20 Mind Blowing Sports Facts

The history of sport is a long and very interesting one, so there are a lot of really crazy facts that will make your head spin. Check these fun facts out as a starting point and impress your friends next time you watch a game.

1. Horse foreskins were originally used in the making of baseballs.
2. Catguts previously used to make tennis racket strings (and violin bows) are not actually the guts of cats, but of sheep and cows.
3. The first golf balls were made of dried cows eyeballs.
4. In 1927 a car with a wood burning engine finished 3^rd in the Indy 500.
5. Rocky Marciano, the boxing legend also invented the fax machine.
6. Until 1925 all college football players in the USA had to study in half time.
7. Custom dictates that jockeys get paid in coins, no matter how big the win. These days a small bag of coins is symbolically awarded, as the prizes are as big as the jackpots paid out by Australian online pokies, so there would need to be several truckloads of coins!
8. In Ancient Greek Olympic wrestling matches were conducted naked. The match would not reach its conclusion until one of the participants became visibly aroused.
9. The Stanley Cup is ice hockey’s biggest accolade, but originally it was 2 storeys tall and incredibly difficult to transport, so a smaller cup was made.
10. Many of the broken bats from the Major Leagues are sent to 3^rd world countries where they either become crude weapons or are used as building materials.
11. From 1952 to 1960 the O-Chimp-ics were held every 4 years. Just like the name says, these were the Olympics for monkeys!
    
12. The grass on the courts at Wimbledon was kept at 2 inches until 1949. When a snake bit an English player, it was mowed shorter so the risk of this happening again was eliminated.
13. In 1957 Vin Scully was suspended by the Dodgers for commenting that a home run had been hit like it was Marilyn Monroe.
14. In 1884 a man in Missouri was briefly jailed for witchcraft after hitting a curve ball at a county fair.
15. When Roger Bannister set the world record for the mile he thought it would last a good few years. Unfortunately it was broken just 46 days later, and he lost his spot at the top.
16. If Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps were a country he would rank as number 35 on the all-time medals list.
17. In 1948 the Dodgers replaced Jackie Robinson with a white man in black face, as Robinson was injured.
18. An average golf ball has 336 dimples.
19. On average in every baseball game there are only 18 minutes of total action.
20. The phrase winning hands down can be attributed to a jockey who won a race without once whipping or pulling on his horse’s reins.