Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rarest Feats in Sports

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the world of sports, some things take place all the time. You'll see some of the same things happen in every game or match. However, there are some things that almost never occur. Things that are so rare and unexpected that if you find yourself as a spectator to such an event, you can consider yourself lucky. Some of these events are so rare, they may only happen once a decade or even once a century. Learn more about the rarest feats in sports on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. In discussing rare feats in sports, I'm not going to be talking about things that take a season or a career to accomplish. Every sport has someone who has achieved a high-level success after an entire career or a team that

Starting point is 00:01:17 had a great season. What I'm going to be talking about are highly improbable events. Events that require not just luck and skill, but oftentimes the right circumstances to present themselves for such an event to even take place. Not all sporting events lend themselves to these sort of rare things. For example, in track and field, there isn't a lot of room for unexpected events. On rare occasions, records can be broken, and I've talked about those in a previous episode, but those are just cases of the same thing being done better. So with that, I'll start with a sport that doesn't usually lend itself to rare events. Tennis. There are only a limited number of outcomes in tennis, so most matches take place within those parameters. However,

Starting point is 00:02:00 there is one element in tennis that has quite a bit of variability. Tiebreakers. For the longest time, Wimbledon used a system known as Advantage set rules to break ties. That meant that a player had to win the final set by two points if it was tied. Winning by two points did have the potential to extend the length of a match, but usually not by any great amount.

Starting point is 00:02:21 You'd usually be talking about 15 minutes, maybe a half an hour. However, in the first round of the 2010 Men's Singles Tournament at Wimbledon, a match took place that was unlike any in tennis history. The 23rd seed, American John Eisner, faced off against Nicholas Mahout, an outstanding doubles player from France. The match was very close throughout.

Starting point is 00:02:42 Eisner won the first set, 6-4. Mahoot won the second set, 6-3. Mahout then won the third set, 7-6, and then Eisner won the fourth set, 7-6. The match at this point had gone on long enough, and they had to call it due to darkness and resume it the next day. In the fifth and deciding set, the score was tied 6-6, and the advantage rules kicked in. A player would have to win two games in a row to win the set, and the match.

Starting point is 00:03:07 The problem was neither player could do it. They kept on playing and playing, each man trading off games with the other, neither able to win two in a row. They played the entire day until the match had to be called again due to darkness. The score of the fifth set at the end of day two was 59 to 59. This otherwise unremarkable first-round match was now the talk of Wimbledon, and everyone's attention was on it. On day three, they kept trading off games again. They played for an additional 67 minutes until

Starting point is 00:03:40 Eisner was finally able to put two games in a row together, winning the final set, 70 to 68. The match lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes over the course of three days. It demolished every previous tennis record in terms of length and number of games by a wide margin. The All-England Tennis Club gave both players special recognition, and there's a plaque commemorating the game on the ground today. In the world of bowling, you can achieve perfection in the form of a perfect game. In a perfect game, you roll all strikes and get a score of 300. A perfect game is certainly not common, but it also isn't incredibly rare. I had a friend at high school who rolled a perfect game. However, most bowling matches are conducted in a series of three games. What is truly difficult is to roll three perfect games in a

Starting point is 00:04:28 row for a 900 series. A 900 series would represent 36 consecutive strikes. In the case of bowling, we aren't just looking at the professionals, but every single sanctioned amateur league at every bowling alley. This is an incredible amount of bowling, amounting to tens of millions of series bowled by millions of bowlers over time. In all of that bowling, there have only been 40 instances of a bowler achieving a 900 series. Joe Scarborough is the only bowler in the history of the Professional Bowlers Association, who has ever bowled a 900 series, having done it in 2013. In the world of golf, you might be thinking that the rarest accomplishment is a hole-in-one. Hole-in-ones are pretty rare. However, they will be achieved

Starting point is 00:05:14 regularly by amateurs at local golf courses. There is something that is much more rare than a simple hole-in-one. Golfers are scored on the basis of how well they did versus the par value of a hole. If you're one-stroke under par, it's called a birdie. And if you're two-year-trow, two strokes under par, it's called an eagle. Most hole-in-ones will be on a par-three hole and would usually be an eagle. If you are three-strokes under par, then it's considered an albatross, or sometimes a double eagle. To do it, you have to get a hole-in-one on a par-four, or get two strokes on a par-five. Albatrosses are far rare than simple holes in one. In the entire history of all four major golf tournaments in golf, going back over a century, of all the

Starting point is 00:05:58 the holes played by all the rounds by all the golfers, there have only been 18 albatrosses. But the albatross is not the rarest scoring golf. There's one better. If you are four under par for a single hole, it's called a condor. A condor can only happen on a hole that is a par five or par six, and there just aren't many of those. Only six times in the history of golf, and I'm talking about all golf, not just professional golf, has anyone gotten a condor? In five of the six cases, it was a hole in one on a par five, which is extremely difficult to do. It usually involves either a very unusual hole that's shaped like a horseshoe or conditions that are very dry, which cause the ball to roll a long distance. The most recent condor was by Kevin Pondon on the monster 667-yard

Starting point is 00:06:51 par 6, 18th hole at the Lake Chalbot golf course in Oakland, California in 2020. In the world of association football, aka soccer, it's very common to have low-scoring matches. So if an individual manages to score three goals in a game, that's a noteworthy achievement. However, it is possible to score even more goals. One of the rarest achievements is known as the quintuple. Given how many different levels there are to competitive soccer, it's possible to have enormous variability in the quality of teams and players, so a quintuple is much more common at lower levels. However, at the highest level of club competition, UEFA leagues in Europe or Copa Libra Tadorus

Starting point is 00:07:32 competitions in South America, quintuples have occurred. There have been nine quintuples recorded since 1963, with the most goals in a single game being six. The most famous quintuple was probably that of Lionel Messi against Bayer-Levercousin in 2012 in the Champions League. In the history of the English Premier League, there have only been five quintuples in history. In international cricket, there are rare feats for both bowlers and batters. For bowlers, the rarest achievement is probably getting a hat trick. The term hat trick actually comes from cricket, and it's when a bowler gets three consecutive wickets or outs with three consecutive deliveries. In the history of international test cricket, which goes back almost 150 years, there have only been 46 recorded hat tricks.

