Hazardous History with Henry Winkler 1x4

1. Did you know that there was once a time

2. when golf was dangerous, and airborne?

3. Each time they were going up in these planes,

4. they were risking their lives,

5. maybe even the lives of the other people on the course.

6. Do you remember when playing hockey

7. could get you arrested?

8. The next day, Boston's homicide squad informed Shore

9. that if Bailey doesn't pull through,

10. he will be arrested and charged with manslaughter.

11. Or when shooting real pigeons

12. could win you an Olympic medal?

13. It really shows how slapdash

14. those early modern Olympics were.

15. It turns out to be a really messy event.

16. It literally is a bloody mess.

17. These are the things we used to do for fun, for money,

18. or maybe out of boredom,

19. that we'll never see again.

20. Were they dangerous? Certainly.

21. Deadly? Occasionally.

22. But boy, wasn't it exciting.

23. Americans love to move fast and compete.

24. So when cars began to replace horses as a way to get around,

25. some folks thought, "Wait a minute.

26. What if we replace them in the sport of polo, too?

27. What could go wrong?"

28. Almost every sport has its origins in some real danger.

29. Polo seems pretty dangerous,

30. with horses flying around

31. and jockeys with mallets

32. swinging them as hard as they can at balls.

33. But just, like, imagine this in a car.

34. If you're anxious to risk life and limb,

35. here's an ideal game: auto polo.

36. We're gonna take this sport from the UK,

37. which is so prestigious,

38. and we're just gonna redneck it down.

39. We're gonna play polo out of our cars.

40. Great idea.

41. Auto polo is invented by Ralph "Pappy" Hankinson in 1911.

42. He is a Ford dealer in Topeka, Kansas

43. looking for a way to sell more Fords.

44. Hankinson comes up with a promotional idea

45. modeled along the lines of horse polo,

46. but instead of riding a horse,

47. people will be driving one of these new Model T Fords.

48. This idea really came to Pappy

49. because other people were doing it.

50. They were just playing around in their farms,

51. and Pappy is really the one that comes up with the idea

52. to make formalized rules around it and call it auto polo.

53. In auto polo, you have the driver,

54. and then in the passenger seat, you have the mallet man.

55. And that person's job is to whack a large ball

56. about the size of a basketball into a goal

57. while traveling very fast,

58. leading to accidents, crashes, all kinds of mayhem.

59. Just think about this, right?

60. The car's trying to go as fast as it can

61. to get to the ball, just like a horse would in polo,

62. but what if the driver slams on the brakes?

63. The mallet man is going flying,

64. but they're flying right into a field

65. with a bunch of other cars.

66. People refer to baseball as the national pastime,

67. boxing as the sweet science,

68. but do you know what auto polo is known as?

69. The undertakers' delight.

70. If they were doing it today, I would go and watch it.

71. A couple of drunk, good old boys

72. in a couple of pickup trucks

73. with some mallets, whacking up ball around,

74. causing all sorts of mayhem and destruction.

75. Almost overnight,

76. auto polo goes from country fields to the big city.

77. By 1912, just one year after Hankinson starts the thing,

78. they're doing auto polo in Madison Square Garden

79. in New York City.

80. They started drawing crowds of 5,000 people

81. because they would show up for the competition,

82. but they would stay for the carnage.

83. In the course of a typical match, cars roll over,

84. they crash into the stands,

85. players get ejected from the cars,

86. they're suffering tremendous head injuries,

87. some cases losing limbs.

88. They got so bad that they started having doctors

89. and nurses as a part of the teams.

90. At one auto polo match in Buffalo in 1916,

91. this car kind of bucks and it throws out both of the players

92. and then it crosses the street

93. because it's busted through one fence

94. and then goes through another fence

95. where eventually the car stops.

96. These kinds of crazy outcomes are what the fans expect.

97. They wanna see wild things, they wanna see danger,

98. they wanna see damage.

99. It doesn't take long for the cars

100. to start getting modified to be better competitors,

101. so they might chop the top

102. or put like a ramming bar on the front.

103. I mean, it became like a demolition derby,

104. but some dudes hanging out the side.

105. And it's not just the players in harm's way.

106. You get a point for each goal,

107. but if you run over the referee, you only lose half a point.

108. Can you imagine a sport that doesn't punish you

109. for hitting the ref with a car?

