnate George A. Richards brought pro football to stay in Detroit.

Before his career as a civil rights activist and actor, Paul Robeson spent one year in the 1920s playing professional football in Detroit.

Many people who believe professional football in Detroit began with the Lions are surprised to learn that the team that moved here from Portsmouth, Ohio in 1934 actually represented the fifth attempt to launch a National Football League franchise in the city.

The four previous attempts all occurred in the 1920s, a decade that saw unprecedented prosperity and population growth in Detroit – but not enough enthusiasm for college football’s weaker sister to keep any of the NFL franchises around for longer than a couple of seasons.

Pro football was a risky proposition in 1920, the year the American Professional Football Association was founded inside the showroom of a Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio. Over the next dozen years the loosely organized affiliation of mostly midwestern clubs sounded more professional than it really was. Teams made up their own schedules, statistics were sporadically kept, and the awarding of championships often was arbitrary and almost always hotly debated. The APFA, which changed its name to the National Football League in 1922, included a franchise in Detroit, the Heralds. The 1920 Heralds (re-named the Tigers in 1921) were followed by the Panthers (1925-1926) and the Wolverines (1928). All failed to attract a following large enough to ensure their survival.

The Heralds had been organized as an amateur team in 1905 by a group of University of Detroit athletes when the school temporarily dropped its football program. By World War I, the Heralds were a well-known semipro squad, having won city and state championships. They were coached by Bill Marshall and managed by John Roesink, a local merchant and sports promoter. Roesink owned the Heralds’ home venue, Mack Park, but the Heralds often leased Navin Field when larger crowds were anticipated. In 1917, for example, the Heralds drew 16,000 rooters to The Corner in a benefit game against the Fort Custer All-Stars. The Heralds also hosted Jim Thorpe and the Canton Bulldogs that year.

When the new pro league looked to put a team in one of the nation’s largest cities, the established Heralds were a natural choice. Like all clubs, the Heralds were a mix of former high school and collegiate stars and overage sandlotters. The team’s captain was Clarence “Steamer” Horning, an All-American tackle and punter from Colgate who also took an occasional turn running the ball. Players typically made between $50 and $100 a game and worked full- or part-time jobs to supplement their salary.

Detroit’s first NFL game took place on October 17, 1920, as the Heralds traveled to Chicago to take on the Chicago Tigers. A couple of botched punts led to two Chicago scores as the Tigers notched their only league victory of the season, 12-0, in front of a Sunday crowd of 5,000.

The following Sunday, October 24, the Heralds played the Columbus Panhandles in the first-ever NFL game in Detroit. Emblematic of the league’s low status was the fact that the Heralds’ tussle with their traditional rival was played at Mack Park because Frank Navin had reserved his ballpark for an amateur hurling match. The Heralds defeated Columbus, as an end named Fitzgerald returned an interception 85 yards for the only points in a 6-0 whitewash. Horning “played splendid football on defense, being in every play and stopping the Columbus ball-toters repeatedly,” observed the Free Press, which also mentioned that “A big crowd watched the contest.”

The Heralds played two more league games, both shutout losses on the road, to finish their abbreviated NFL campaign with a 1-3 record. Like other league clubs, they filled in their schedule with as many semipro games as possible.

The Heralds returned the following season with a new name, the Tigers, and snazzy new orange-and-black uniforms to replace their longtime red-and-white ones. The team had adopted the name of their baseball cousins, looking to capitalize on their popularity.

The first NFL game at The Corner was between the Tigers and Dayton Triangles on Sunday, October 9, 1921. No attendance figures were given, though the Free Press noted the game “was played under fine weather conditions and a good-sized crowd was on hand to cheer the home team, something that has been lacking in past games here.” The Tigers won, 10-7. The winning score was delivered by Tillie Voss, a familiar face around local gridirons. The former University of Detroit standout and ex-Herald end returned a blocked kick 65 yards for a touchdown.

