Obscure sports trivia

Herman Beam, a predecessor of guys like Buddy Arrington and J.D. McDuffie.

 

Yep. Oddly enough, my wife was college softball teammates with McDuffie's daughter at Louisburg.
If I've heard the story once, I'd heard it a thousand times: My dad always talks about how Herman would always have the best looking bananas but never offer him one while he worked on his old shitty race cars.

 

The longtime - i.e., diehard and/or real stock car fans - need to keep McDuffie's story alive. How much would he have benefitted from softer walls and better safety features at Watkins Glen?

 

That crash was weird, though. He went into a tire wall (which was a precursor to softer walls), the car kind of bounced, flipped upside down, and dropped straight down on its top. It wasn't like he slammed right into concrete.

 

Given how long ago it happened, I'm guessing J.D. wasn't wearing a full-faced helmet. In all fairness, though, the way I envisioned that McDuffie was killed that a full-faced helmet might not have helped. ESPN had to announce that he was dead during the broadcast ... we had some clue when you see Jimmy Means quickly climb out of his vehicle, check on McDuffie and calling for help on the latter's behalf.

 

Greasy Neale is another of the Hof guys. Hit me around 4 this morning. Can’t think of who the seventh might be.

no idea on the punting pitcher

 

I read at the time or was told the impact that actually killed him wasn't the first hit but the drop and roof collapse. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what I remember.

 

I’ll guess the punter as Clay Parker, who pitched for the Yankees for a bit and I know he punted at LSU (always thought the barefoot guys were cool), so maybe he also punted in one strike game?

 

I’m not much of a NASCAR fan, so I looked up McDuffie. He raced 27 years, never won a race and only had one pole. Talk about perseverance.

 

I thought it was Neale, too, but when I looked him up on the Hall of Fame site, it said his last season as a player was 1919 and the NFL was founded in 1920.

 

Then I found an old Sports Illustrated story in which Neale told a story about playing for a local Ohio team that beat a couple of NFL teams in 1930. But that team -- the Ironton Tanks -- was not a member of the NFL.

 

Neale gets an asterisk, like Hubbard. From Wiki: He played eight years in Major League Baseball, mostly for the Cincinnati Reds, from 1916 to 1924. He also played for the Dayton Triangles in 1918 before the NFL was established. He later served as the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles from 1941 to 1950 and has been inducted into both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame. However, he never appeared as a player in an official NFL game.

Not Clay.