110. And that's why fans absolutely love it.

111. Here's a deadly sport

112. in which the cars are getting destroyed

113. 'cause they're hitting each other,

114. they're running over refs,

115. people are losing body parts 'cause they're getting clipped.

116. And as fun as that is to watch,

117. it's a nightmare financially.

118. Obviously, the danger in this sport

119. is what led to it going away, right?

120. No. It was that people were like,

121. "Yeah, I really don't wanna smash up my car.

122. It's really expensive."

123. There's the irony.

124. Auto polo met its end by the 1930s,

125. a victim of high repair costs and the Great Depression.

126. But one sport that survived for centuries is golf.

127. And there was a time

128. when some tried to give the classic game

129. a highly unusual upgrade that made it more extreme.

130. So it's right after the First World War

131. and people are just enjoying themselves again.

132. People are getting out there having a little fun with golf.

133. It's regained some popularity

134. now that things are a little more calm.

135. They start building golf courses everywhere,

136. people are learning how to play golf,

137. it becomes a go-to sport.

138. But, this isn't great for rich people

139. who want golf to still be exclusive.

140. That made the kind of upper class folks feel like,

141. "Hmm, now it's everyone's game.

142. How do we do something different?

143. How can we make it a little more dangerous,

144. a little more difficult?"

145. In the 1920s,

146. there is still one thing the common people don't have.

147. Private planes.

148. Enter aerial golf.

149. The first iteration of aerial golf

150. was invented at a golf course

151. in Westbury, Long Island in New York.

152. This is the golden age of massive estates.

153. Yellow Rolls-Royces.

154. This is the Long Island of Jay Gatsby.

155. This is a weird, weird sport,

156. and I feel like only the excessively wealthy

157. could think this was anything close to normal.

158. Aerial golf and regular golf

159. are actually incredibly similar.

160. They're both played on regulation golf courses.

161. They both include keeping track of score,

162. except for one critical difference.

163. Your first shot on the course is dropped from an airplane

164. flying at 500 feet above.

165. So, one person is down on the ground,

166. their partner would go up in an airplane,

167. and they're gonna drop a golf ball

168. from a minimum of 500 feet.

169. Golf balls are flying out of the air,

170. and when they finally hit to the ground,

171. provided no one's been, you know, hit in the noggin,

172. the second player on the team,

173. then he plays to the hole with it.

174. I'm a big fan of boneheaded ideas.

175. They're fun to do, they're fun to play around with.

176. I think that when you get to wasting all that fuel,

177. wasting all that technology to just drop a ball down,

178. I think that that's ill-conceived.

179. But the elite love their new game so much,

180. they decide to expand the scope of aerial golf even further.

181. Once they got a little bored with this,

182. they realized they had to turn up,

183. make it a little more exciting,

184. and that's where they came up

185. with the nine-hole course special.

186. Rather than flying over one golf course,

187. let's have our holes spread out,

188. except each hole is a different airport.

189. Nine hole courses made up of nine separate air fields

190. are created.

191. They decide to move and elevate aerial golf,

192. flying a plane to the next airport, playing there,

193. flying to the next airport, playing there.

194. You have to think about it, like,

195. whose air traffic controlling all of these planes,

196. and how many players are playing

197. and how many planes are flying?

198. That's insane.

199. On paper, this looks stupid,

200. but in practice, it's actually really stupid.

201. Each time they were going up in these planes,

202. they were risking their lives,

203. maybe even the lives of the other people on the course.

204. In the end, safety concerns are actually

205. what end up grounding the game of aerial golf.

206. You had planes buzzing at 50 feet,

207. you had all this increased air traffic around airports.

208. So finally, aerial golf was put to rest in 1930.

209. Aerial golf might not have lasted long,

210. but it was popular enough for famous figures,

211. like New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia

212. and baseball player Ty Cobb to play a few rounds.

213. Today, football is the most popular sport in America.

214. The whole family can head to the stadium on a Sunday,

215. have wings, a soda, and feel the rush of excitement.

216. But in the earliest days of football,

217. the atmosphere was a whole lot different.

218. American football originates in the 1860s

219. on college campuses,

220. where young college men are sort of combining

221. basically rugby, soccer,

222. to form what we now think of as football.

223. Football in this time period

224. was very different from today's game.

225. There was no forward pass.

226. It was very much in the trenches,

227. people slamming their bodies into each other.

228. They developed plays with names

229. like the Princeton V and the Flying Wedge,

230. and these plays are essentially just one team's players

231. running at full force at the other team's players.