The Tigers’ victory proved to be their only one of the campaign. The turnstiles quit spinning, management quit paying its players, and the club finally dropped out of the league with a 1-5-1 record, but not before hosting one other game of note. On October 16, the Tigers took on the Akron Pros. Akron won handily, 20-0, thanks in part to the skillful play of two black stars. One was wingback Fritz Pollard. The other was end Paul Robeson, a true Renaissance man playing his only NFL season. In years to come, the powerful and imposing orator, actor, singer, and activist would be a regular visitor to Detroit, performing in downtown theaters and participating in various civil rights causes. A hero to African Americans and white liberals in the 1940s and ‘50s, few knew that the internationally famous figure had once chased an NFL football around Navin Field for the better part of a Sunday afternoon.

Goalie Gerry Desjardins was a member of the short-lived Michigan Stags during the 1974-1975 season,

Hockey fans with long memories remember the World Hockey Association as an upstart enterprise strong on ambition and innovation but light on cash and principle. Overall play may not have approached the talent level of the National Hockey League, but individually the WHA boasted some of the sport’s greatest names during its seven seasons of existence, ranging from established stars like Gordie Howe to promising youngsters like Wayne Gretzky.

Viewed at from different angles, the WHA either was a much-needed force for change in the game–or a circus run by carpetbaggers. Winnipeg’s shocking signing of Chicago Blackhawks superstar Bobby Hull to a $2.75-million contract in 1972 had the effect of boosting artificially low salaries across the board. But with the big bucks came player agents (practically unheard of in the NHL before then) and franchise-hopping on an unprecedented scale. Between 1972 and 1979, the WHA fielded 32 teams in 24 different cities. Only four would ultimately survive.

Curiously, although Detroit has always been recognized as a hockey hotbed, the city had a WHA franchise for just a few months. In the summer of 1974, Chuck Nolton and Pete Shogun, a couple of local entrepreneurs with interests in the chemical business, bought the moribund Los Angeles Sharks. They moved the franchise to Detroit and renamed it the Michigan Stags.

The Stags, coached by ex-Wings player and coach Johnny Wilson, held its training camp at the University of Michigan’s Yost Arena. The team got little respect. A circus kept them out of their home, Cobo Arena, until the seventh game of the season. The play-by-play announcer for their inaugural game, a veteran broadcaster, was so underwhelmed by the assignment that he didn’t even bother to study the roster before going on the air. “Number 14 passes to number 8,” he told his audience. “He takes it into the corner and passes to number 16….”

The Michigan Stags quickly proved to be a disaster, financially and competitively. Attendance fell far short of what was needed for the club to break even. “I’d say they’d draw a couple of thousand a game,” recalled Jack Berry, then the hockey writer for The Detroit News. “You never had to worry about finding a parking space, I remember that.”

Defenseman Larry Johnston played three seasons with the Red Wings before signing with the Stags. “I got a little more money,” he recalled. “I thought they’d stay around for awhile. Instead it was a disaster.”

According to Johnston, the new owners didn’t realize how much money it took to operate a professional hockey team. They were strapped for cash straight out of the gate. “Hotels wouldn’t let us check in on credit, so we had to sit around in the lobby until somebody came up with the money to pay for the rooms in cash,” he said. “We’d get off an airplane and the bus driver wouldn’t take off until he was paid in advance. All of our sticks were neutrals; they’d gotten them wholesale from some place. It was all pretty sad.”

The Stags’ offense featured Marc Tardif, an accomplished scorer who had jumped from the Montreal Canadiens to Los Angeles the previous season. The 25-year-old left winger started the 1974-75 campaign with the Stags and finished it with Quebec, bagging 50 goal between the two teams. He went on to capture a couple of scoring titles in a Quebec uniform, including a WHA record 154 points in 1977-78. His point totals predictably went down when he returned to the NHL, but he was still good for 25 to 30 goals a season playing in the senior circuit. All told, he popped 510 pucks into NHL and WHA nets during his 14-year, two-league career.

