Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (25 page)

PEERLESS

In 2011 Elena Kagan was called in for jury duty in Washington, D.C. She dutiully showed up at court and sat with the other prospective jurors, but ultimately wasn’t chosen to sit. She then returned to her day job...as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tlacatlaolli
was an Aztec stew made of corn and human flesh.

HUT, HUT, HIKE, EH?

If you’re American, you’ll find these Canadian football rules strange...and strangely familiar. If you’re Canadian, you may also learn a thing or two about “the other NFL
.”

B
ACKGROUND
The National Football League is the only one of the “Big 4” American sports leagues that doesn’t have any teams in Canada. That’s because Canada has its own football tradition, with its own league and its own rules.

In the 1860s, an army garrison from Great Britain, which still controlled Canada, introduced American football to rugby players at Montreal’s McGill University. They’d picked it up in the United States, where the game’s popularity was beginning to grow at northeastern colleges, such as Yale and Princeton. By the 1920s, both sports—rugby and American football—were being played by the same groups of people at Canadian colleges. From those two football games a new, third style of football developed: Canadian football, which combined the fast-paced, pass-and-kick style of rugby with many of the rules and structure of American football. It eventually replaced professional Canadian rugby altogether.

An official pro league—the Canadian Football League—was formed in 1958. Initially, there were eight teams in the league, but most of them were far older than the sport of Canadian football. For example, two current CFL teams, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, were founded as rugby teams around 1870. Today, Canadian football is the second-most-popular spectator sport in Canada (behind hockey). It’s played throughout the country—but only in that country—at youth, high school, senior, and semi-pro levels to boot.

THE RULES

If you watched a Canadian football game and knew nothing about it, it would look fairly similar to an American football game...but just slightly off. For example:

• The field.
The playing field in the CFL is bigger. An NFL field is 100 yards long and 53 yards wide, while in the CFL it’s 110 yards long and 65 yards wide, making for a looser style of play with more throwing of the ball than handoffs. The goalposts are in a different place as well. In the NFL, the “uprights” are placed at the back of the end zones, while in the CFL they’re right on the goal line.

NFL stars who played in the CFL: Doug Flutie, Ricky Williams, and Joe Theismann.

• Players.
CFL teams get one more player than NFL teams: 12 vs.11. The extra man is usually employed as a backfielder. On offense, Canadian teams employ two
slotbacks
, instead of one tight end as Americans do. On defense, the formation includes two halfbacks and one safety, instead of the single American safety.

• The line of scrimmage.
In the NFL, the offensive and defensive lines line up just 11 inches apart from each other—the length of the football. In Canada, a full yard is mandated, which means that more teams take a risk on the last down.

• Downs.
Canadian football uses three downs, not four. And the amount of time allotted for a play is just 20 seconds, half of what the NFL allows. Combined with the three downs, it makes for a faster-paced game.

• Scoring.
Scoring in the CFL is the same as in American football, with the exception of the “rouge point.” One point is awarded to the kicking team when they miss a field goal or punt the football and the receiving team opts to take a knee rather than attempt to run it down the field. A rouge point is also awarded if the ball goes out of bounds in the end zone during a kick.

MONEY

In the 1950s and early ’60s, the NFL and CFL were pretty much on par financially. That’s because the main source of revenue was admission to games. TV changed all that. The NFL now has multibillion-dollar deals to air its games. Canada, with about one-tenth the population of the United States, has fewer TV outlets, which means less TV revenue. And that affects player salaries: The average NFL player makes about $1.1 million a year. The average CFL player makes about $50,000, and many have to get off-season jobs to make ends meet. The highest-paid CFL player ever: Rocket Ismail. In 1991 the Toronto Argonauts drafted the Notre Dame star and offered him $18.2 million for four seasons, more than any player had ever been offered in CFL
or
NFL history to that point. (The Argonauts got around the $3.8 million salary cap by using a “marquee player” exemption loophole. They also got a huge cash transfusion that year from the team’s new owners—hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and movie star John Candy.)

Long distance: The first telephone answering machine was 3 feet tall.

Huge TV revenues led the CFL to try to expand into the United States in 1993, with the addition of the Sacramento Gold Miners. They added more teams the following year—in football-friendly cities that had no NFL team, such as Birmingham, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Memphis, Miami, and Shreveport—but getting Americans interested turned out to be an uphill battle because the CFL was essentially introducing them to a new sport. The Baltimore Stallions went to the Grey Cup champion ship finals in 1994 and won the cup in 1995. Nevertheless, all American teams were shuttered that year, thanks to poor attendance and no TV contract.

OTHER QUIRKS

• More games. The CFL’s regular season is 18 games vs. the NFL’s 16. The season runs from June to November (in America it runs from September to February). And since there are only eight teams in the CFL, each team plays all the others at least twice.

• NFL games are almost all played on Sunday. In Canada, they’re played throughout the week but primarily on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And just as Thanksgiving in the U.S. features a double-feature of televised football games, Labor Day in Canada offers football on TV all day.

• In the NFL, cheerleaders are hired individually by each team, which controls budgets and public appearances. In the CFL, the cheerleaders are employees of a separate umbrella organization: Canadian Football League Cheerleading.

• Only player in both the Canadian Football Hall of Fame and the American Pro Football Hall of Fame: Warren Moon, quarterback of the Edmonton Eskimos from 1978 to ’83 and then an NFL star (primarily with the Houston Oilers) from 1984 to 2000.

