Newer Than They Think / Sports

• Most popular spectator sports were invented in the late 19th century, and their rules have little connection to their supposed predecessors, which were usually more disorganised and violent.
  • Similarly, the (false) claim that baseball was invented in 1839 by Abner Doubleday "only" dates back to 1907, to the point where everybody except the people making the claim (who also were the ones deciding what was going to be published) knew it was bunk.
    • The fact the Baseball Hall of Fame, which was opened in Cooperstown in 1939 for the 100th anniversary of Doubleday's supposed invention of baseball, NEVER INDUCTED HIM should illustrate this. They inducted Alexander Cartwright (pretty much the guy who did invent baseball in 1845, if one wishes to claim baseball was "invented"^note To wit: Cartwright wrote the Knickerbocker Rules, which (1) codified a number of rules used for baseball at the time into a coherent whole, (2) innovated a number of rules (like getting runners out by tagging bases, rather than throwing the ball at them) that are foundational to modern baseball, and (3) were continuously modified by Cartwright through the 1840s and 50s, to the point where the Knickerbocker Rules, in their last Cartwright-penned iteration, were quite close to what we identify as modern baseball—largely because they had become the standard rules for New York-area baseball teams, which spread their influence via the extremely large contingent of New York-area soldiers who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War.) but not Doubleday.
    • This may also double as Older Than They Think, with baseball and softball both being variations of the traditional English game of rounders, which dates to around the 15th century.
    • There are some great illuminated manuscripts from as far back as the thirteenth century with marginalia that appear to depict monks with modern baseball bats swinging at balls. Not anything we would recognize today as baseball, since there's no evidence of bases before the seventeenth century, but a precursor to baseball and cricket goes back a long way. Older than you think in some form, newer in the form you know.
• In rugby union, the World Cup was first held in 1987, the European Rugby Champions Cup was first played in 1995–96,^note The Champions Cup actually dates only to 2014–15 (!), but it claims the history of the Heineken Cup as its own. and Super Rugby began in 1996.
  • A try has only been worth five points since 1992. Originally, the try was worth no points—it only gave the scoring team the right to attempt a kick for 1 goal (i.e., point). That didn't last long; it became a separate score in 1875, but officially scored as a "try", with tries only used to break ties if teams had the same number of goals. In 1886, point scoring was introduced, with the try now worth 1 point. It became 2 points in mid-1891, and then 3 points in mid-1894. It remained at that value through 1970, increasing to 4 points in 1971.
• The Korean sport of Taekwondo is often assumed, like kung fu, to be unimaginably old, probably dating to early medieval times at the latest. It can be quite a shock to learn that not only is taekwondo ultimately Japanese in origin (it was basically Karate with some Korean native influences), but that the first tournament was held in 1955 (yes, that's A.D. 1955) — and that some of its earliest champions are probably still alive!
  • Taekwondo isn't alone: Judo was formed out of several jujutsu styles in 1882, and Aikido was developed the same way in the 1920s and 30s, although both are considered ancient. Taekwondo and Judo are effectively competitive versions of much older traditional martial arts while Aikido was developed as a soft version of Aiki-jutsu which was developed by Sokkaku Takeda perhaps a few decades before Ueshiba.
    • Not only that, but the inventor of Judo was also the one who first came up with using colour-coded belts to denote rank in martial arts. And it wasn't until the 1900s that the system was expanded beyond simply white and black.
• The idea of receiving a cup or trophy after winning an athletic event goes back to the funeral games depicting in The Iliad; but lifting the cup into the air as a celebration only originated in 1958, when Brazilian captain Hilderaldo Bellini held up the World Cup trophy so that photographers could get a better view of it.
• The Olympic Games tradition of having people carry a lit torch from the ruins of Olympia (in the Peloponnese) to the site of the current games is not from antiquity; it was invented by Hitler's PR people for the 1936 Berlin games.
  • To clarify: this was the first time the torch was lit in Olympia, and as an official Olympic ceremony. In 1904, William Randolph Hearst sponsored a New York-to-St. Louis torch relay to promote his newspapers. This, however, was an independent Hearst promotion that the IOC had nothing to do with.
