But you might care, so: Men's winner, Ghirmay Ghebreslassie of the African nation of Eritrea (his 1st time winning the race); women's winner, Mary Jepkosgei Keitany of Kenya (her 3rd).
The New York Giants beat the Philadelphia Eagles, and the New York Jets lost to the Miami Dolphins. It's rare that both New York teams play at the same time. And each was playing a major rival, a game that English soccer fans would call a "derby" (pronounced like "darby").
Arsenal played their North London Derby with Tottenham today -- 7 AM, New York time -- and led 1-0 before a dodgy penalty from jackass referee Mark Clattenburg gave Tottenham a 1-1 draw. I'm not happy about that. But it could have been a whole lot worse.
Thank you, Chicago Cubs fans, for, so far, not being the kind of twats in victory that Boston Red Sox fans were in 2004 and New York Ranger fans were in 1994.
Ben Roethlisberger is injured. It is long past time for the Pittsburgh Steelers to move on from him, morally speaking. It may now also be time for them to move on, competitively speakng.
Joe Flacco is injured for the Baltimore Ravens. The native of Audubon, Camden County is already the greatest quarterback ever to come out of New Jersey. Ahead of: Joe Theismann, South River, Middlesex County; Frank Tripucka, from my original hometown of Bloomfield, Essex County; and way ahead of the idiot Neil O'Donnell of Madison, Morris County.
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November 6, 1528: Shipwrecked Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca -- "Cabeza de Vaca" means "Head of Cow" -- becomes the 1st known European to set foot in the area that would become Texas.
This will eventually make possible the major league cities of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, and lots of great college football memories. But it will also make the American Civil War possible, and leave America saddled with a lot of right-wing nuts.
And remember: The good guys won at the Alamo. The guys defending it were slaveholders. And illegal immigrants. Literally. The 2 things conservative Texans claim to hate the most: Criminals and illegal immigrants.
November 6, 1816, 200 years ago: James Monroe is elected President. Secretary of State to outgoing President James Madison, also formerly Secretary of War, Governor of Virginia, U.S. Ambassador to Britain and France, and Colonel in the Continental Army -- he's the young man seen holding the flag in the famous, if erroneous, painting Washington Crossing the Delaware -- the nominee of the Democratic-Republican Party wins 68 percent of the popular vote, and 183 Electoral Votes.
The Federalist Party disintegrated during the War of 1812, due to its having agitated the country into the war, and its feckless peace offerings during it. They had nominated Senator Rufus King of New York, who won just 31 percent of the vote, and 34 Electoral Votes. He turned out to be the last Federalist nominee for President. Soon, the Democratic-Republicans would split into the Democratic Party and the National Republican Party, later to become the Whig Party.
November 6, 1854: John Philip Sousa is born in Washington, D.C. Perhaps the most famous American of Portuguese descent, he conducted the U.S. Marine Band, playing for Presidents, then formed his own band. The Sousa Band toured from 1892 until 1931, and he died the next year.
"The March King" composed and conducted songs that are still remembered today, most notably "The Stars and Stripes Forever" (1897). In 1923, his band played "The Star-Spangled Banner" before the 1st game at Yankee Stadium.
November 6, 1860: Abraham Lincoln is elected President. He is the 1st nominee of the Republican Party to win the Presidency, making the Republicans the 1st, and to this day only, "third party" to elect a President. Thanks to a split in the Democratic Party and the Whig Party (to which he once belonged) totally dissolving, he wins with 39 percent of the vote, the lowest percentage of any winner in the election's history.
But the former Congressman from Illinois did win a majority of the Electoral Votes: 180. Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky won 72, Senator John Bell of Tennessee won 39, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois -- who had beaten Lincoln for that office just 2 years earlier -- won 12. Douglas finished 2nd in the popular vote, with 29 percent, Breckinridge had 18 and Bell 12.
In spite of the fact that Lincoln said, at the time, that he didn't want to abolish slavery entirely, only stop it from spreading to new States and Territories, the Southern States began to secede the next month. Outgoing President James Buchanan, a moral coward who thought the Constitution didn't allow him to do anything to stop it, did nothing to stop it. The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861. It would take Lincoln 4 years to win it.
