On this day in 1948, an era ended, as the Negro National League officially disbanded. Jackie Robinson had played his second season in Brooklyn – Larry Doby had just finished his first full season in Cleveland as a key member of the Indians championship squad. Integration was in full swing in the bigs, and interest in Negro League baseball was plummeting. Negro League teams found themselves in an epic catch-22 – they could not protect their own players without seeming to be standing in the way of racial progress. So they stepped aside.

The Negro National League contained perhaps the most legendary of all the Negro League franchises, the Homestead Grays, a team that at one time or another boasted 12 players who are now enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame, including the black Babe Ruth, Josh Gibson (pictured above), the speedster Cool Papa Bell, and fireballing pitcher Smokey Joe Williams. The New York Black Yankees also played in the Negro National League. At the end of the 1948 season, the Black Yankees folded, while the Grays went out on a barnstorming tour. It was an unsuccessful venture, and they were forced to pack it up in 1950.

The Negro American League continued to play ball until 1958, although 1951 is considered to be the last season of record. The Indianapolis Clowns were the last Negro League team to suit up, continuing to play exhibition games into the 80’s as a sort of baseball version of the Globetrotters.

There’s been talk this month (perhaps a little too much talk) of two disgraced sprinters making a go of it in the NFL – American Justin Gatlin and Dwain Chambers of Great Britain.

Chambers is a BALCO boy, the former European champion in the 100 meters who tested positive for THG in 2003. His coach was Remi Korchemny, who is currently under investigation for his BALCO ties. Chambers returned to track and field this past summer with some success, but reportedly wants to jump ship to the NFL. He joined an NFL Europe camp at the beginning of November with the hopes of getting a tryout in the U.S. for next season.

Meanwhile, reigning Olympic champion in the 100 meters and former world-record-holder Justin Gatlin had a workout with the Houston Texans this week. This past summer, Gatlin tested positive for excessive testosterone and agreed to an eight-year ban from track and field. Gatlin’s coach, Trevor Graham, is a central BALCO figure, the inital whistle-blower of the whole sordid scandal. He is one of the dirtiest figures in recent track and field history and was banned, at long last, from USOC facilities in August.

The roids aside, these high-profile track-to-gridiron aspirations can’t help but bring to mind the greats of the genre:

BOB HAYES

Bullet Bob Hayes became the world’s fastest man at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, winning the 100m in world-record time despite the fact that he was running in borrowed spikes and occupying a mangled lane one of the track. He signed with the Cowboys at the end of that year and went on to be an All-Pro wide receiver. He was a stalwart on the Cowboys Super-Bowl-winning squad in 1971, making him the only man ever to win an Olympic gold medal and a Super Bowl ring.

RENALDO NEHEMIAH

Skeets Nehemiah was one of the greatest hurdlers in history, the first man ever to run the 110m hurdles in under 13 seconds. He held eight different hurdling world records but was prevented from winning an almost certain Olympic gold medal by the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980. In 1982, Nehemiah joined the 49ers, and he played with them for three seasons as a largely ineffective wide receiver. He returned to the track in 1986, retiring in 1991.

WILLIE GAULT

Though Gault was never quite the track star that Hayes and Nehemiah were, he was a member of a world-record 4×100 relay team while at the University of Tennessee and he also would have gone to the Moscow Games as a hurdler if not for the boycott. Gault was drafted by the Bears in 1983, and played in Chicago until 1988, when he was traded to the Raiders. He was a dangerous wideout, a constant long threat, and a combustible kick-returner. In Super Bowl XX with the Bears, he had four receptions for 129 yards. And Gault’s talents did not stop at track and football – he was also a performing ballet dancer, an Olympic-level bobsledder and a successful actor.

On November 29, 1976, the Yankees signed Reggie Jackson to a five-year contract totalling close to three million dollars. It was an epic move of the early era of free agency, and it had dire consequences – brawls, slander, hubris, hatred, not to mention two World Series titles and one very, VERY tasty candy bar.