232. And that's when the brutality of the game

233. really starts to come alive.

234. We're putting all our weight together,

235. increasing the power and the velocity

236. with which this collision's gonna happen,

237. wearing nothing more than a sweatshirt and some pants.

238. These max-momentum plays weren't just allowed.

239. They were encouraged.

240. Because of this, guys are getting injured,

241. they're getting disfigured, they're getting crippled,

242. or worse.

243. These players are playing

244. without, really, any kind of protection.

245. What little protection they have is extremely flimsy.

246. It's horsehide,

247. and they're stuffing textbooks down their uniforms.

248. They're certainly not wearing helmets.

249. The grudge matches between Harvard and Yale

250. make national headlines for their violence.

251. So in 1894,

252. Harvard and Yale go head to head

253. in what's considered the Hampton Park Bloodbath.

254. They would lock arm in arm

255. and just ram at each other head first.

256. You have a guy that gets his nose broken,

257. you have a guy break his collarbone,

258. and another guy gets knocked out during a timeout.

259. They think he might be dead.

260. This was what was not only acceptable,

261. it was what was required.

262. The president of Harvard,

263. in an editorial titled "The Evils of Football,"

264. declares the game more brutal than cockfighting,

265. bull fighting, and prizefighting.

266. The world heavyweight boxing champion at the time,

267. John L. Sullivan, says, quote,

268. "Football, there's murder in that game."

269. Imagine how brutal it must be

270. for a guy who punches people in the head for a living

271. to think that sport is too dangerous.

272. At one point,

273. The Chicago Tribune publishes a headline,

274. "Football Year's Death Harvest,"

275. and in that article, they list 19 kids

276. who've been killed playing football that year.

277. We're talking roughly three decades

278. past the culmination of the Civil War,

279. and here were young men going to die not on a battlefield,

280. but on a football field.

281. So at this point in the game,

282. editorials are calling for the sport of football

283. to be abolished.

284. So think about that.

285. Decades before the NFL comes together,

286. football could be banned in America.

287. We wouldn't have the Super Bowl,

288. we wouldn't have the Playoffs, none of it.

289. It could be erased from history.

290. It actually takes President Teddy Roosevelt

291. to save the game.

292. There's 18, 19-year-olds losing their lives,

293. and you have to have the president say,

294. "We have to clean this game up.

295. We have to get a hold of this game

296. or it's gonna have to go away."

297. He invites all the heads of every school

298. to Washington, D.C. and says,

299. "You gotta clean up the rules and get better equipment."

300. And of all people, it's the Rough Rider himself,

301. Teddy Roosevelt, who finds ways to modify this sport,

302. so that young men could play the game, enjoy the game,

303. and still go home at the end of it.

304. The dangers in football have never been in doubt,

305. but America's pastime, baseball,

306. is known as a kinder gentleman's game.

307. But it wasn't always that way.

308. In its early days, baseball isn't just aggressive,

309. it's downright dangerous.

310. Everything was done bare-handed.

311. Balls would be coming at you at enormous speed,

312. and you were expected to either catch, deflect,

313. or bat away the ball with your bare hands.

314. Even in the latter half of the 1800s

315. when we had professional baseball,

316. if someone wanted to wear a protective piece of gear,

317. you'd be laughed at.

318. People in the stand would razz them

319. and say they were cowardly and unmanly,

320. but they actually needed protection.

321. These guys were just getting murdered

322. by these line drives.

323. They would have bruises, broken fingers, broken hands.

324. The fielders aren't the only ones in danger

325. in old-time baseball.

326. The original rules have a bit of dodgeball written in.

327. You could throw someone out

328. by actually hitting them with the baseball itself.

329. Now, this would be considered assault.

330. Back then, no, that was just part of the game.

331. They called it soaking or plugging,

332. wherein you could hit the opposing player

333. before they reached base safe.

334. Imagine getting, you know, banged in the head by a ball.

335. You're gonna see blood on the field.

336. It had to look pretty rough as the day went on.

337. Right now, if you throw a pitch near somebody,

338. it ends up in a fight.

339. I can't imagine in today's game how many ambulances,

340. how many fights there would be.

341. By 1845,

342. soaking is eliminated from the game,

343. though not everyone loves the rule change.

