In 1947: Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians becomes the first black player to appear in the American League. Doby would join the Indians almost four months after Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke baseball’s color barrier. Doby was only a part-time player in his rookie season, but would go on to have a solid career with the Indians, White Sox and Tigers, hitting .283 lifetime with seven straight all-star game invites and two World Series appearances in 1948 and 1954.
In 1946: Two gentlemen named Jacques Helm and Louis Reard helped create what they called “four triangles of nothing.” Spring Break. Senior Week, Sports Illustrated and trips to my apartment complex pool would finally become interesting as the bikini was unveiled on a Paris runway; and it caught on in America shortly afterward. While the two-piece bathing suit had been around for centuries, it took Helm’s design and Reard’s marketing genius (as in,” lets get that thing on a model and show it off”) to help make the bikini what it is today.
In 1980: Sweden’s Bjorn Borg defeated American John McEnroe in the men’s final at Wimbledon in perhaps the most memorable and dramatic finals in tennis history (although we rank the one where Pete Sampras vomited and any of the combined 564 career professional appearances of Maria Sharapova and Anna Kournikova as personal favorites). The match not only see-sawed for five sets, it also featured a dramatic, 34-point tiebreaker in the fourth set won by McEnroe, 18-16. Borg, however, got the last laugh in the fifth, winning 8-6 and capturing a record fifth consecutive Wimbledon men’s singles title.
