Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 3/26/2011

3/26/1979:
Led by Magic Johnson, Michigan State beats Larry Bird and Indiana State by the score of 75-64 in the NCAA championship game in Salt Lake city. Johnson is voted Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four. Both Johnson and Bird will be named to the All-70s and All-Time Final Four teams selected in 1989 by a panel including coaches Dean Smith and John Wooden.

Birthdays:
Rip Engle b. 1906
Ann Meyers b. 1955
Marcus Allen b. 1960
John Stockton b. 1962
Michael Peca b. 1974

Packers Fact:
The Packers selected kicker Chris Jacke out of Texas El-Paso in the sixth round in 1989. Jacke played in Green Bay for eight seasons.

ON TRUE ENOUGH

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Family Feud host Richard Dawson: Name something you should do in moderation, or you’ll be sorry later.

Contestant: Sex.

“’Tis always morning somewhere in the world.”

—RICHARD HENRY HORNE, English poet and critic

A LIFE

“Respectability lets the human pendulum swing over such a pitiful little arc,” wrote Clarence King to his friend Secretary of State John Hay. King was a scientist and explorer and quite a lionized figure in his time. Blond and blue-blooded, King felt the stifling strictures of respectability, and he didn’t care for them. So he overcame them by living a double life—one as a white bachelor scientist, and one as a black train porter with a wife and five children. Martha Sandweiss exhaustively researched King’s life and has written an engrossing and remarkable book about a remarkable man.

PASSING STRANGE: A GILDED AGE TALE OF LOVE AND DECEPTION ACROSS THE COLOR LINE, by Martha A. Sandweiss (Penguin Press, 2009)