November 6, 1865: The last grand match of the season takes place at the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn, before 15‚000. The Atlantics lead all the way to defeat fellow Brooklynites the Eckfords, 27-24‚ and claim the 1865 championship with a record of 17-0.
Henry Chadwick, America's 1st real sportswriter: "Is there another sport attractive enough to draw such attendance under such circumstances? In the summer it is not surprising as the weather is pleasant... but on a cold November day‚ in the busiest time of the year‚ it must be indeed an attractive sport to collect such an assemblage that is present on this occasion."
Named for a famed hill in Rome, the Capitoline Grounds, a 5,000-seat wooden stadium opened in 1864, was meant to rival and surpass the Union Grounds. The Atlantics made it their home, and, like the Union Grounds, it became a skating rink in the winter.
But it was demolished in 1880. Halsey Street, Marcy Street, Putnam Avenue and Nostrand Avenue, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. A or C train to Nostrand Avenue. While this neighborhood, notorious for crime not that long ago, should be safe during the day, definitely do not visit at night.
November 6, 1869: What is generally recognized as the 1st college football game is played. Rutgers College plays the College of New Jersey, on Rutgers' campus in New Brunswick.
The game is essentially a very large soccer game, with a round leather ball, and 25 men on a side. The Rutgers men, finding the color inexpensive to obtain, wrap scarlet red cloth around their heads like turbans, so that they can tell each other apart on the field. Thus did they invent school colors and the football helmet.
The men of Old Queens must have had less trouble telling team from team than did the men of Old Nassau, as Rutgers won, 6-4 -- that's 6 goals to 4, or 42-28 under today's scoring system.
The next week, the CNJ men returned the favor in Princeton, and won, 8-0. There was supposed to be a 3rd game, but the college presidents got together and decided that too much emphasis was being placed on athletics, and forbade it.
The field where "the first football game" was played is now the parking lot for Rutgers' College Avenue Gym.
In 1874, Harvard University would accept a challenge from McGill University in Montreal, and discover on their arrival that by "football," McGill meant "rugby," not "soccer." Adjustments were made, Harvard liked the results, and convinced the other "football"-playing schools to join them in this adaptation of "football." In 1906, the forward pass was legalized and hashmarks prevented dangerous scrimmages close to the sideline. "Football" as America knows it now was on its way.
In 1896, the College of New Jersey changed its name to Princeton University, while a nearby school would later be founded as Trenton State College, and change its name to The College of New Jersey. Rutgers College would become, and remains, the centerpiece of the larger system of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
November 6, 1887: Walter Perry Johnson is born in Humbolt, Kansas. He grows up there, but by the time he got to high school, the family had moved to Olinda, Orange County, California. The Big Train pitched 21 years for the Washington Senators, 1907 to 1927, winning an American League record 417 games, including a major league record 113 shutouts, and struck out 3,508 batters, a major league record until 1983.
He finally won a World Series in 1924, pitching the 9th through 12 innings of Game 7, and another Pennant in 1925. In 1936, he was 1 of the 1st 5 players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He died in 1946. In 1999, The Sporting News named him 4th, the highest-ranking pitcher, on their 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and, though he hadn't thrown a pitch in 72 years, fans voted him onto the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
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November 6, 1900: President William McKinley is re-elected. As in 1896, he defeats Nebraska Congressman William Jennings Bryan, 51.6 percent of the popular vote to 45.5, and 292 Electoral votes to 156.
Garret Hobart, McKinley's 1st Vice President, had died in office in 1899, so he needed a new one. He chose Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York, because his svengali, Ohio Republican boss Mark Hanna, though TR was making too much noise as Governor, thinking he'd be silenced as Vice President. He told McKinley he had to live, to keep "that damned cowboy" out of the White House.
On September 6, 1901, at a World's Fair in Buffalo, McKinley was shot. He died 9 days later, and Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States. In 1904, Hanna died, and TR won a term of his own.
November 6, 1928: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover is elected, with a whopping 58 percent of the vote, and 444 Electoral Votes. The Democrats had nominated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, the 1st Catholic ever nominated by a major party. He won just 40.8 percent, a figure exceeded by all but 2 Democratic nominees since (George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984), and took just 8 States, worth 87 Electoral Votes.