  • The first Olympics with any sort of mascot were the 1968 Winter Games at Grenoble, France, which had a character named Schuss, a skier with a red ball for a head, used for advertising purposes. The first official mascot created as an all-around symbol for the games (and for merchandising) was Waldi the multicolored dachshund at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich.
  • The 1988 Olympics were the first in which professional athletes were allowed to compete; before then, the Olympics were supposed to be for amateurs only.
    • However, in basketball, not all professionals were allowed to play in the 1988 Games. FIBA, the sport's international governing body, still barred NBA players from the Olympics. It changed this policy a year later, paving the way for Team USA to become the trope namers for Dream Team in 1992.^note Not to mention that a documentary on another team in the 1992 Games, Lithuania, was titled The Other Dream Team.
  • The IOC banned Olympic athletes from using performance-enhancing drugs in 1967; the 1968 Games in Mexico City were the first at which any kind of drug testing occurred.
  • The Summer and Winter Olympics were held in the same year every 4 years until 1992, when the current system of holding alternating Olympics every 2 years began.
• The Australian Football League didn't adopt its current name until 1990. Before then, it was known as the Victorian Football League. It started out in 1897 with all of its teams in the state of Victoria, and all but one in Melbourne, and remained a Victoria-only league for over 80 years. However, the name became an artifact in 1982 when South Melbourne moved to become the Sydney Swans, and the league added the Brisbane Bears (a predecessor to today's Brisbane Lions) and the Perth-based West Coast Eagles before changing its name.
• Georgia Tech is considered an "old-school" member of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) even though they didn't join the league (founded 1953) until 1979, and didn't play ACC football until 1983.
  • Similarly, Michigan State, which didn't join the Big Ten (established 1896) until 1950 and didn't actually start conference play until 1953, seems to be treated as if it were always there.
    • The tenth school was originally the University of Chicago. A powerhouse in the conference's early years, Chicago saw a gradual de-emphasis in its athletic programs after Robert Maynard Hutchins, an academic elitist who loathed intercollegiate sports, took over as university president in 1929. They dropped football after the 1939 season, and used a post-World War II funding crunch as an excuse to withdraw entirely from Division I sports (Chicago is currently an NCAA Division III school). MSU, which was expanding both its academic and athletic program at the time, went on a campaign to replace Chicago; they eventually got Chicago's blessing on account of their close academic cooperation (many Chicago graduates went on to teach at Michigan State, so there is some institutional connection). Also, MSU had always had a rivalry with the most prominent Big Ten school, Michigan, which (1) meant that MSU was usually on Big Ten schedules and (2) gave Michigan State an incentive to keep up standards athletically as well as academically (nothing like wanting to show up the in-state rivals who think they're better than you to motivate you to get up your game on and off the field). This has paid off quite well for the Big Ten; MSU has, at least in part because of a desire to keep up, become a bit of an overachieving school (in the sense of doing better than you might otherwise expect) both athletically and academically.
    • Speaking of the Big Ten: While the "Big Ten" name has been used for most of the conference's history, it was founded in 1896 as the "Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives". The legal name didn't change to "Big Ten Conference" until 1987 (!!)
  • UCLA's football team didn't start playing home games at the Rose Bowl until 1982.^note Formerly they shared the LA Memorial Coliseum with USC, which explains the tradition of both teams wearing home colors when they play each other. There had been a push to build a 44,000-seat on-campus stadium in The '60s, but students voted down a proposed fee hike to pay for it, and the residents of adjacent posh neighborhoods like Westwood, Bel-Air and Holmby Hills were horrified by the prospect of increased traffic. Instead, 11,000-seat Drake Stadium was built and is used for track and field. When the Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles they made the Coliseum their home field, and not wanting to be a third wheel at the Coliseum (which is literally across the street from the USC campus), UCLA decided to move to the Rose Bowl, even though it's about a 40-minute drive from campus.
  • West Virginia's "Flying WV" logo debuted in 1980, when newly-hired head football coach Don Nehlen convinced the school that it needed a more distinctive icon (they previously used a "WVU" inside an outline of the state of West Virginia).
  • The practice of multiple college football teams getting a jump start on the season by playing on the Thursday before Labor Day instead of Saturday was practically non-existent until The '90s. 1994 was the first year to feature several power conference teams playing on that first Thursday, and it wasn't until 2001 that a double-digit amount of major college games were moved to the first Thursday.