Another Stag worth mentioning was a husky forward from Royal Oak named Bill Evo. The former Peterboro Pete had been selected by the Red Wings in the third round of the 1974 draft, but he opted to sign with the Stags. After five WHA seasons, including stints with Cleveland and Edmonton, he quit hockey to pursue law career. In 1995, Evo was named the Wings’ president, partially because of the experience he had gained in the WHA. Part of that experience was being informed in the middle of a road trip that the Stags’ owners had defaulted. This occurred in early 1975, when creditors caught up to the Stags in Cleveland.

“That last game they weren’t even the Stags,” Jack Berry recalled. “That night when the players trooped into Richfield Arena, they had their jerseys taken away from them.” The Stags’ red, green, and brown uniforms were replaced with generic, logo-less outfits. Afterwards, the players were free to strike their own deal. Many wound up in Baltimore, where the franchise was resuscitated as the Blades.

The Michigan-Baltimore club, which scored fewer goals and surrendered more than any other team in the league, finished with a 21-53-4 record for 46 points. Only the expansion Indianapolis Racers had a worse record. The Racers, at least, quickly turned things around and won a division title the next season. The Baltimore franchise folded.

The Stags’ owners need not have felt bad. More franchise shifts and failures followed. In four years the WHA shrank from an ambitious three-division, 14-team league to a barely breathing circuit of six clubs, four of which (Winnipeg, New England, Quebec, and Edmonton) were absorbed into the NHL for the 1979-80 season.

Asked to summarize the brief history of the World Hockey Association, Jack Berry responded: “The players weren’t as skilled as those in the NHL, but they were entertaining. It was certainly minor-league hockey. But you know what? Today, with expansion, all of those guys would be playing in the NHL.”

‘Oh, how times they have a changed!’

Today, lefties often have an advantage over their more numerically superior right-handed counterparts. In sports, lefties can use their handedness to set themselves apart, make themselves confusing to opponents, and forge long careers as specialists.

Many of the most successful athletes in history were left-handed. Babe Ruth, certainly the most famous American athlete, was a lefty. Here are five left-handers who are famous in Detroit sports lore, not just for their favored hands, but also their success and popularity.

Ty Cobb
Before the Babe, and before Detroit was known as the Motor City, Ty Cobb was baseball’s greatest ballplayer and an icon in Detroit. Cobb threw right-handed but  batted left-handed. He was never known for his arms though – his legs were his most powerful limbs – performing daring baserunning feats in the era of the deadball. From the left side of the plate, Cobb hit .367 for his career, far and away the highest mark in baseball history. Cobb loved golf, though he was never a great player on the links, and he used his left-handed clubs in his famous matches against Ruth during the 1930s.

Hal Newhouser
Though it was brief, Newhouser’s greatness surpasses all other pitchers in Tigers history, at least so far. He won two MVP Awards and topped the 20-victory mark four times in a five-year stretch from 1944-1948. Born in Detroit, “Prince Hal” was famous for his overhand curveball, which was especially difficult for left-handers to hit. Among lefties (since 1900), only Lefty Grove ever eclipsed Newhouser’s 29 wins in a season.

Terry Sawchuk
As long as he was in a Red Wings sweater, Sawchuk played brilliantly and stayed away from trouble. But when he got off the ice or went elsewhere to play for other hockey clubs, he found pain and ultimately death. The left-handed Canadian was in net for the Wings before his 20th birthday, and he won the NHL”s Rookie of the Year award after flashing brilliant reflexes in the goal. He helped lead the Wings to four Stanley Cup titles, and put up an almost impossible-to-believe total of 115 shutouts. In 1970, Sawchuck was with the New York Rangers when he got into a playful scuffle with his roommate, suffering internal injuries. After scores of injuries, many serious, over the course of his 21-year NHL career, and battles with depression, Sawchuk died days later. He was only 40 years old.