344. Fans aren't all happy about this.

345. Some players aren't either.

346. They think that it takes away from the manliness

347. or the rough-and-tumble nature of the sport,

348. But fans don't need to worry.

349. With this rule change, something lost is something gained.

350. Because you can no longer suffer the possibility

351. of being hit with a ball,

352. the type of ball that's used moves to a much harder ball,

353. which is the hard ball that we now know today.

354. As balls become more tightly wound,

355. the velocities imbued in these balls

356. create legit danger to the catcher.

357. Originally, catchers defended behind the plate

358. without padding, without gloves, without masks.

359. They're suffering broken fingers, broken fingernails,

360. bruises all over their hands.

361. They would be hit kind of all over their bodies.

362. If catchers are wearing any kind of padding,

363. they're using things like sponges, or raw meat, or hay

364. to kind of protect themselves from being hit with the ball.

365. In 1870, a catcher named Doug Allison

366. cites he's had enough of it.

367. He is sick of the injuries he has incurred behind the plate.

368. So Allison takes to the field for the first time

369. with the first glove, a buckskin mitten,

370. to protect his hand while he's behind the plate.

371. Allison's so-called glove

372. looks less like a piece of sporting equipment

373. and more like something you might wear to go sledding.

374. And it gets an interesting nickname around the league,

375. the sissy mitten.

376. So brutal and relentless are the taunts.

377. Rather than continue to utilize his sissy mitten,

378. Doug Allison continues the season without it.

379. Baseball continues to be played without gloves

380. until one man takes a stand In 1877.

381. Ultimately, it took Albert Spalding,

382. one of the best pitchers to ever do it, to say,

383. "No, I'm gonna protect my hand."

384. And because he was a hero of the game,

385. a lights out pitcher for the Chicago White Stockings,

386. no one says anything.

387. No one's gonna mock the king.

388. He was the guy who made it cool for everyone else.

389. Like, "If Spalding's gonna wear a mitt,

390. well then, I'll wear a mitt, too."

391. Over the next decade, gloves become commonplace,

392. and the equipment in the game keeps evolving,

393. except for one position

394. that still has no protection whatsoever.

395. Balls got harder, balls got tighter, pitchers got faster.

396. So catchers are starting to develop mitts, pads,

397. and face masks,

398. but the batter is developing nothing.

399. And in August of 1920,

400. the Yankees are playing Cleveland at the polo grounds.

401. And shortstop Ray Chapman comes to bat

402. against Yankees pitcher Carl Mays.

403. Mays hurls a spitball at Chapman.

404. It hits him square in the head.

405. People watching thought it hit his bat.

406. So much so that the pitcher fielded the ball

407. and threw it to first base.

408. While Ray Chapman laid there

409. with blood coming out of his ears,

410. and the next day, he dies in the hospital at 29 years old.

411. Unfortunately, after Ray Chapman dies,

412. we don't see players wearing any kind of protective headgear

413. for many, many years.

414. Consider this; players start wearing cups in about 1904,

415. yet helmets don't find their way into the game until 1940.

416. Says a lot about the priorities of men.

417. Helmets themselves were not mandated

418. by Major League Baseball until 1971,

419. which is crazy to think about.

420. Once helmets were a must,

421. baseball's wilder days

422. were permanently taken out of the rotation.

423. Americans have a long history with extreme sports,

424. testing boundaries and pushing our bodies to the limit.

425. But long before snowboarding, kite surfing,

426. or mountain biking,

427. one of the most hardcore sports around was extreme walking.

428. In the 19th century,

429. competitive walking takes off in America,

430. and it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

431. It's people walking for a set amount of time

432. over a set distance.

433. These are obviously not casual strolls.

434. The challenges could be something like

435. walking 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours,

436. or walking 100 miles in the course of 24 hours.

437. It's a test not only of endurance, but speed.

438. And only the hardiest hoofers

439. will make punishing journey from start to finish.

440. The events are drawing large audiences.

441. Watching people walk

442. becomes America's favorite spectator sport.

443. Even celebrities attend.

444. Future President Chester Arthur is there.

445. Famous circus performer, Tom Thumb.

446. This is the place to be seen, like prize fights today.

447. Watching competitive walking

448. sounds like torture in itself, but not as much torture

449. as these competitors put their bodies through

450. to walk days and days at a time.

451. These races are insane and they're very intense.

452. You're walking for hours on end, days on end,

453. you're getting very minimal breaks.

454. There's something called the heel-to-toe rule,

455. where one foot can't fully come off the ground

456. unless the other foot is on the ground.