  • Conference tournaments only became an ingrained part of Division I college basketball in The '80s. Up until 1975, only the Atlantic Coast and Southern Conferences even had them.^note The Southeastern Conference started its tournament in 1933, but ended it after the 1952 edition (a year before the ACC existed), not reinstating it until 1979. As late as 1997, two of the top tier conferences, the Big Ten and Pac-10 (now Pac-12), didn't have a tournament (the Pac-10 briefly had one in The '80s, but the league's coaches didn't like it). The final holdout, the Ivy League, only started playing one in 2017 (and even then, they only went with a four-team format, rather than the whole conference).
• Association football (soccer) has quite a few:
  • Americans are usually mocked for using "football" for a sport that mostly use your hands. But the use of the foot to kick the ball is a recent invention, there are mentions of other rulesets (Cambridge rules, Sheffield rules and Rugby rules) that allowed the use of hands by any player, there's even a mention of a ruleset which forbade kicking the ball. The ban on carrying the ball with your hand came to existence in 1863, and provoked such controversy that some clubs broke off from the Football Association and adopted the rules created a few years prior in the Rugby school to form the Rugby Football Union.
  • Yellow cards and red cards were first used to signal fouls in the 1970 World Cup. No cards at all were used before then. The cards were introduced because of incidents such as the one at the 1966 World Cup in the game England vs. Argentina, where the Argentinian Antonio Rattin refused to leave the field when he was sent off claiming that he did not understand what the German referee was saying and holding up the game for eight minutes (he eventually was led off by policemen). The idea for cards came when a referee saw traffic lights and thought, "yellow is 'danger', red is 'stop playing'."
  • Substitutes were not allowed in most tournaments until the late 1960s.
  • Similarly, the black-and-white "truncated icosahedron" (black pentagons, white hexagons) soccer ball made of synthetics dates from the 1970 World Cup. (Before then, they looked more like what modern athletes would consider a volleyball. The old-style ball is still commonly found in club crests and logos, like those of Manchester United, Chelsea and Barcelona, and is still used in Ireland for Gaelic football.) That particular ball was named Adidas Telstar, after the telecommunications satellite. The idea was to make the ball more visible in black-and-white television sets, hence the black pentagons. The design was a geodetic sphere originally designed by Buckminster Fuller. It immediately was a great success, superseding the old soccer ball design almost overnight.
  • While FIFA has always awarded winners' medals after the World Cup final, it originally presented them only to the players on the pitch at full time of the final. Only in 1978 did it start its current practice of presenting medals to the entire playing squad and coaching staff. Retroactive winners' medals for those from the 1930–1974 period who did not receive medals for their final were not awarded until 2009.
  • The players' names were printed on the back of their shirts for the first time in the 1994 World Cup. That's the year where it was hosted by the United States, where the practice had been prevalent^note But by no means universal; baseball teams in particular often left the shirts nameless, and to this day the New York Yankees still do. in other sports for at least two decades. For the NBA (professional basketball) and NFL (professional American football), names on jerseys weren't optional. They were required.
  • Replica shirts didn't go on sale until 1973 (Leeds United being the first).
  • Crystal Palace didn't have an eagle symbol until 1971.
  • The famous Brazil kit (canary yellow shirt, blue shorts, white socks) wasn't worn until 1953. Up until then Brazil wore all white (with blue collars). The reason for the change was that Brazil had unexpectedly failed to win the World Cup against Uruguay in 1950 playing in Brazil. The whole country fell in such a Heroic BSoD that everyone agreed they never wanted to see a national side wearing white again, lest they be reminded of that defeat. There is also the implication that white signifies purity and that purity had been "sullied" by the Shocking Defeat Legacy.
  • Giving 3 points for a win was only invented in 1981, and it took the 1994 World Cup adopting it for widespread usage.
  • The notion of the word "soccer" as an odd, exclusively American way to refer to the sport only dates to The '80s. Before then, it was quite common as a secondary nickname for football in England, much as one might call basketball "hoops." Moreover, the word was coined in England, being a classic example of the "-er" shortening characteristic of Oxford graduates (it's the same process that gave us "rugger" for rugby football as well as "fiver" for a five-pound note, "brekker" for breakfast, and "Macca" for Paul McCartney). It also in widespread use in other Anglophone countries where association football isn't the primary sport; besides the U.S., Canada and Australia have their own football codes, while New Zealand mostly goes for rugby (as does a good chunk of Australia, though mostly under a different code from NZ), and all use "soccer" to refer to association football as much as the Americans.