Mickey Lolich
Through a fluke accident when he was just a toddler, Lolich became a left-hander. Little Mickey tipped over a relative’s motorcycle and hurt his left arm as a result. when it came out of the cast he was forced to use it to strengthen it, and he soon became a lefty. And what a great lefty he was. growing up in Oregon, where there wasn’t a major league club to root for, Lolich idolized the Yankees and Whitey Ford. By the time he was in his 20s, Lolich was facing Ford in the big leagues. With a sharp 90-93 MPH fastball that he could buzz past the batter’s knees, Mickey was an excellent hurler for the Tigers. Of course, in the ’68 World Series, the southpaw won three games, including Game Seven on two days rest, to cement his place in Detroit lore. He still holds the career record for most strikeouts by a lefty in American League history.

Bob Lanier
In the 1970 NBA Draft, just as Sawchuk was checking out and Lolich was illuminating his star for the Tigers, Lanier was selected as the overall #1 by the Detroit Pistons. With that selection, the Pistons turned around the fortunes of the franchise, laying the groundwork for later glory. Though the left-handed Lanier never won a title with Detroit, he spent parts of ten seasons in Motown, making his signature moves in and around the basket and establishing himself as one of the NBA’s best (and most physical) big men. He brought respectability to the Pistons, and helped by his patented left-handed hook shoot from eight foot range, he amassed a 22.4 career PPG average in Detroit. Though his left hand puts Lanier on this list, he was also famous for his feet – size 22 feet – that were some of the biggest in sports history.

The Detroit Wolverines were an all-black football club that played for four seasons ending in 1922.

For much of the 20th century, most of American life was split along racial lines, forcing many black athletes in search of competition to organize their own teams and leagues. Of the handful of all-black semi-pro football teams known to exist in Detroit in the first half of the 20th century, one of the most notable was the Wolverine Athletic Association.

The Wolverines, pictured here, were organized in 1919 by two notable Detroiters: John C. Dancy and Fred Hart Williams. Dancy was the longtime director of the Detroit Urban League, established in 1918. Williams, a descendant of runaway slaves who had escaped to Detroit via the “underground railroad,” was a municipal tax clerk, journalist, and namesake of the first African-American genealogical society in Michigan. As “race men”- that is, as prominent black men intent on furthering the cause of their race – Dancy and Williams saw the Wolverines as an opportunity to teach young men the values of teamwork while also demonstrating to the world that blacks could compete on an equal footing with whites.

The Wolverines played local high school teams, factory teams, and semipro squads, as well as Wilberforce College, the historically all-black college in Ohio. Although the scores of most of these contests have been lost to time, anecdotal accounts indicate the Wolverines were high-caliber competitors; they are known to have beaten Wilberforce at least twice. The association, which also fielded teams in basketball and track and field, evidently disbanded in 1922 after four seasons of exceptional play.

Perhaps the most talented local black eleven were the Detroit Pioneers, an independent team coached by Tuskegee alum William “Dad” Moberly in the years leading up to World War II.

The Pioneers practiced at Goldberg Field at Ferry and St. Antoine streets and played home games at Mack Park, a 10,000-seat wooden facility near Southeastern High School that for many years housed the Detroit Stars of the Negro baseball leagues. Unlike the Stars, who were financially successful for more than a decade until the Great Depression caused attendance to dry up and the club to fold, the Pioneers never were profitable. They played before sparse crowds in 1939 and 1940, the only years for which partial game accounts can be found.

Nonetheless, the Pioneers’ roster featured some top-shelf talent from the country’s historically black colleges, including Tuskegee, Kentucky State, Wilberforce, Xavier, and Wiley. In 1940, the Pioneers fielded a pair of former All-Americans from Kentucky: quarterback Redford Rogers and center Melvin Bailey. These players would have had a reasonable expectation of playing in the NFL had the league not been practicing de facto segregation.