Had Smith been a Protestant, from a small town rather than the biggest city, with a pleasant voice instead of a Noo Yawk accent, and in favor of keeping Prohibition rather than repealing it, he still would have lost, as Hoover rode the Republican prosperity of the Roaring Twenties. But the anti-Catholic bigotry in America was brutal. Smith won only 7 States, and New York wasn't one of them: Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the 2 most Catholic States in the nation; and 6 Southern States: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.
Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Oklahoma and Texas were willing to break with "the Solid South," put aside their hatred of Abraham Lincoln (the Civil War had ended just 63 years before, and there were still living people who remembered it well), and vote for the Republican nominee. Indeed, Hoover nearly won Alabama, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Despite the Hoover landslide, Franklin D. Roosevelt is narrowly elected to succeed Smith as Governor. Someone asked Smith if FDR, one of his biggest backers, was going to be a rival that would prevent him from getting the Democratic nomination again in 1932. Smith, noting that Roosevelt had polio, said, "No, he will be dead within a year."
Within a year of the 1928 election, the stock market had crashed, and, barring a major scandal, the Democratic nominee was going to win in 1932. Smith tried for it. He lost. To FDR.
Also on this day, Arnold Rothstein dies, 2 days after being shot in the Park Central Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. (Albert Anastasia, "the Boss of All Bosses," was killed in the same hotel, 29 years later.) The man who fixed the 1919 World Series was 46.
There's conflicting reports as to why he was killed. Most sources say he refused to pay a debt over a poker game he claimed was fixed. Another says that mobster Dutch Schultz killed Rothstein, in retaliation for Rothstein hiring Jack "Legs" Diamond to kill Schultz's friend Joey Noel.
Schultz lived long enough to identify his killer, but he refused, telling the police, "You stick to your trade, I'll stick to mine." He had famously said, "The odds on everything in life, including life itself, are 6-to-5 against."
November 6, 1931: Peter John Collins is born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, England. In 1958, he won the British Grand Prix, but a few weeks later was killed in a crash at the German Grand Prix. He was only 26.
November 6, 1938: Mack F. Jones is born in Atlanta. The outfielder played in the major leagues from 1961 to 1971, including moving with the Braves from Milwaukee to his hometown of Atlanta, and as an original 1969 Montreal Expo. He died in 2004.
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November 6, 1940: Michael John Giles is born in Dublin, Ireland. The midfielder helped Manchester United win the 1963 FA Cup, but there wasn't really room for him. Don Revie bought him for Leeds United, and the rest was history: The 1969 and 1974 League titles, the 1968 League Cup, the 1968 and 1971 Inter-Cities Fairs Cups, and the 1972 FA Cup.
When Revie was hired to be the England manager in 1974, Johnny Giles was already so respected, he had been named manager for the national side of the Republic of Ireland while only 32 years old and still playing. Nearly everyone thought he would be named to replace Revie as Leeds manager.
Instead, the job was given to Brian Clough, who had taken Derby County to the 1972 League title, but had called Leeds a dirty team. Clough lasted just 44 days, and Giles' resistance to him was a major reason why. About 40 years later, in an interview, Giles said that if he and Clough could have straightened things out, it might have worked. Instead, Clough was out, and Jimmy Armfield was hired, and Leeds reached the 1975 European Cup Final, controversially losing to Bayern Munich.
In 1978, Giles was player-manager of Dublin club Shamrock Rovers, and won the FAI Cup, Ireland's equivalent to the FA Cup. He also managed West Bromwich Albion and the original version of the Vancouver Whitecaps. In 2004, UEFA named him the Republic of Ireland's greatest player ever. He is now an analyst for Ireland's leading sports network, RTÉ Sport.
November 6, 1947:Meet the Press debuts on NBC. It is still on the air after 69 years. It is the longest-running program in television history.
November 6, 1956, 60 years ago: President Dwight D. Eisenhower is re-elected. Despite concerns over his health (he'd had a heart attack in September 1955), the fitness for office of Vice President Richard Nixon, and how he'd handled the recent crises in Hungary and Egypt, he wins 57 percent of the popular vote, and 457 Electoral Votes.