  • The back-pass rule, which prohibits goalkeepers from handling balls deliberately kicked to them by teammates^note a ball headed back to them can be caught with the hands, was introduced for the 1992 Olympics, in response to complaints from the 1990 World Cup that the constant passing to the goalkeeper made the game boring.
  • Whilst they were use before then, shin guards were only made a mandatory part of matchday kit in 1990.
  • In a major tournament, it would make sense if the match officials were all from the same country or at least from countries that speak the same language (e.g. putting German and Austrian officials together). This didn't occur to FIFA until 2006.
• The National Football League has a few:
  • Similar to the Association Football example above, the practice of putting players' names on the backs of jerseys originated with the AFL in the '60s, and wasn't adopted by the NFL until the two leagues merged. Look at pictures from the four pre-merger Super Bowls, and you'll find that the AFL teams have names on the jerseys while the NFL teams don't.
  • The official game time was originally kept by the referee on the field, as in association football at almost all levels to this day. The AFL made the scoreboard clock the official timer in 1962, but the NFL didn't adopt this change until the merger.
  • Some teams with "classic" uniforms have only been using those uniforms relatively recently. The Green Bay Packers (famous for their Green and Gold color scheme) started playing in the 1920s, for example, but didn't even wear green until the 50s and they didn't wear the famous "G" logo on their helmets until 1961. Before then, they actually wore navy blue uniforms.
  • The Chicago Bears and Soldier Field have both been Windy City institutions since the early 1920s, but the Bears only started playing home games there in 1971, when the NFL mandated a minimum of 50,000 seats for home stadiums, forcing the Bears to leave Wrigley Field (where they'd played since 1921).
  • While the Green Bay Packers have played at Lambeau Field since 1957, it only became their exclusive home stadium in 1995; they played part of their home schedule in Milwaukee from 1933 to 1994.
  • The Super Bowl itself. Not only was it not called that officially until 1970. It was also not sold out in its first edition and considered something of an anticlimax as nobody took the AFL entrant seriously. Until the New York Jets showed the AFL had grown the beard in Super Bowl III where the NFL Baltimore Colts never got a foot on the ground. Oh and the Vince Lombardi Trophy? Not called that in the first four Super Bowls, either — it got its name in memory of the Green Bay coach who won the first two, who died just before the start of the 1970 season.
    • The tradition of presenting the Lombardi Trophy to the winning Super Bowl team on-field after the game only began with Super Bowl XXX in 1996. Before that, the trophy would be brought to the winning team's locker room.
  • And before that, Playoffs. The first few NFL winners were simply the team who had the best standing after the season — there were no divisions or conferences for more than a decade. Sometimes the winner and runner-up did not even face each other (the schedule being even weirder than now). Only in 1932 when two teams had the same win/loss record did a "one-off" Playoff for the title take place. The game drew quite a crowd and by the next year it had become a permanent fixture (with the league split into two conferences) and the NFL has held a title game ever since.
  • It wasn't until the NFL split into four divisions in 1967 that it adopted a system of tiebreakers, using factors such as head-to-head record and division record, to break ties between teams with the same record at the end of the season. From 1933 to 1966, when there were only two divisions and the division winners went straight to the NFL title game, a one-game playoff was used to settle ties for first in the division.
  • In NFL games, the goalpost was located at the front of the end zone (i.e., on the goal line) until 1974, when it was moved to the back (aka the end line).
    • Doubles as "Older Than They Think"—when the NFL was founded in 1920, it used NCAA rules, which then had the goalposts at the goal line. In 1927, the NCAA moved its posts 10 yards back to the end line, with the NFL following suit because it was still using the NCAA rule set. In 1932, the NFL moved its "Playoff Game" (the championship tiebreaker) to the indoor Chicago Stadium due to expected severe weather; due to the limitations of playing a football game in a hockey arena, it moved the goal posts to the goal line. The following year, the NFL stopped mirroring NCAA rules, keeping the goal posts on the goal line, where they would remain for the next four decades. The Canadian Football League has the posts at the goal line due to the end zones being 20 yards deep.