The Pioneers played an uneven schedule, their opponents ranging from black professional teams like the powerful Chicago Panthers (whom they beat, 2-0) to white amateur and semipro elevens. “The Detroiters completely smothered the efforts of the white boys,” the Chicago Defender crowed after the Pioneers crushed the Marine City Athletic Club, 26-0, one afternoon that season.

A few weeks later, on a cold, wet Thanksgiving afternoon, the Panthers beat the Toledo All-Stars, 6-0, before a smattering of shivering fans at Mack Park. “The white boys threatened in the last period, rushing the ball to the Pioneers’ one-foot line, but three tries at the line failed to produce any yardage,” reported the Defender. A fourth-down pass was intercepted by Booker Wingo, the former Tuskegee guard, to secure the victory.

None of this was enough to save the Pioneers. Black Detroiters had all they could do just trying to pay the rent and put food on the table. There was no discretionary income for football tickets. By the following year all mention of the team had disappeared from the newspapers.

At their pre-fight weigh-in, Primo Carnera makes Joe Louis look small.

The sports world was hungry for a great boxing champion in the mid-1930s. Detroit’s Joe Louis satisfied their hunger with a string of impressive victories that launched him to the status of Heavyweight Champion of the World. In 1935 he fought one of his most important fights, defeating a former champion and striking a blow for American democracy.

After turning professional the previous year, Joe Louis had a very busy 1935 – he fought 13 times. As he dispatched opponent after opponent, Louis’ legend was growing, as was his list of nicknames.

Newspapers of the day were fond of catchy monikers for sports heroes. “Chocolate Chopper,” “Mahogany Mauler,” “Coffee-Colored KO King,” and “Saffra Sandman” were a few that were set in ink. But the name that took hold was “The Brown Bomber,” the label he’s most known by to his fans.

On June 25, 1935, Louis met his toughest match yet in his climb to an eventual shot at the title. He would face Primo Carnera, a giant Italian fighter who stood nearly 6-feet, six-inches tall, or roughly a foot taller than most of his countrymen. Due to his freakish size (he was also listed at 265 pounds), Carnera was nicknamed “The Ambling Alp”. His size wasn’t the only intimidating thing about the Italian. In 1933, Carnera knocked out Ernie Schaaf in the 13th round of a bout. Schaaf was so badly beaten that he died two days later.

One publicity release about Carnera read in part: “For breakfast, Primo has a quart of orange juice, two quarts of milk, nineteen pieces of toast, fourteen eggs, a loaf of bread and half a pound of Virginia ham.”

Louis was giving up nine inches of reach and about 65 pounds to Carnera, who was the personal favorite of dictator Benito Mussolini, who saw the boxer’s greatness as a symbol of Italian strength and a sign that the nation would return to the glory of the Roman Empire.

Louis and Carnera met at Yankee Stadium for their bout, Louis just fresh from his 21st birthday. Both men were big punchers who liked to stalk their opponent and deliver the fatal blow. But “The Brown Bomber” displayed a lot more footwork and speed. Though Carnera staved off Louis with a jab for the first few rounds, Louis worked to the Italian’s body, realizing he couldn’t reach the much taller and bigger Carnera’s head.

In the sixth round, Louis’ body work paid off, as he caught Carnera with a series of punches to the head, flooring the former champ. Louis floored him again, but Carnera got up, which resulted in Louis pummeling Primo with punches to the rubs and upper body. Carnera fell once more – the third time in the round – and when the referee waved off the fight, it was as one reporter put it “an act of humanitarianism.”

Louis had dispatched Carnera after felling the giant former champ three times in the sixth, improving his own mark to 20-0, 17 by knockout.

“I thought I’d get him,” Louis said after the fight, “but I wasn’t sure when his big arms would drop and I’d get to his chin.”

Two years later, Louis would win the heavyweight title, a belt he would successfully defend 25 times and hold for an amazing 140 months.