457. The rules are, at no time can your feet

458. leave the pavement.

459. Judges are gonna sit and watch so that you never get to stop.

460. Just imagine how bad this could have been.

461. Would we have seen people actually fall out and die

462. in the middle of competition?

463. They're pushing themselves to win,

464. and stopping is something they can't do,

465. so they just keep going and going.

466. You're walking for literally six days.

467. I feel like this is the first version of "Survivor,"

468. the mindset that somebody would have to have.

469. When you get to that fifth day and your leg is cramping,

470. your foot is flaring up,

471. everything is going on within your body,

472. that's too hard for me.

473. That's why drag racing is my thing.

474. Five seconds, let's roll, we are out of here.

475. Now, at the time, trainers thought,

476. "What could I give my walker to really give them an edge

477. to kind of lift their spirits up?"

478. And the beverage that they reached for the most

479. was champagne.

480. But now, you've got a bunch of half-drunk walkers

481. trying to go faster than the next one.

482. I mean, what a brilliant idea.

483. Champagne, instead of like your normal sports drink.

484. The demand from spectators

485. leads to the sport being moved indoors for six-day races,

486. just in time for its first scandal.

487. The first official six-day race

488. is held in March of 1875 in New York City

489. and was actually won by Edward Payson Weston.

490. He would find himself mired in some controversy

491. a few years later

492. when it was found that he was chewing coca leaves,

493. which, obviously, is the leaf that we derive cocaine from.

494. And he is obviously getting a little bit of extra energy

495. for these walks.

496. To think this has kinda always been our nature, right?

497. Whatever it takes to win,

498. there is always those athletes

499. that are willing to push those boundaries.

500. Despite its popularity,

501. the sports heyday were short-lived

502. because something even more exciting came along

503. on two wheels.

504. Bicycles come on to the scene,

505. the increased speed and the drama of crashes,

506. and even multi-bike pileups,

507. that's what's drawing the crowds in now.

508. The infrastructure already exists,

509. the tracks and the arenas and everything.

510. So, six-day indoor bicycle racing becomes the new sport.

511. The events operate under the same formula as walking,

512. people going around in circles endlessly for six whole days.

513. These races are grueling events.

514. If you think about how difficult the Tour de France is,

515. they get breaks every day.

516. These riders have to go for as long as they possibly can,

517. as far as they possibly can over six days.

518. After one day of no rest, you're not quite yourself.

519. Two days, three days, and now, add to that,

520. you are physically exerting yourself

521. at the highest level possible.

522. This is a mental game, for sure.

523. The mental wear and tear

524. that comes from that endurance factor is extreme.

525. Now, these riders are not on the track by themselves.

526. They employ people who are called seconds

527. who act like corner men

528. who are giving them encouragement and motivation,

529. and screaming them along.

530. Like, in a boxing match,

531. they're there to speak life into them.

532. Like, "You can do this, you can keep going,

533. you can push further than you think."

534. And they also give them stimulants and other substances

535. to keep them awake and pedaling along the way.

536. So these guys are hauling ass, flying for days at a time,

537. while doped up trying to sort of keep going.

538. It's kind of like the bicycle baton death march.

539. Despite the popularity,

540. it isn't lost on everyone,

541. but the riders are pushing themselves to the edge.

542. In 1897, The New York Times coverage of a six-day race

543. compares it to torture,

544. and says it is not sport, it is brutality.

545. So the next year,

546. the state governments of Illinois and New York

547. prohibit cyclists from being on the bike more than 12 hours

548. in a 24-hour period.

549. Somehow, they rationalized that keeping cyclists on a bike

550. for half a day is somehow more humane.

551. Go figure.

552. Promoters started trying to brainstorm

553. about how could we keep the race at 24 hours.

554. So they said, "What if we made the seconds

555. eligible to race also?"

556. And it works.

557. The return of an old familiar sporting event,

558. the six-day bicycle race.

559. I mean, speeds increased,

560. distance increased, the crowds increased,

561. which means the money is increased

562. for the whole operation.

563. Five more days,

564. and the first man home becomes one of the instant rich.

565. Famously, in 1920,

566. an Australian rider by the name of Alf Goullet

567. makes $20,000.

568. Now, that may not sound like a lot,

569. but in today's money, that's the equivalent of $300,000.

570. That's more than Babe Ruth made,

571. and he knocked in 54 dingers

572. for the New York Yankees that year.