  • Prior to the 1972 season, ties were statistically ignored in computing winning percentages. Starting in 1972, ties were mathematically counted as a half-win and half-loss for teams.
  • The quarterback kneel, the simplest play there is, was first performed in its familiar form following the "Miracle at the Meadowlands" game in 1978. Before then, a team that wanted to stall out the clock would either do a hand-off and hope they didn't fumble (which is exactly what went wrong in the aforementioned game), or catch the snap and immediately fall over. The NFL did not officially amend its rules to allow for kneeling until 1987.
  • Similarly, the NFL didn't have the option for a 2-point conversion until the 1994 season, although college football had adopted it in 1958 while the AFL had used it for its entire existence (1960-69).
  • Also, while college football adopted a rule in 1988 that allowed the defensive team to return a failed extra point or two-point try for two points of their own, the NFL didn't adopt it until 2015.
  • Bye weeks weren't a yearly part of the NFL schedule until 1990; they did two bye weeks per team in 1993 but went back to single bye weeks the following year.
  • "Hail Mary" didn't become a widespread term for a desperation pass at the end of a game until Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, after throwing a game-winning touchdown pass to Drew Pearson in the last minute of a 1975 playoff game, said: "I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary." It should also be noted that that play actually wasn't a Hail Mary in the current use of the term, since it wasn't a throw into the end zone on the final play.
  • The iconic "Lambeau Leap" only originated during the 1993 season.
• Basketball:
  • The three-point shot. It has been used by various leagues since the 30s but didn't get adopted by the National Basketball Association until the 1979-80 season. And not by the NCAA until 1986 for men and 1987 for women (although individual conferences fiddled with it beforehand).
  • Also, it wasn't until 1990–91 in the NCAA, and 1994-95 in the NBA, that a player fouled while attempting a three-pointer got three free throw attempts instead of two.
  • Even though the NBA adopted the shot clock in 1954, women's college basketball didn't adopt it until 1971, and men's college basketball not until 1985.
  • Women's basketball uses a smaller ball than the men's game.^*To be exact, the women's ball is 1 in/25.4 cm smaller in circumference and 2 oz/57 g lighter than the men's ball. However, the smaller basketball has a considerably shorter history than most modern basketball fans think. The first competition to use this ball was the Women's Basketball League, a US pro circuit that lasted only from 1978 to 1981. The NCAA adopted the smaller ball in 1984, as did US high schools, and the WNBA has used it since its first season in 1997. International women's basketball, however, continued to use the men's ball until 2004.
  • The Big 5, the top Division I college basketball teams in Philadelphia (La Salle, Pennsylvania, Saint Joseph's, Temple, Villanova) have played each other for over a century, but it only became an organized rivalry in 1955, and they only restarted a full single round-robin series with each other in 1999, after going on hiatus in 1991. The full round-robin series was ended after the 2022–23 season, when Philly's other D-I school, Drexel, was officially added to the rivalry. The rivalry will keep its "Big 5" name, partially at Drexel's insistence.^note In the new format, the six teams are split into three-team pods, with a single round-robin within each pod. This is followed by single games between the teams that finished in the same position in their respective pods.
    • Also, women's basketball didn't officially become part of the Big 5 rivalry until Drexel was added.
  • While 3-on-3 half-court basketball is very popular as a recreational sport, with some US organizations establishing major competitions in the 1970s, it didn't become an international sport until the current century. FIBA (the international governing body) held its first tournaments in what it now calls 3x3 in 2007 and launched the first 3x3 World Cup in 2012.
  • Basketball itself was invented in 1891, making it the youngest of the five major North American team sports.
• Cheerleading dates back to the end 19th century but cheerleading as a female high school student activity (let alone the female high school student activity) is much more recent. It was not until World War II that female cheerleaders started to outnumber males and was still considered sufficiently masculine as late as the early 1960s that all-male high schools had cheerleading squads — George W. Bush was head cheerleader at his boarding school.
• The idea of having gold, silver and bronze to represent first, second and third place made its first appearance in 1904, with the medals awarded at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics.
  • The idea of having a second and third place at all in the Olympics. In the ancient Games, you either won and got all the glory, or you lost and went home in utter shame.