Carnera moved to the United States where he and his wife became citizens. He later entered the ring as a wrestler in the 1950s.

Albert Pujols has been one of baseball's greatest sluggers.

Now that the Cardinals have won the 2011 World Series and seeing as Mr. Pujols smashed three homers in Game Three, there should be no question that the slugger from St. Louis is the best there is.

How does he match up against the Tigers best offensive player?

Here are Miguel Cabrera’s 2011 numbers: 30 homers, 105 RBI, 108 runs, and an American League leading .344 batting average. He’s now led the AL in homers, RBI, and batting as a Tiger.

As for Pujols, his 2011 stats were 37 homers, 99 RBI, 61 walks, and a .299 average.

On paper it appears that Cabrera had the better year. I don’t think either guy had a better year than the other but there is one thing to remember, our Tigers beat the hell out of four of the worst teams in baseball history: the 2011 White Sox, Twins, Royals, and Indians. In fact, Justin Verlander beat those teams 14 times out of his 24 wins.

My picks for the Most Valuable Player are Pujols in the National League. It remains to be seen who will win in the AL.

World Series Ratings and popularity of the game
On the surface, it looked like the 2011 World Series TV ratings were a disaster.

As thrilling as a seven-game Series it was, nobody was watching the World Series, other than family and friends.
Purely by the ratings, the 2011 Series was the least-watched in television history.

When you don’t have the Yankees, Boston, Philadelphia or other East Coast monster teams, the ratings will be only good in the cities in the World Series. The St. Louis and Dallas/Ft. Worth markets just aren’t big enough to make for good TV ratings.

So despite Pujols hitting like a mad man, very few people witnessed his monster feats, or the unlikely heroics of David Freese and Allen Craig. Likewise, people missed out on seeing a professional like veteran Lance Berkman do his thing in the Fall Classic. (Berkman now has 11 RBI to go along with a smoking-hot .410 average and an OBP above .500 in 11 World Series contests). It’s really a shame, because Pujols may well be the best hitter that the game has ever seen. He sure has my vote.

The great news is that the players and real fans don’t play or watch for the ratings, they cheer and play to win the World Series trophy.

But on the other hand these ratings are terribly misleading.

What they completely ignore is context. The 1971 World Series was the eighth-highest rated TV show that year. You know what the eighth-rated show was in 2010?

The World Series of 2010. Yep, that ratings clunker between the Giants and Rangers.

By the way, did you realize that FOX sold out all of the ads for the World Series? So, as long as they do that, do you think they care what the ratings are?

Baseball is still a tremendously popular sport. The 2011 season’s total attendance was 73,425,568. That’s the best since 2007, when the economy started to tank. Baseball remains the greatest game in the world, and until someone can match these numbers, it shall be the KING of all Sports and no one is going to come close to these kinds of numbers soon!

One last stat: Major League Baseball grossed over $7 billion last year. Not bad for a sport that gets “poor ratings” for the World Series, huh?

Longtime Red Wing Red Kelly won four Stanley Cups with Detroit. He later won four more with the Toronto Maple Leafs. He started wearing a helmet when he was traded to Toronto in 1960.

Hats off to technology. Without gains in helmet design over the last few decades, National Hockey League players would be subject to the same tragedy that befell Minnesota’s Bill Masterton, who during a game on January 13, 1968 struck his head on the ice and never regained consciousness. His death remains the only on-ice fatality in NHL history.

Like almost all pro players than, Masterton wasn’t wearing a helmet. Not only were the existing versions of headgear uncomfortable and ill-fitting, but helmeted players also had to endure a chorus of derisive remarks from their bareheaded brethren. “Some of them who have put it on have been called ‘chicken,’” Red Wings left winger Frank Mahovlich admitted at the time.