573. These guys were true celebrities and true superstars.

574. But just as endurance cycling

575. moves competitive walking off the major tracks,

576. a new technology

577. puts the brakes on bike racing's popularity.

578. By the mid-'30s, automobile racing was faster,

579. it was more dangerous, it was more thrilling.

580. As the audience dwindled,

581. so did the heyday of the brutal bike race.

582. Americans love to compete.

583. So when the Olympic Games were revived in Greece in 1896,

584. the United States was there,

585. winning more gold medals than any other country.

586. Four years later,

587. Americans headed to France for the next games,

588. where a dozen sports were added,

589. but one of them was created with an ulterior motive.

590. So, in the 1900 Paris Olympics,

591. there's a new sport introduced into the games.

592. It's called pigeon shooting.

593. Usually, when you hear pigeon shooting,

594. you imagine clay pigeons.

595. That's that little orange painted, upside down saucer

596. that can be released by a device so you can shoot them in midair.

597. But we're talking about real, live pigeons.

598. Now, how did this come about?

599. Well, Paris, at that time, had a histoplasmosis problem.

600. This was a bird-borne disease,

601. and so the Parisians realized,

602. we could kill two birds with one stone:

603. diminish the population of pigeons in Paris

604. and also to create this fun new game.

605. Here's how it works.

606. They release six pigeons 90 feet from the shooter.

607. Once a shooter misses two birds, they're eliminated.

608. The person who wins, of course,

609. is the person who kills the most birds.

610. That gets you a gold medal.

611. So apparently, anticipation had been building for this

612. because on the first day,

613. 166 people showed up to participate in the sport.

614. It really shows how slapdash

615. those early modern Olympics were

616. that it wasn't this like perfectly-organized,

617. corporate-funded event,

618. and Olympic athletes were not the global celebrities

619. that they are today.

620. And it turns out to be a really messy event.

621. It literally is a bloody mess.

622. You can imagine a group of people

623. just massacring a bunch of birds.

624. There's blood, there's feathers,

625. there's everything going on.

626. The Gold Medal goes to Leon de Lunden of Belgium,

627. who shoots 21 pigeons.

628. By the end of the competition, nearly 300 birds are dead

629. and it has made a mess of the field.

630. The event ended up being too gory for the audience,

631. for the organizers.

632. Nobody enjoyed it, and so they never did it again.

633. Pigeon shooting

634. is the first and only time in Olympic history

635. that animals are intentionally injured or killed.

636. It ends up being such a black mark in Olympic history

637. that their archives barely even mention it.

638. Pigeons are hardly the only birds

639. that we've ever used for sport,

640. including the birds that were caught up

641. in one popular, even beloved, competition

642. that would be unimaginable today.

643. It's called goose pulling and it's pure blood sport.

644. Goose pulling becomes popular in the United States

645. in the late 1700s, early 1800s, out on the frontier,

646. but it goes all the way back to 12th-century Spain.

647. So, look, it goes like this.

648. A goose is hung by its feet from a pole above a road.

649. And making this more complicated,

650. the goose's head has been greased up,

651. making it hard to grab hold of.

652. It's flapping its wings, it's shaking all about.

653. And then a cowboy's gonna hop on a horse

654. and go full throttle,

655. and try to see if he can rip the goose's head off.

656. Obviously, it's not easy to pull the head off a goose

657. that's been greased up

658. while you're riding on a horse at full gallop.

659. So typically, you're taking multiple attempts to do this.

660. Other riders are trying the same thing with the same goose.

661. It just sounds like, "We had nothing else to do,

662. and I wasn't very good at figuring out another game.

663. So we're gonna try and see

664. if we can rip the head off of a bird."

665. The person that yanks the head off the goose,

666. they are kind of the hero of the day for doing so.

667. They often will get the goose, maybe a little bit of money,

668. maybe a little bit of alcohol,

669. and then they get to take the goose home and eat it.

670. One would see goose pulling at things like county fairs.

671. So it's running races, it's wrestling,

672. and a little bit of goose pulling.

673. It was seen by people on the East Coast as a barbaric sport,

674. sort of suggested these people were barbarians.

675. Goose pulling was made illegal

676. in the United States in 1920,

677. but it's still practiced in parts of Europe today.

678. Well, kind of.

679. The live goose is now replaced by an already dead one

680. or a fake goose.