• Although the legend that inspired it had been around for a very long time, the marathon race was invented for the inaugural Modern Olympic Games in 1896 and the distance wasn't standardised until 1921.
• The NHL has a group of six teams (Montreal, Toronto, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, New York Rangers) called the "Original Six". However, only the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs^note  who weren't actually called the "Maple Leafs" until 1927; prior to that, they were the Toronto Hockey Club (1917-19; sometimes nicknamed "Blueshirts" or "Torontos" at the time, but retroactively designated the "Arenas" after their original owners) and the St. Patricks (1919-27) existed in 1917, when the NHL was founded. Those two teams, along with the Ottawa Senators, Montreal Wanderers, and the Quebec Bulldogs, were the charter members of the NHL. The Senators are not considered an old team, however, as the original incarnation died in 1934, and the name was only reused in 1992. Boston entered in 1924; the three others joined in 1926. After that expansion, however, there were a total of 10 teams in the league. The Great Depression thinned the herd, and by 1942, only the Original Six were left. The term itself came about as a result of the 1967 expansion in which the league doubled to twelve teams, and as the league expanded further, the term stuck.
  • The vast majority of players didn't wear helmets until the 1970s; in 1979 the NHL declared that all players who didn't sign a pro contract until after June 1 of that year would have to wear them(the last NHL player to not wear a helmet was Craig MacTavish, who retired in 1997). The death of player Bill Masterton from a brain injury in 1968 is usually cited as the point at which attitudes regarding hockey helmets began to change.
  • Overtime in NHL regular season games is both this and Older Than They Think. It was a part of the NHL from its creation in 1917 until November 21, 1942, when it was banned because wartime travel restrictions made it so trains wouldn't wait for teams leaving a game that ended later than usual. Regular season overtime didn't return until the 1983-84 season.
  • The term "one-timer" — meaning to immediately slapshot the puck off a pass from a teammate — is first attested in 1984.
• The custom of playing the national anthem before sporting events began in World War II, as a patriotic gesture during baseball games. The tradition remains strongly associated with North American sports and is seldom performed in other countries.
  • More accurately, this custom is seldom performed for domestic league matches outside North America. However, it's now standard for matches between national teams.
  • Similarly, baseball's seventh inning stretch use of "God Bless America" was popularized after the 9/11/2001 attacks.
  • The custom of NFL players standing on-field during the national anthem only began in 2009, as the U.S. Department of Defense started paying the NFL for patriotic displays. Prior to 2009, most teams would wait in the locker room before running on-field as the song ended.
• While its constituent schools were founded between 1636 and 1865, the Ivy League was not formally constituted until 1945 in football and 1954 in other sports; in fact, the description of certain schools as "ivy colleges" dates back only to the 1930s.
• The Super Bowl halftime shows didn't become the star-driven spectacles they're now known as until 1993, when Michael Jackson headlined. The NFL brought in a big-name star that year specifically to prevent viewers from switching the channel, as they often had during the halftime shows of previous years, which consisted largely of marching bands. Even after that, it took nearly a decade before the halftime show settled into its familiar groove of being a prestige showcase for some of the biggest musical artists in the world: up until the early 2000s, halftime shows were predominantly spectacle-driven, they always had a specific theme, and they were nearly always ensemble shows featuring at least three musical guests. The 2004 halftime show was something of a turning point for future shows: it was the last to feature a theme, and it convinced the NFL to choose one artist apiece for future shows (2004's chaotic ensemble performance was partly blamed for the confusion that led to Janet Jackson's infamous wardrobe malfunction), making it all the more prestigious to be chosen to perform. While duets and ensemble acts have since made a comeback, performances with single headliners are now the norm.
  • Another aspect of the Super Bowl telecast that's probably newer than a lot of people think is the commercials being a huge deal. Apple's famous Nineteen Eighty-Four ad was the first really buzzy Super Bowl commercial, and in the next few years as ad rates for the game skyrocketed, advertisers started putting together more memorable and creative ads. By 1989 there was enough interest in the ads that USA Today started running an annual "AdMeter" feature in their paper the day after the game, ranking the ads based on scores given by a focus group. It was only in The '90s that Super Bowl commercials really took off in popularity. In 2000, CBS began airing its annual Super Bowl Greatest Commercials special, which marked the moment when the commercials became an extremely-hyped, highly anticipated part of the Super Bowl viewing experience, almost equal to the game itself.