Although many players in the early days of the sport wore tukes or baseball caps, it was merely an attempt to keep warm, not protected. The first helmets appeared in the late 1920s and remained basically unchanged through the 1950s. The leather football-style headgear typically was worn by players recovering from concussions or other serious head injuries, though in the case of Johnny Crawford, vanity was the motivator. Throughout the 1940s, the Boston defenseman wore a helmet to hide his bald spot.

There were occasional attempts to make headgear mandatory during the NHL’s first half-century, but the movements always fizzled. One season in the late 1930s, for example, Detroit general manager and coach Jack Adams made helmets mandatory for all Wings.

The experiment was short-lived. One by one, the players abandoned them, saying they were too confining or uncomfortable. They followed the example set by team leader Ebbie Goodfellow, who ripped his helmet off before a fight and flung it toward the bench—where it hit Adams in the face.

Perhaps the most influential spokesman for helmets was Red Kelly, the longtime Wings defenseman, who donned headgear shortly after being traded to Toronto in 1960. Kelly’s stature as a player and member of of the Canadian Parliament helped influence public opinion. “Kelly plays it safe,” proclaimed a safety brochure distributed in Canadian schools. By 1964, some 200,000 players in the Toronto Hockey League were wearing the mandated helmets.

That still wasn’t good enough for Kelly. “They wear it in the bantam, midget, and peewee leagues but not in the juniors,” he complained. “If more players wore it in the NHL, you’d see the same thing happening in junior and other leagues.”

Molded plastic helmets, imported from Europe, were first worn by NHLers like Bert Olmsted and Red Berenson in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, General Electric produced the “Patterson Helmet.” It was made of a synthetic material called Lexan and featured a suspension system that cradled the head and kept it away from contact with the outer shell. As part of a public relations campaign to promote hockey safety, GE made the helmets widely available at cost.

During the 1970s, improvements in ventilation, comfort, and visibility made headgear more palatable to pro players. Other refinements included custom fitting and improved protection for the temples, the back of the neck, and other sensitive areas of the head.

On June 1, 1979, the NHL enacted a rule requiring the wearing of helmets for anyone entering the league after that date, though a “grandfather” clause allowed diehard veterans to continue to go hatless if they wished. Ongoing advances in foam technology, hards plastics, and structural configuration made helmets much lighter and stronger. And the clear plexiglass visor, introduced in the 1980s as a new form of facial protection, quickly developed to the point that glare, distortion, and fogging were virtually eliminated. Today, nearly two-thirds of all NHL players wear a visor.

Several players preferred to go without head protection well into the early 1990s, including defensemen Harold Snepts, Mike O’Connell, and Brad Marsh, each of whom spent part of his career in Detroit. Marsh, whose short-cropped, granite-like mug bobbed up and down the ice at Joe Louis Arena between 1990 and 1992, once explained how Hockey Night in Canada influenced him to emulate his heroes: “When I was very young, I watched hockey on Saturday night. I saw those players, I recognized them on the ice and on my hockey cards.”

The last player to go helmetless was St. Louis Blues center Craig MacTavish during the 1996-97 season. By then, many hockey observers were lamenting that something of the game’s unique character had been lost in the move to protect players’ noggins. Gone were those end-to-end rushes by Guy LaFleur and Ron Duguay, their long locks trailing in the slipstream as they sped down the ice. So in 1991 the league tacitly acknowledged the marketability of having recognizable heroes by allowing players to go helmetless if they wished. Significantly, even the most ego-fueled players didn’t take advantage of the new rule—which demonstrated, perhaps, that their heads were in the right place.

Inside a helmet.

The announcement came Wednesday, in the first month of the latest collegiate football season, with both major Michigan universities — the University of Michigan and Michigan State University — boasting undefeated records after two weeks of early play.

Walter Tenbrooks, 42, who operates a combination hardware store and taxidermy at the flashing light on highways F41 and F30 in this isolated locale was described by researchers as a “reasonably ardent and apparently honest college football enthusiast who, after months of testing and intensive investigation by our field analysts, displayed an equal interest and caring” in the fortunes of both UM and MSU in their gridiron endeavors.

