Sports Then and Now

Jack Youngblood played the 1979 NFC Playoffs with a broken leg.

A serious leg injury, particularly one in a key joint like the ankle or knee, reduces mobility to almost zero and brings an intense wave of pain. To study some of the technical details, check out https://www.vivehealth.com/blogs/resources/broken-ankle. Yet despite the often crippling nature of these injuries, a number of past and present athletes have stayed on the field when everything was on the line.

Shun Fujimoto, 1976 Montreal Olympics

Fujimoto was a 26-year-old Japanese gymnast when he competed with the national team at the XXI Olympiad. These were the first games played under the International Olympic Committee’s new rules that limited the number of participants. The clear intent was to level the playing field for smaller nations by keeping some prominent gymnasts from countries like the Soviet Union on the sidelines. Nevertheless, the USSR was still favored to win gold in the men’s team competition.

After taking a nasty spill during his floor exercise, Fujimoto fractured his knee. Nevertheless, he competed in both the pommel horse and the rings, earning marks of 9.6 and 9.7. At the end of his rings routine, his dismount aggravated his injury and doctors said that he risked permanent disability if he did not withdraw. Japan won the team gold over the Soviet Union by 0.4 points.

At the time, Fujimoto said that he stayed in so he would not let his team down. Some time later, when someone asked him if he would do it again, Fujimoto flatly replied “No.”

Jack Youngblood, 1979 NFL Playoffs

Coming off a year in which he had a career-high eighteen sacks for the Los Angeles Rams, Youngblood broke his leg in the second quarter of the Rams’ first playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys. But he stayed in the lineup for the team’s entire playoff run that went all the way to Super Bowl XIV. Later in that playoff game, Youngblood came up with a critical sack of quarterback Roger Staubach in the game’s waning moments, with the Rams desperately clinging to a 21-19 lead.

Youngblood was in the starting lineup for the Rams’ 31-19 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers. He even played in the meaningless Pro Bowl on that same broken leg, but that might have been because the 1980 version was the first Pro Bowl to be played in Hawaii. Read the rest of this entry →

If you have a passion for sports, blogging is a great way for you to share your knowledge and insight with the world. Whether you want to blog for fun or profit, avid fans all over the world are looking for new sites to get their fix of sporting news and opinions, so there has never been a better time to join the blogosphere. A successful website could generate income or even lead to a career in sports journalism or game analysis; so, to help you get started, here’s how to create a winning sports blog.

Choose a Topic

Before you start writing posts, you need to choose a topic for your blog, such as your favorite sport, team or player. It’s important to identify a niche target audience early on, so try to be as specific as possible instead covering all sports.

For example, if you want to start a blog about American football, you could write about your favorite NFL player or create a website dedicated to their team’s victories. Sticking to a single blog topic means you’re always writing relevant content that your readers are interested in rather than trying to cover all bases.

Find a Blogging Platform

If you’re new to blogging, free software like WordPress is easy to use and requires very little technical know-how. However, there are two ways to set up a website using WordPress: you can visit WordPress.com which is free to use but has a lot of limitations, or you can use WordPress.org which gives you self-hosting and complete ownership over your site. WordPress is a great tool, but it’s not the only platform on the market. There are other free blogging sites too, like Blogger, Wix, and Tumblr, so do your research before you decide which one is right for you. Read the rest of this entry →