• The "Gatorade shower" tradition in American football, wherein a cooler full of Gatorade or some other sports drink is poured over the winning coach's head, dates back to a Giants-Redskins game on October 28, 1984.
• Cricket:
  • Twenty20 was only invented in 2002, with the first match being played in 2003 and the first international match played in 2005.
  • The free hit was only introduced in 2007 (and even then, only to ODI and T20 cricket), and has only been applied to all no-balls since 2015.
  • Although cricketers have worn crotch-protecting gear since the 16th century, batsmen didn't start wearing helmets until the 1970s.
  • Bowling underarm was once the only allowed form in cricket. It wasn't until 1835 that roundarm bowling (keeping the hand between hip and shoulder height) was allowed and it took a staged player walkout in 1864 to legalise overarm bowling.
• In that other form of bowling (the one where you roll a ball to knock over pins):
  • Automatic pin machines weren't used until 1952; before then, a "pinboy" had to be used.
  • Automatic scorers weren't used until 1967, weren't common until the mid 70s, and didn't become beloved staples until around the late 1990s. As late as The Simpsons episode "Life on the Fast Lane", involving a bowler trying to hook up with Marge Simpson, released in 1990, characters still wrote down their scores. This was still common well into the late 90s due to the inaccuracies and errors of earlier automatic machines.
• Major League Baseball:
  • It has only been a single legal entity since 2000; before then, the National and American Leagues had separate offices and administration and MLB was, at least officially, a regulatory organization rather than a league. National and American League teams never played against each other in meaningful games, aside from the World Series, until 1997.
  • MLB players have been unionized only since 1966.
  • The first Home Run Derby happened in 1985, and was first televised in 1991. The event was inspired by a short-lived 1960 TV series of the same name.
  • The ceremonial first pitch, one of the most time-honored traditions in baseball, began, as we know it, in 1989, when George H. W. Bush^*who had actually played baseball at Yale and ex-president Ronald Reagan both opted to take the mound and actually pitch the ball toward the plate. No ceremonial pitcher, president or otherwise, had done so beforehand, but the Bush/Reagan precedent became standard practice almost immediately afterward. For the entire preceding century, the ceremonial "pitch" was a gentle toss from the stands in the general direction of the players, who would assemble in a mass to catch it. ^note  As seen done by Queen Elizabeth II in The Naked Gun, released in 1988.
  • MLB banned the use of performance-enhancing drugs in 1991, before which there were no actual rules against them. Even then, the rules weren't seriously enforced until the steroid scandal of the 2000s.
  • Batting helmets. They first started to get a serious call for them after the fatal beaning of Ray Chapman in 1920, but no team would actually wear any until 1941, and then it was just a handful of teams in the NL. It wouldn't be until 1953 that a team (the Pittsburgh Pirates) made it mandatory for the whole team, then in 1956 did the NL make it mandatory for everyone, followed in 1958 by the AL. It wouldn't be until 1971 when MLB began enforcing the rule however, allowing a grandfather clause for players who had played before then to go without one, meaning it was 1979 when Bob Montgomery was the last player to ever go without a batting helmet in the Majors.
  • The playing of Neil Diamond's 1969 hit "Sweet Caroline" during the 8th inning at Fenway Park is such an integral part of the culture of the Boston Red Sox, on par with Liverpool FC's usage of "You'll Never Walk Alone", that it may come as a huge surprise that, as far as anyone can tell, the song had no links at all to the Red Sox until a stadium PA employee chose to play it during a game in 1997. It wouldn't even be for another 5 years in 2002 that playing it during the 8th inning became a once-per-game event.
  • Even though Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, it wasn't until Pumpsie Green joined the Boston Red Sox in 1960 that every MLB team was integrated.
  • No MLB teams existed south or west of St. Louis, Missouri, until the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1955. In fact, no teams formed, dissolved, or moved between 1903 and 1952, during which MLB consisted of 16 teams, concentrated in the Northeast. MLB's 1961 expansion ended a decades-long status quo.
• Canadian Football League:
  • While the first Grey Cup game was held in 1909, it wasn't until 1954 that the Cup was contested solely by professional teams.