Former Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois fares no better in the rematch than he did in 1952, winning just 42 percent, and 73 Electoral Votes. Stevenson won only 7 States: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri. In the other 41 States, he comes close only in Tennessee.
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November 6, 1972: Deivi Cruz Garcia is born in Nizao, Dominican Republic. A shortstop, Deivi Cruz played in he major leagues from 1997 to 2005, mostly with the Detroit Tigers.
November 6, 1976, 40 years ago: Patrick Daniel Tillman is born in Fremont, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. A safety at Arizona State, he played in the NFL for the Arizona Cardinals from 1998 to 2001. Quarterback Jake "the Snake" Plummer was his teammate in both college and pro ball.
On May 31, 2002, his contract with the Cardinals having run out, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, in response to the previous year's 9/11 attacks. His brother Kevin Tillman, in the Cleveland Indians' minor-league system, also left his sport to enlist that day. Specialist Pat Tillman passed the test to become an Army Ranger, and was deployed to Afghanistan.
On April 22, 2004, he was killed in action in Spera, Afghanistan. At first, the Army said his death was the result of an enemy ambush. It soon got out that his death was a mistake, from his own side: What's known as "friendly fire."
Arizona State retired his Number 42, the Cardinals his Number 40. When a new bridge was built over the Colorado River, connecting Arizona and Nevada, rerouting traffic on U.S. Route 93 to make the Hoover Dam more secure, it was named the Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.
November 6, 1978: Erik Thomas Cole is born in Oswego, New York, on Lake Ontario. The left wing was a member of the 2006 Stanley Cup-winning Carolina Hurricanes. A back injury with the Detroit Red Wings in 2015 has prevented him from playing since, and his career may be over.
November 6, 1979: David Adam LaRoche is born in Anaheim, California, where his father, Dave LaRoche, was then pitching for the California Angels. Dropping his first name, he grew up in Fort Scott, Kansas, and became a 1st baseman, reaching the postseason with the Atlanta Braves in 2004 and '05, and the Washington Nationals in 2012 and '14. His brother Andy LaRoche has also played in the major leagues.
On March 15 of this year, while at spring training with the Chicago White Sox, Adam LaRoche said that he intended to "step away from baseball." The next day, it was revealed that his reason was that the White Sox had placed a restriction on his 14-year-old son Drake entering the team's clubhouse every day. By retiring, LaRoche walked away from a $13 million contract.
Also on this day, Lamar Joseph Odom is born in South Jamaica, Queens, the same neighborhood that produced rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Governor Mario Cuomo, and my grandmother. The forward played in the NBA from 1999 to 2013, beginning and ending with the Los Angeles Clippers. In 2009 and 2010, he won titles with the Los Angeles Lakers, and was named NBA Sixth Man of the Year in 2011.
But he is best known for his drug problems, which, at last check, he was in successful recovery from; and for his on-again, off-again marriage to businesswoman and reality-TV star Khloe Kardashian, which is now off again, as their divorce is final. He has 2 children, plus 1 who died as a baby. Today, he owns Rich Soil Entertainment, a film and music production company.
Also on this day, Bradley Stuart (no middle name) is born in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. The defenseman was a member of the 2008 Stanley Cup-winning Detroit Red Wings. After playing last season with the Colorado Avalanche, he is now a free agent.
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November 6, 1984: President Ronald Reagan is overwhelmingly re-elected, defeating Walter Mondale, who had been Jimmy Carter's Vice President. Reagan nearly pulls off the 50-State sweep, as Mondale wins his home State of Minnesota by 2,996 votes. He also won the mostly-black District of Columbia. Or, as comedian Jay Leno put it, "When I went to bed, I only had 3 more Electoral Votes than Mondale, and I wasn't even running!"
Mondale also got at least 48 percent of the vote in Massachusetts and Rhode Island; 47 percent in Maryland; and 45 percent in Pennsylvania, Iowa, New York and Wisconsin. Had he won those, instead of losing 525 Electoral Votes (Reagan breaks Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 record of 523) to 13, he would have lost 398 to 140, and it wouldn't have looked so bad. But the popular vote was still bad: Reagan won 58.7, Mondale 40.6.
