Sports
Definition Athletic contests, both team and
individual
The 1990’s experienced the usual sports dynasties, emerg-
ing athletic superstars, tragedies, triumphs, labor strikes,
and even the birth of a new league.
One word could summarize the decade of the 1990’s:
dynasty. The National Football League (NFL) had
the Dallas Cowboys. The National Basketball Associ-
ation (NBA) produced the six-time-champion Chi-
cago Bulls led by Michael Jordan. The Atlanta Braves
and the New York Yankees emerged as perennial
powerhouses for Major League Baseball (MLB).
Dale Earnhardt won four NASCAR championships,
and rookie Jeff Gordon would materialize as the face
of a new generation of stock car racing in the late
1990’s. The National Hockey League (NHL) began
the decade with the dominance of the Pittsburgh
Penguins, and two Penguins, Mario Lemieux and
Jaromir Jagr, would win countless player of the year
awards. Tennis produced a competition like no
other with the rivalry between Steffi Graf and
Monica Seles. The Women’s National Basketball As-
sociation (WNBA) formed in 1997, and the Houston
Comets would win the first three WNBA champion-
ships. Finally, the one-man golfing dynasty of Tiger
Woods began: In 1994, the eighteen-year-old Woods
won the first of three U.S. Amateur Golf Champion-
ships, and in 1997, his first full professional year, he
would win the Masters Tournament.
Basketball If one basketball franchise were the
face of the 1990’s, then it would be the Chicago
Bulls. The Bulls, led by NBA great Jordan, would
produce two “three-peats,” a phrase coined by for-
mer Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Riley to describe
three championships in a row. The Bulls won in
1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, and 1998 and set an
NBA record with most wins in a season with a 72-10
record in 1996. Jordan had retired in 1993 after the
murder of his father and played professional base-
ball in the interim before returning to basketball
and the Bulls in 1995. He retired a second time after
the 1998 season, but his Nike shoes, hanging
tongue, high-flying slam dunks, and ability to make
clutch shots created a lasting legacy.
Football Three teams dominated the NFL in the
1990’s: The Dallas Cowboys, the San Francisco Forty-
Niners, and the Denver Broncos combined for seven
of the ten championships won during the decade.
However, it was the second-place finisher that gar-
nered most of the headlines: Between 1991 and
1994, the Buffalo Bills represented the American
Football Conference (AFC) in the NFL champion-
ship game, and each time the Bills were on the losing
end. For the first time in NFL history, a team fin-
ished as runner-up in the championship game for
four consecutive years. The Bills lost a heartbreaker
in 1991 when Scott Norwood’s field goal attempt
sailed just wide, resulting in a 20-19 loss to the New
York Giants. The Bills would go on to lose in 1992 to
the Washington Redskins and in 1993 and 1994 to
the Dallas Cowboys.Baseball Major League Baseball in the 1990’s is re-
membered for the play of two great franchises: the
Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees. The
Braves won their division every year during the de-
cade and appeared in the World Series five times,
winning once in 1995. The Yankees won the World
Series in 1996, 1998, and 1999.
In 1992, the Toronto Blue Jays became the first
non-American team to win the World Series. The
Blue Jays would win again in 1993 with Joe Carter’s
famous game-winning walk-off home run against the
Philadelphia Phillies’ Mitch Williams. The 1993 sea-
son also saw the birth of two new franchises. The Col-
orado Rockies and the Florida Marlins were created
and joined the National League in 1993. Just four
years later, in 1997, the Marlins would win the World
Series, the quickest rise for an expansion team in his-
tory.
In 1994, the highlights and positive stories in
baseball were replaced with a labor strike between
MLB and the players’ union. The standoff would
lead to the cancellation of most of the regular season
and result in baseball becoming the first major sport
to lose its postseason because of a strike.
In 1998, however, baseball would rebound with
one of the most electrifying seasons in professional
sports. Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and
Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs both chased the
single-season home run record of sixty-one set by
Roger Maris thirty-seven years before. Both would
eclipse Maris, but it was McGwire’s seventy home
runs that would outdo Sosa’s sixty-six. The home
run battle is said to be responsible for bringing base-
ball back as the national pastime. McGwire wouldThe Nineties in America Sports 801