On August 20, several notable events in sports history have taken place. One of the most significant dates back to 1920, when the American Professional Football Association was formed with Jim Thorpe as its president. This league would eventually become known as the National Football League.
Other milestones recorded on this date include the Chicago White Sox acquiring “Shoeless” Joe Jackson from Cleveland in 1915, and Lou Gehrig hitting his final career grand slam in 1938. In baseball, Tommy Brown became the youngest Major League Baseball player to hit a home run in 1945 at just over seventeen years old. Bob Keegan threw a no-hitter for the White Sox against the Washington Senators in 1957.
In track and field, the first women’s competition took place in Paris’s Pershing Stadium in 1922. Nolan Ryan threw a pitch clocked at 100.4 miles per hour in 1974, then considered the fastest ever recorded.
Dwight Gooden achieved a pitching milestone by recording more than two hundred strikeouts in each of his first two MLB seasons, becoming the first pitcher to do so in 1985.
Golf history was made twice by Tiger Woods: he won three majors including back-to-back PGA Championships from 2000 through 2006. Usain Bolt set a new world record of nineteen-point-three-zero seconds in the men’s two-hundred-meter race during the Beijing Olympics of 2008.
These moments reflect some of sports’ historic achievements and milestones that occurred on August 20 across different years and disciplines.