  • The CFL itself wasn't officially founded until 1958, when the Canadian Football Council, made up of the country's two professional circuits, left the Canadian Rugby Union (now Football Canada, which governs amateur Canadian football) and assumed control of the Grey Cup.
  • Teams from the Eastern and Western Football Conferences (now the East and West Divisions) played only in the Grey Cup until 1961.
  • The two conferences didn't play the same number of regular-season games until 1974.
  • The CFL didn't become a single entity until 1981, with the two "Conferences' becoming "Divisions". Before then, the CFL had been technically only a regulatory organization rather than a league, much like MLB would remain until 2000.
• In athletics, the long jump was known as the "broad jump" until the 1968 Olympics, when its name was changed to avoid using the sexist slur "broad".
• Sticking with athletics, the most popular way of clearing the bar in the high jump - headfirst with their back to the bar - was first seen in the 1968 Olympics.
• Yellow tennis balls were first introduced in 1972 so that they could be better seen on television; before then, tennis balls were usually black or white.
• With the kickflip being one of the most basic skateboarding tricks one can learn, one might think that the trick was invented way back in the early days of skateboarding during the 70s. However, it was actually invented in 1982, by skateboarding legend Rodney Mullen. The 540 shuv-it was actually a few years older, having been invented in 1979.
• Sumo wrestlers have always been universally fat, right? Nope. 19th-century sumo photos show much thinner and leaner wrestlers than now, and this body type was still pretty common until the 1980s or so, when wrestlers started fattening up in an arms race, of sorts, to make themselves harder to push or throw.
• The Indy 500 tradition of "kissing the bricks" (i.e., kneeling down and kissing the racetrack, specifically the bricks that mark the start/finish line) was first performed in 1996 by Dale Jarrett... after winning the Brickyard 400, a NASCAR race (he never raced in IndyCar). The first Indy 500 winner to do this was Gil de Ferran in 2003.
• The term "mixed martial arts" was coined in 1993 in a review of the inaugural UFC pay-per-view event.
• While professional sports are old, the idea that all top-level professional players should be paid sufficiently to not need any other employment is recent. Major League Baseball players, for instance, still often held menial jobs in the off-season (e.g. stocking shelves and flipping burgers) until the 1980s.
• The first score bug — a continuous onscreen graphic showing the score of a televised sports match — was introduced in 1992 for the English Premier League. The score bug was introduced to America for the 1994 FIFA World Cup, and spread to other sports from there. Fox's newly-minted NFL coverage later in 1994 really helped popularize it, though it was quite controversial at the time and other networks took a while to start using them. Monday Night Football games have only featured them since 1997.
• The term "monster truck" was coined in 1982 to describe Bob Chandler's Bigfoot truck, which was also the first such truck to crush cars.
• The triathlon - swimming, then cycling and finishing with running - was first run in 1974 (although in a different method to current competitions). As a result, the sport's governing body wasn't created until 1989 - the year before being used as a demonstration sport during the 1990 Commonwealth Games.
• Team sports - like hockey and netball - were only introduced to the Commonwealth Games in 1998.
• Riding aside / riding sidesaddle is often seen as ladylike and high-class, usually connected to the belief that women riding astride would break their hymens. This is a zigzagging case—while women have certainly ridden aside or astride for thousands of years, it was rarely mandatory. Most women who rode aside would have been sitting sideways in a normal saddle for formal occasions, and riding astride for regular/daily riding. The alternative was using various contraptions that ranged from useless to outright dangerous at anything faster than a walk, which is why most women just didn't ride aside if they could help it. The first SAFE prototypical sidesaddle is often agreed to be invented by Catherine de' Medici in the mid/late 1500s... at practically the end of the medieval period. A key change for why the Victorians' insistence on women riding aside was because their narrower skirts and hoops weren't nearly as practical as the roomier skirts of prior centuries, and Victorian women would have had to hike up their skirts far too much for decency.
• Greco-Roman wrestling dates to the 1840s at the earliest, its name being a prime example of an invented tradition. It bears little resemblance to any known wrestling tradition from ancient Greece or Rome.
• The Philadelphia Eagles' fight song, "Fly, Eagles, Fly" was written in 1955, but it wasn't till 1998 that they added the spelling chant, "E-A-G-L-E-S, Eagles!" to the end of the song (the chant itself is believed to have originated during the 1980s).

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