Unemployment was 7.5 percent, higher than the 7.1 percent that it was 4 years earlier when Reagan knocked Carter out of the White House. And there was the Beirut barracks debacle just a year before this election, killing 241 U.S. Marines -- to put it into recent context, 60 "Benghazis" all at once. And, less than 4 months earlier, Reagan had joked about starting World War III: "We begin bombing in 5 minutes." As a 14-year-old boy, let me tell you: That was terrifying. And, especially in the 2nd debate, Reagan looked like he was already affected by Alzheimer's disease.
So how did Reagan win? By lying: By saying that it was "Morning Again In America," by saying that America was stronger than ever thanks to his defense building, by saying that the Communists were in retreat (they weren't), and that he wasn't going to raise taxes but Mondale was (as Mondale pointed out, Reagan had already raised taxes 3 times).
Also on this day, Ricardo Romero Jr. is born in East Los Angeles, California. Ricky Romero pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays from 2009 to 2013, but injuries have kept him out of the major leagues since. He is still attempting a comeback, in the San Francisco Giants organization. He is married to retired soccer player Kara Lang, who played for Canada in the 2003 and 2007 Women's World Cups.
November 6, 1989: Josmer Volmy Altidore is born at the same hospital I was: St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, Essex County, New Jersey -- albeit 20 years later. And Jozy Altidore did not grow up in New Jersey like I did, instead growing up in Boca Raton, Florida.
He's played for several teams, starting with the New York Red Bulls from 2006 to 2008, helping them reach, so far, their one and only MLS Cup Final in 2008. He's played for Hull City and Sunderland in England, Villareal and Xerez in Spain, Burasapor in Turkey and AZ Alkmaar in the Netherlands.
He currently plays for Toronto FC, and has represented the U.S. at the 2010 and 2014 World Cups.
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November 6, 1990: André Horst Schürrle is born in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The soccer winger played enough games for West London club Chelsea in the 2014-15 season to receive medals for winning the Premier League and the League Cup, before being sold in midseason to German club Wolfsburg, whom he helped win the DFB-Pokal (German Cup). So he had what is probably a unique domestic Treble: A League title, a national cup win and a league cup win, but in 2 different countries.
He now plays for Borussia Dortmund, and was a member of the Germany team that won the 2014 World Cup.
November 6, 1995: Art Modell announces that he's moving the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, where they will become the Ravens. He does so because the City of Cleveland, the County of Cuyahoga and the State of Ohio refused to listen to his pleas to either build him a new stadium, or at least give him a better lease at the existing Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
Modell said he had no choice. He lied. He could have sold the Browns to a local buyer, and bought the rights to one of the 1995 expansion teams and put that in Baltimore. Instead, he screwed Cleveland over.
November 6, 2009: The Yankees get a ticker-tape parade for winning the World Series. Only 1 other New York team has gotten one since: The Giants in February 2012.
November 6, 2012: President Barack Obama is re-elected, defeating former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. Romney had run the most dishonest Presidential campaign of all time -- a record that didn't even survive a full election cycle. But Obama won the popular vote, 51.1 percent to 47.2; and the Electoral Vote, 332 to 206.
Going into Election Day, Republicans were sure that Romney was going to win Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. If he had, it would have been a shift of 67 Electoral Votes, making Romney the winner, 273 to 265. But Obama won Florida by 45,000 votes, and both Ohio and Pennsylvania by 50,000. The "Swingiest of Swing States" did not trust the economy, which Obama had rescued after being crashed 4 years earlier by conservative businessmen, to another conservative businessman.
November 6, 2013: Clarence "Ace" Parker dies in Portsmouth, Virginia, at the age of 101. He had been the oldest living former Major League Baseball player, the oldest living former National Football League player, and, as best as we can determine, the 1st former NFL player to live to see a 100th birthday.
A two-way back, he starred for Duke University and the NFL team named the Brooklyn Dodgers, and was the 1940 NFL Most Valuable Player. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1972. He was also a shortstop for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1937 and 1938.