681. How exciting is ice hockey, with players

682. slamming into each other at 20 miles per hour

683. and pucks flying at five times that speed?

684. It's wild to think

685. how little protection there was in the early days.

686. The first organized hockey games

687. take place in Montreal in 1875.

688. The players wear football pants, knee-high socks,

689. wool turtlenecks, and no protective gear.

690. No helmets, nothing on their legs.

691. The purpose of anything that they're wearing

692. is to keep them warm more than anything else.

693. By the mid-1880s,

694. players begin wearing homemade shin guards

695. constructed of strips of leather reinforced with wood.

696. In hockey,

697. goalies have the most dangerous position.

698. They defend shots

699. that often reach speeds of 80 to 100 miles per hour.

700. And for decades, masks are non-existent.

701. Their faces kind of wore the scars of the game:

702. cuts, missing teeth.

703. There's a goalie by the name of Terry Sawchuk,

704. and that man, he is a tough SOB.

705. He picks up more than 400 stitches to his face,

706. including three that are to his right eyeball.

707. And then there's Montreal Canadiens goalie,

708. Jacques Plante, who, in November of 1959,

709. takes a puck to the face.

710. And he decides he's not gonna take it anymore.

711. He said, "I'm done with this. This is it.

712. How many times I've been hit in the face with a puck?"

713. They actually stitch him up on the ice,

714. which sounds crazy, but was normal for back then.

715. So after the doctors finished tending to him,

716. he goes to the locker room and he grabs a mask.

717. Now, this mask is very primitive for the time,

718. and it's actually kind of grotesque, but he's had enough.

719. He gets back on the ice and his coach says,

720. "You can't wear that, you're making us look soft.

721. You're supposed to be the tough guy."

722. But at the time,

723. there were no backup goaltenders in the NHL.

724. So he says, "Hey, I'm not going back out there

725. if you don't let me wear this mask."

726. So the coach says, "He's the only goalie I got.

727. We've gotta let him play."

728. So he goes back out

729. and he becomes the first goalie to ever wear a mask.

730. Even though goalies start wearing protection,

731. the rest of the players aren't interested.

732. The players resist helmets

733. simply because it's not a macho masculine thing to do.

734. The only reason that hockey players start to wear a helmet

735. is because of one really nasty incident.

736. During the 1933 season,

737. a game between the Bruins and the Maple Leafs

738. gets particularly violent.

739. And another player was thrown flat on his face!

740. Bruin's defenseman, Eddie Shore, gets checked,

741. and in retaliation,

742. he immediately charges toward Leaf's player Ace Bailey.

743. Shore uses his stick

744. to flip him up in the air like a ragdoll.

745. They're mixing it up,

746. and now they're going down into a heap!

747. Bailey lands on the ice, boom, square on his head.

748. Bailey is knocked out cold.

749. When he finally comes to, Shore tries to apologize to him.

750. Bailey's fine with it, saying, "It's all part of the game,"

751. before blacking out again.

752. Bailey is rushed to the hospital.

753. He has a significant skull fracture

754. and a massive, massive brain injury.

755. What a fight!

756. They even had to call in the police.

757. The next day, Boston's homicide squad informed Shore

758. that if Bailey doesn't pull through,

759. he will be arrested and charged with manslaughter.

760. Bailey comes out of his coma 10 days later,

761. but he never plays again.

762. Shore, one of the toughest guys in the game,

763. he's convinced from this incident

764. to wear a helmet for the rest of his career.

765. Despite that incident,

766. it takes until 1979 for the NHL

767. to make helmets mandatory for all the players,

768. and fighting remains a vital part of the game for decades.

769. If you fight in other sports,

770. you're probably kicked out of the game.

771. If you're fighting in real life, you might be arrested.

772. But in hockey,

773. it's accepted, maybe sometimes encouraged.

774. These boys are just settling

775. a little good-natured argument.

776. Hockey is unique among professional sports

777. because it's the only one

778. where two, four, six players can get in a brawl

779. and they're all allowed to stay in the game.

780. At the time,

781. hockey is far more brutal than it is today.

782. The reason that fighting exists

783. is because the sheer momentum and the sheer speed

784. at which these guys are moving on the ice

785. creates contact that is, in itself, inherently dangerous.

786. And because of that, it does create heightened emotions.

787. We forget that these athletes,

788. this is how they put food on the table for themselves.

789. So sometimes,

790. those emotions are gonna roll over into a fight.