Here at No Mas, we’re not ashamed to say that it’s the candy that really interests us, and so to commemorate this anniversary of the unofficial birth of the Bronx Zoo we invite you to check out this classic Reggie Bar TV ad, where His Reggie-ness is seriously digging his own indisputable deliciousness.

This right here is some shit. You better have been nursed on pine tar if you want to get down on this action, because we ain’t playing. This is an official No Mas Birthday Smackshizzle – The MLB Platinum Edition.

For those about to rock, some guidelines. All the suspects below were born today. First to name them all in a comment wins No Mas booty, and trust us, we are breaking out the grade-A goods, the primo gear for this late fall classic. So get into it, get involved…

On this day 21 years ago, Thanksgiving Day 1985, Ahmad Rashad proposed to Phylicia Ayers Allen on national television during halftime of a Lions/Jets game. Allen accepted, thereby cuckolding Cliff Huxtable’s pudding-pop-eating-ass and taking up with the cheesiest Black Muslim bad makeup has ever known. The duo had a child in 1986, and divorced in 2001. Evidently the breakup occurred after Ahmad discovered that the Cos wasn’t the only one with his hands in Mrs. H’s cookie jar. “It works every time,” smiled Billy Dee, and we all knew what that meant.

Motherfucking Fred Lynn. Man didn’t even warrant his OWN baseball card in 1975, and yet he went on to be the Rookie of the Year AND the A.L. MVP. What the fuck did Terry Whitfield do? And Eddie Armbrister? Other than looking a lot like George Foster, dude was useless.

On this day in 1975, Lynn was named the MVP of the American League, making him, to that point, the only rookie ever to win the award. In my book, he’s still the only man to do it – Ichiro did it in 2001, but he was a 27-year-old seasoned professional at the time.

Just as an aside, Lynn has a few other “only’’s on his resume as well – he’s the only man to win the ALCS MVP as a member of the losing team (with the Angels in 1982) and the only man ever to hit a grand slam in the All-Star Game (1983). He’s also the only man, with his fellow outfield-mate and borderline Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice, to ever make me even think about rooting for the Red Sox. Lame though it is, I think I deserve a pass on that, because I was very young and impressionable, and his 1977 All-Star card was dope.

Who’s next for Manny Pacquaio? To me, it seems like a layup – Barrera. If Pac Man fights Marquez, I’ll watch for sure, but if he fights Barrera? To me, that’s a superfight.

I must say, I didn’t even think Marquez was in the running until I watched that HBO fight on Saturday night and Manny and Max Silverman were pumping up the Marquez/Pac Man possibility (and on that score, Max, please – Pacquiao got Barrera in the 11th round, not the 5th).

I thought Marquez looked a step slow and on the whole pedestrian against the Filipino, Jaca, who certainly did seem to be a poor man’s Pacquiao. The question to me boils down to this – do you really think Marquez would beat Barrera right now? I emphatically do not. If Barrera brawled like the old days, it might be touch-and-go, but if he mixed in his boxing rounds with his brawling rounds, I think he’d probably get the stoppage.

For our second official No Mas Knockout of the Week, we turn to Tommy Hearns, which is appropriate, because if Tyson was the most devastating knockout artist of our time, Hearns is certainly a close runner-up.

We take you back to August 2nd, 1980, when the Hit Man won his first title, the WBA welterweight crown, from the ever popular Jose “Pipino” Cuevas. At this point in his career, Hearns was 29-0, with all but two of his wins coming by stoppage. He had become a feature attraction because of his devastating punching power – of his previous ten fights leading up to Cuevas, nine had ended in a stoppage, and none of those after the sixth round. After his second-round KO of Cuevas, the hype for a Leonard/Hearns showdown would begin in earnest.