Tenbrooks, a 1987 graduate of Oscoda High School and the father of a boy and girl of elementary school age, reportedly feels an “equal rooting interest” while paying “close attention each year to the won-and-loss records of each school.” The clerk/taxidermist was subjected to extensive observation and analysis, including daily polygraph testing, by teams from the Midwest Behavioral Institute (MBI) of Bay City. During last year’s Michigan–Michigan State football contest, he was found to be “entirely truthful” by investigators when he told family and friends that he was “ardently hoping for a tie.”

(Editor’s note: Under present rules, college football has eliminated ties as the outcome of football contests. MBI investigators began their search for a non-committal state of Michigan fan in 1974, when ties were allowed under previous NCAA provisions, and in that time neither the analysts nor Tenbrooks had been apprised of the change. “We only get one channel up here,” Tenbrooks said. “We get cable all right, but it’s a awful small one, and the only things what I watch are the games. My wife sees the news in our family.”)

MBI investigators had scoured the state, both the Upper and Lower peninsulas, in searching out the perfectly neutral college football fan. It had been erroneously reported in 1991 that a man in St. Ignace was believed to have been the first such football follower to be discovered. But a subsequent search of what the original allegedly non-committal fan told analysts was a “fall-out shelter out back in case of, you know, like a world war” had later proved to be decorated in maize and blue bunting, with a 24-hour “eternal flame” candle illuminating a huge portrait and shrine to former Michigan coach Bo Schembechler. Coded telegrams from onetime Wolverine athletic director Don Canham were also discovered in the “fall-out shelter,” apparently relating to Michigan football recruiting in the Upper Peninsula.

“We were embarrassed by that mistake,” said an MBI spokesperson. “Since that time we have relied on lie-detecting backup for our in-the-field analysis. Use of polygraph techniques in 1991 would have surely ruled out the bogus St. Ignace prospect as the first ‘successful find’ of our research.”

MBI analysts reportedly viewed the recent Michigan–Notre Dame game with Tenbrooks in his Mikado home, with the subject wired to electrodes and sensory analysis computers. Following the exciting last second comeback win by the Wolverines, he was quoted as saying “Well, wasn’t that nice? That was a very pleasant outcome.” Investigators reported that he said almost exactly the same words earlier the same day when he was informed that Michigan State had beaten Florida Atlantic 44-0. The Spartan game was not telecast in Mikado. “We don’t see much of Florida Atlantic up here,” Tenbrooks said.

Investigators have long searched Michigan in hopes of finding a college football fan who shared an equal interest in the fates of the Spartans and the Wolverines. Five Michigan governors have tasked the behavioral institute in that quest, seeking to find a common ground that would allow the state’s college fans to “End the bickering, unite as one, extend the hands of brotherhood, bring Blue and Green together, and stick it to Ohio and its so-called university, twice a year, every year, year after year,” in the words of former Governor George Romney, an original backer of the study. Sadly, Romney died before MBI investigators turned up Tenbrooks this week. (Romney’s son Mitt, currently campaigning for the Presidency and named after a baseball glove, said when informed of MBI’s findings “When I lived in Michigan, I liked the University of Michigan and Michigan State University exactly the same. In fact, I like every other university in this great land of ours the same amount. I want everybody to win!” Expanding on his comments, the candidate later told reporters “My idea of the perfect college season would be one in which every team goes 12-0.”)

Tenbrooks said Wednesday that he is “looking forward” to victories by both the University of Michigan (playing Eastern Michigan) and Michigan State (at Notre Dame) this coming weekend. “I believe in the words of Martin Luther King, who said ‘Can’t we all just get along?’” he said. (Editor’s note: Actually it was Rodney King.)

Michigan’s first “Neutral Fan” describes himself as a political “middle-of-the-roader,” who “tried to vote for everybody in the last election, but they wouldn’t let me.”