•
Jackie Robinson, the first black player in Major League Baseball, had played for the minor league Montreal Royals in the mid-1940s, and he was accepted and well liked there. Believing that the city—and football—was ready for black players, in 1946 Montreal Alouettes boss Lew Hayman hired Herb Trawick. The NFL didn’t draft any black players until 1949.

Spudnik: Potatoes have been grown in space.

THEY WENT THATAWAY

Some famous people aren’t just remarkable for how they lived, but also for how they died. Take these folks, for example
.

K
ING ALEXANDER OF GREECE (1893–1920)
Claim to Fame:
Alexander reigned from 1917 to 1920. He was a first cousin of Prince Philip of England.

Cause of Death:
Killed by monkeys

Details:
On October 2, 1920, the king was walking his dog through the Royal Garden in Athens—now called the National Garden—when one of the monkeys that lived there attacked the dog. (Some sources claim it was the dog that attacked the monkey.) When Alexander tried to separate them with a stick, a second monkey came to the defense of the first, and the king was badly bitten by both. He died from his wounds three weeks later.

Note:
Alexander became king during World War I after his father, King Constantine I, was forced off the throne because of his pro-German sympathies. After Alexander’s death, Constantine returned to the throne, making Alexander a rare example of a king who succeeded his father and was succeeded by him as well. Constantine abdicated a second time in 1922, this time for good.

JOHN A. ROEBLING (1806–69)

Claim to Fame:
The engineer who designed the Brooklyn Bridge

Cause of Death:
Killed by the Brooklyn Bridge

Details:
On June 28, 1869, Roebling was standing on a dock surveying the location of the tower on the Brooklyn side. When an approaching ferry pressed up against the dock, Roebling got his right foot caught between the boat and the dock and his toes were badly crushed. They were amputated later that same day. Roebling refused further medical treatment, perhaps contributing to his developing
tetanus
, a disease caused when a wound is infected by a strain of bacteria commonly found in dirt. Tetanus can be fatal, and in Roebling’s case, it was. After a week of suffering terrible seizures, he died on July 22.

Jack Haley, who played the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
(1939) and famously sang “If I Only Had a Heart,” died in 1979. Cause: heart attack.

Note:
Roebling’s son Washington, who took over supervision of the project after his father’s death, was nearly killed by the Brooklyn Bridge as well. Long hours spent in
caissons
, the pressurized underwater chambers used to construct the bridge’s foundation, left him severely disabled by decompression sickness, more commonly known as “the bends.” For the remaining decade that it took to finish the bridge, he supervised the project from his house via intermediaries, rarely returned to the job site, and did not attend the bridge’s opening in 1883.

MARCUS GARVEY (1887–1940)

Claim to Fame:
Leader of a New York-based “Back-to-Africa” movement in the 1910s and 1920s

Cause of Death:
Killed by his own obituary

Details:
Garvey, who was born in Jamaica, believed that people of African descent would never win equal rights in majority-white countries and felt it made more sense for them to return to Africa. His views made him a controversial figure even within the African-American community. By 1940 he had long since been deported from the United States as an “undesirable alien” and was living in London. After he suffered a stroke that January, some newspapers mistakenly reported that he’d died, prompting one prominent African-American newspaper, the
Chicago Defender
, to run a full, and very unflattering, obituary. On May 18, Garvey read it and was so upset by its negative tone that he suffered a second stroke and died three weeks later, on June 10, 1940.

JASPER NEWTON “JACK” DANIEL (1846–1911)

Claim to Fame:
The distiller who created Jack Daniel’s Whiskey

Cause of Death:
An unsafe safe

Details:
Daniel had a terrible time remembering the combination to his office safe (no word on whether whiskey was a factor), and it was usually his nephew’s job to open it. One morning, however, Daniel came in to work early and his nephew wasn’t there. Daniel tried to open the safe himself and got so frustrated in the attempt that he kicked it, striking it so hard that he broke his toe. The toe became infected, and he developed
septicemia
, or blood poisoning, which killed him on October 10, 1911. Daniel’s last words (according to the distillery): “One last drink, please.”

MIKE EDWARDS (1948–2010)

Claim to Fame:
Cellist and founding member of the rock group Electric Light Orchestra. Edwards was with ELO from 1972 to 1975.

Caused of Death:
Killed by a bale of hay

Details:
In the United States, bales of hay are often rectangular in shape and don’t weigh much more than 100 pounds. In the United Kingdom, the bales are wheel-shaped and can weigh more than 1,300 pounds. In September 2010, Edwards happened to be driving past a farm in Devon, in Southwest England, when a farmer lost control of just such a bale. It rolled down a slope, bounced over a 15-foot hedge, and demolished the cab of the van Edwards was driving, killing him instantly.

MATTHEW VASSAR (1792–1868)

Claim to Fame:
A wealthy brewer, in 1861 Vassar donated $408,000 and 200 acres of land to found a college for women in Poughkeepsie, New York. Thanks to his generosity, Vassar College was the first such institution that was comparable to men’s colleges in terms of funding and equipment.

Cause of Death:
Dropped dead while delivering his farewell speech

Details:
Vassar turned 76 in 1868, the year he decided to step back from his close involvement in the college. On June 23, 1868, he made his final speech to the board of trustees. One topic he planned to cover: his gratitude that none of the students or faculty had become ill or died during the school’s first three years of instruction. According to the minutes of the meeting, Vassar was eleven pages into the speech “when he failed to pronounce a word which was upon his lips, dropped the papers in his hand, fell back in his chair insensible, and died at precisely ten minutes to 12 o’clock p.m. by the clock in the College Tower.” After a prayer, the trustees adjourned until 3:00 p.m. and then reassembled to listen to a trustee finish reading the speech.