791. Fighting begins declining significantly

792. starting in 2008,

793. with rule changes that emphasize skill and speed.

794. Each successive generation

795. gets less and less tolerant of fighting.

796. People came to appreciate a brand of hockey

797. that wasn't based upon fighting and brutality,

798. but on speed and finesse.

799. Scores!

800. Rodney Dangerfield once joked that he went to a fight

801. and a hockey game broke out.

802. An apt description, but fans ate up that old time,

803. hard knocks hockey.

804. The roar of the engines, the smell of the burning rubber.

805. Americans love a good car race,

806. and our need for speed didn't take long at all.

807. In the 1880s, the arrival of the first automobile

808. started our competitive juices immediately.

809. It's hard to imagine the newness of a car.

810. They come out of nowhere,

811. and people want to see them.

812. Almost as soon as we have cars, we have car races.

813. Back in the day, it was very lawless.

814. You did not have sanctioning bodies, you did not have rules.

815. By 1900, cars are able to reach a speed

816. up to 70 miles an hour,

817. and that's when the craziness of auto racing

818. really takes off.

819. This is still new technology that now,

820. people are pushing to the limits.

821. Auto racing becomes extremely dangerous.

822. So we're talking cars

823. weighing about 1,500 pounds.

824. Keep in mind, there's no safety regulations.

825. There's no seat belts.

826. There's definitely no helmet.

827. So a lot of times during the races,

828. these drivers were just getting thrown out

829. if they didn't catch on fire beforehand.

830. By the 1920s, the sport becomes so popular,

831. promoters roll out a new invention,

832. a type of racetrack called the motordrome.

833. At Altoona, Pennsylvania,

834. they got rid of the dust

835. by building a wondrous wooden saucer,

836. which became more oil-soaked and slippery.

837. Essentially, these were hastily-constructed cheap tracks

838. that were made of planking,

839. but to make it the spectacle more exciting,

840. they began making banked tracks.

841. It was pretty cool 'cause you could see all the action

842. that would be sort of contained

843. and the track could travel,

844. but it was still just as dangerous

845. as any racing was before it.

846. Because the wooden planks of a board track

847. can be disassembled and reassembled,

848. it moves around frequently to different venues,

849. which also makes it very unstable.

850. You have relatively inexperienced drivers

851. on relatively unproven pieces of machinery,

852. hurdling around a hastily-made track that would

853. sometimes disintegrate while driving on it.

854. And if it sounds scary,

855. it's because it was freaking terrifying.

856. So you also have to worry about the actual track,

857. the boards coming up and disintegrating

858. either by accidents or just by themselves.

859. So suddenly, you've got shards of wood

860. popping in your radiator or maybe in your shoulder.

861. When you're there as a spectator,

862. you'll have to keep your head on a swivel

863. of whether or not you're gonna catch a stake in the throat

864. shooting off this racetrack.

865. These races are pure pandemonium.

866. And in fact, as the speed and danger increase,

867. fans started referring to the board tracks as murder-dromes.

868. Famously, crashes would claim multiple vehicles at a time,

869. and it wasn't uncommon for a driver

870. to be ejected out of the car 20, 30 feet into the crowd,

871. or even worse,

872. run over by his own car or another vehicle

873. right there on the track.

874. To get some context to the danger,

875. in the 1920s,

876. four drivers who had won the Indy 500

877. were killed racing on board tracks.

878. These risks make board track racing

879. a huge draw,

880. even more popular than races like the Indianapolis 500.

881. Because of how dangerous the sport was,

882. board track racing was a phenomenon.

883. Famously, one year in Chicago,

884. 80,000 people show up to see a board track race

885. when only 60,000 had showed up

886. to the Indianapolis 500 the same year.

887. You would assume that safety concerns

888. is really what ultimately ended board track racing.

889. But that's not it, nobody cared about that.

890. The Great Depression sunk in,

891. and then suddenly it just wasn't feasible

892. to take these tracks apart and move them around

893. and try to have whole races with them.

894. I am glad that I was not alive in that era

895. because I would not step foot on a board track or racetrack.

896. It's insanity, honestly.

897. Looking back at our original extreme sports,

898. whether it was playing golf from an airplane,

899. or barehanded baseball,

900. or playing polo in speeding cars,

901. we didn't always play by the rules,

902. and sometimes there were no rules.

903. And that's what made our hazardous history

904. a full contact sport.