Like all Mexicans, Pipino is gamer than game in this fight, and he comes out swinging for the fences, but about a minute into the first round Hearns staggers him with one of those cobra-sprung straight right hands. After that things turn ugly. By the second round, it’s target practice for Hearns. His epic reach, the ferocity of his combinations – he’s a terrifying fighter. In two rounds, Pipino takes a lifetime’s worth of KO-worthy haymakers, and when he finally does go down for good, it seems like he’s been shot with a gun. He shimmies in the air, suspended, barely conscious, and then Hearns finishes him with another short right. Enjoy.

Twenty-six years ago tonight, unbeknownst to little Large and even littler I-Berg, our humble sports brand found it’s name, when Roberto Duran unexpectedly threw up his hands in the middle of the eighth round of his fight with Ray Leonard and either did or did not utter the words, ‘No mas.”

It was at the Superdome in New Orleans. Five months before in Montreal, Duran had shocked Sugar Ray and the world, luring the Olympic golden boy into an ill-advised brawl with his taunts and then doing what he did best , brawling like a motherfucker. It was a hard, close fight, but Duran won a well-earned unanimous decision.

In the rematch, Sugar Ray used his feet and his brain against the Panamian, and that was that. Like Barrera against Juarez a few months ago, Leonard simply outclassed a thuggish fighter he had been stupid to stand toe-to-toe with in the first place.

In the seventh round, pretty much throwing a shutout to that point, Sugar Ray started to clown and taunt Duran. By the middle of the eighth Old Hands of Stone had seen enough. He suddenly backed away from an exchange, waved a glove in the air as Leonard shoe-shined his ribcage, and reputedly said ‘No mas.” Then, according to referee Octavio Meyran, he said it three more times on the way back to his corner. Duran claimed afterwards that he never said the infamous words in the ring, and that he quit because of severe stomach cramps, not because of Leonard’s humiliating antics.

Either way, he quit, and for a macho Latino boxer like Duran, that was a lot to live down, especially to the Panamanians who had revered him like a god on earth (imagine if Manny Pacquiao pulled something like that in a rematch with Barrera , the Philippines might actually sink into the Pacific). His image was somewhat restored when he outbrawled Davey Moore at the Garden for a junior middleweight belt in 1983, but still, the legend of ‘No Mas” lives on – in the minds of boxing fans everywhere, and of course, on the tags of those stupid fly shirts you pimps be wearing every day.

Check the shit out below – it shows the seventh and eighth rounds in full and then a post-fight Cosell interview with Duran’s trainer Ray Arcel, who seems genuinely flabbergasted and heartbroken.

We lost one of the greatest fighters of the 20th century today. Willie Pep died at the Alzheimer’s unit of a nursing home in Connecticut, where he’d been confined since 2001. He was 84.

Pep, called “Will o’the wisp” for his famed elusiveness, was known for both his balletic footwork and his savage combinations. Owner of the featherweight title for six years and the veteran of an astounding 242 fights, Pep was a beautiful fighter to watch, a true matador. Legend has it that he once won a round without throwing a punch.

When he did throw punches, however, they were precise and damaging, often coming in breakneck flurries. He was a prodigy when he burst onto the New England boxing scene in 1940, winning 63 times before losing a fight, and then winning another 72 straight before his next loss.

That loss, however, was a turning point in Pep’s career. It was at the hands of the great Sandy Saddler. Pep would go on to face Saddler three more times in his career, winning once and losing twice, in fights that would make “Pep/Saddler” a single word in history, like “Ali/Frazier” and “Robinson/Lamotta.” The four-fight series between Willie Pep and Sandy Saddler may in fact be the greatest boxing rivalry of all time, epic in its ferocity and the dirtiest load of fighting you’ll ever want to see. This shit is not for the faint of heart.

Below is a condensation of the fourth fight, in which Pep fails to answer the bell for the tenth round. This bout was highly controversial at the time, both for the quality and frequency of the fouling (at one point the ref hits the canvas – borderline WWE material) and because the rumor after the fight was that Pep rolled over for the mob. Which is hard to imagine when you watch him getting pulverized in there, but with fights back then, who knows. Check it out for yourself, and bid farewell to a true legend, the one and only Willie Pep.