<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle">Baseball’s rules and rituals are much as they were fifty years ago and anything to win still goes.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">Introduced not quite a century ago under a name born for oblivion, the game of tennis promises to last forever</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Pilgrims and Puritans, naturally, hated the water, but by the turn of the century certain pleasures had been rediscovered</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Riding to hounds has been as much of a sport among well-to-do Americans as among the British gentry</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> It was fifty years ago that Bobby Jones won his Grand Slam, making him the only man who ever has—or probably ever will—conquer the “Impregnable Quadrilateral” of golf</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">Was it science, sport, or the prospect of a round-the-world railroad that sent the tycoon off on his costly Alaskan excursion?</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> In 1984 Los Angeles will once again play host to the Summer Olympics. It’s got to be easier that the first time. That was just fifty years ago, when, in the teeth of the Great Depression, a group of local boosters boldly set about planning</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The largest Gothic cathedral in the Western Hemisphere has the strangest stained-glass windows in the world</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">It was a hundred years ago, and the game has changed a good deal since then. But there are plenty of people who still insist that cranky old Hoss Radbourn was the finest pitcher ever.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Forget football, basketball, and all the other sports that are artificially regulated by the clock. Only baseball can truly reveal our national character. Only baseball can light our path to the future. </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> The Florida Speed Carnivals at Daytona lasted less than a decade, but they saw American motoring grow from rich man’s sport to national obsession</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck">In 1904, the Olympics took place for only the third time in the modern era. The place was St. Louis, where a world’s fair was providing all the glamour and glitter and excitement that anyone could ask. The games, on the other hand, were something else.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">SMU isn’t playing this season; men on the team were accepting money from alumni. That’s bad, of course; but today’s game grew out of even-greater scandal.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Remember the excitement of the 1924 Olympics in <em><span class="typestyle"> Chariots of Fire</span></em>? That was nothing compared with what the U.S. rugby team did to the French at those games. </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">When you’re lining up a putt on the close-cropped green, there are ghosts at your shoulder. More than any other game, golf is played with a sense of tradition.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">That’s what everyone agreed. Jim Thorpe was at the 1912 Olympics, but legend had to make him even more, and draconian rules had to take it all away</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><lead_in> A CENTURY AGO,</lead_in> a tiny American team arrived in Athens drained from an awful journey and proposing to take on the champions of Europe with, among other handicaps, a discus thrower who had never seen a real discus.</span></p>
<p>TR’s zeal for athletics helped lead to the emergence of modern sports in America, including interscholastic competition, the NCAA, the World Series, and the first Olympics in the U.S.</p>