Starting point is 00:08:20 and only 50 in one-day international competitions. Four consecutive wickets on four consecutive balls has never occurred in test cricket and has only occurred once in one-day international cricket. Only twice in any level of competition has anyone gotten six batters out on six consecutive deliveries. The most recent occurrence was on March 22nd, 2023 by Matt Rowe of Palmerston North Boys High School in New Zealand. For cricket batters, the ultra-rare achievement would be scoring seven runs in a single ball. This requires a combination of both a well-hit ball and ineptitude by the fielders. Only nine times in the history of cricket has a batter gotten seven or more runs on a single ball in international competition.

Starting point is 00:09:07 The late Andrew Simons of Australia scored eight runs on a single ball in a match against New Zealand in 2028. In American football, one of the odd things about the game is that you can theoretically have any final score. score, but you never see a team with a final score of one point. However, technically, you can score a single point. In the NFL, if a team scores a safety on an extra point attempt, then a team can be awarded a single point. As of this recording, a one-point safety has never occurred in NFL history. There is something that has occurred, which is almost as rare. One of the vestigial rules in the NFL has to do with drop kicks. Drop kicks were a bigger part of the game in the early days of American football when the ball was similar to a rugby ball. A drop kick is when you kick the ball

Starting point is 00:09:55 after it bounces off the ground. When the American football became longer and more pointed for the forward pass, it made drop kicking very difficult to do, but not impossible. In the last 82 years, there has been only one successful drop kick in the NFL which scored a point. Doug Flutie, the a 43-year-old backup quarterback for the New England Patriots successfully did a drop kick for an extra point in 2006. It was his last NFL game, and his head coach Bill Belichick let him do it to make his last game memorable. In basketball, a triple-double is when a player gets double digits in three different statistical categories. Points, rebounds, assists, steals, or block shots. A triple-double is pretty uncommon, but not unheard of. Russell Westbrook and Oscar Robinson

Starting point is 00:10:41 managed to average a triple double for an entire season. Much rarer than a triple double, however, is a quadruple double. A quadruple double has only been done four times in NBA history, and the last time it was done was by David Robinson in 1994. A quintuple double has only been recorded three times at any level of basketball competition, all three of which were in girls' high school games. However, there may have been a quintuple double in the NBA. On March 18, 1968, Will Chamberlain supposedly had 53 points, 32 rebounds, 14 assists,

Starting point is 00:11:19 24 block shots, and 11 steals in a game against the Los Angeles Lakers. I say supposedly because steals and block shots weren't formally kept as a statistic until 1974. However, Harvey Pollock, who was considered to be the father of basketball statistics, was in attendance at that game and recorded it. The sport with unquestionably the largest number of odd and rare events is baseball. Several feats in baseball are extremely rare. One of the best known rare events is throwing a perfect game. In a perfect game, a pitcher has to retire every batter without anyone reaching base.

Starting point is 00:11:57 No hits, no walks, no hit batters, and no errors. In the history of Major League Baseball, there has only been 24 perfect games. In 2012, there were three perfect games, and there have been stretches of over three decades without a perfect game. In 1959, Harvey Haddock's of the Pittsburgh Pirates threw 12 perfect innings, the most ever, only to actually lose the perfect game in the 13th inning on an error. As rare as a perfect game is, it isn't the rarest accomplishment. Unassisted triple plays are even more rare.

Starting point is 00:12:32 A simple triple play is pretty uncommon. On average, there are about five triple plays every year in Major League Baseball out of an average of 43,740 half-ennings that take place. However, on rare occasions, when conditions are perfect, a single player can record all three outs. It usually occurs when there is a runner on first and second base with no outs. The second baseman or shortstop will catch the ball in the air recording the first out. They will then tag second base before the runner on second can get back,

Starting point is 00:13:03 recording the second out. They will then take the runner coming from first base for the third out. It has only happened 15 times in history. It occurred six times in the 1920s and five times in the 2000s. There was only one unassisted triple play between 1927 and 1992. However, there is something even more rare than an unassisted triple play, something so rare that it's only happened once. Two grand slam home runs in a single inning. It's very uncommon for any player to even go to bat twice in a single inning. Your team has to be doing really well for that to happen. Of all the time, someone has come to the plate twice in a single inning. Only 58 times in baseball history has somebody hit two home runs in a single inning. To have the bases loaded for a batter twice in a single inning is astonishingly rare.

Starting point is 00:13:57 The vast majority of baseball players will never encounter this situation during their entire career. But on April 23, 1999, Fernando Tatis encountered that very situation in the third inning of a game versus the Los Angeles Dodgers. In both opportunities, he hit a grand slam, putting a total of eight runs on the board in two swings of his bat in a single inning. The thing with all the feats I've just listed in this episode is that they were totally unpredictable. You could never have known that they were going to happen if you were a spectator.

Starting point is 00:14:30 And that is one of the great things about sports. sports. You never know if you're going to be a witness to history. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise. Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:15:05 Thank you.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rarest Feats in Sports

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