one man—Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway,
who in 1983 was drafted by the then Baltimore Colts,
a team for which Elway refused to play. He was soon
dealt to Denver.
In January, 1987, the legend of Elway fully devel-
oped. Though his team trailed 20-13 in the final six
minutes of the AFC championship game in Cleve-
land, Elway led his team on an improbable fifteen-
play, 98-yard touchdown drive that tied the score and
forced overtime. In the extra period, he again drove
the Broncos down the field, using nine plays to cover
sixty yards. A short field goal followed, and the
Broncos stunned the Cleveland Browns with a 23-20
victory.
Fans in three National Football League (NFL) cit-
ies were stunned—for a different reason—during
the 1980’s. They watched helplessly as their teams
moved to new cities: the Oakland Raiders to Los An-
geles in 1982, the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis
in 1984, and the St. Louis Cardinals to Phoenix,
Arizona, in 1988. More franchises—including the
Raiders, who returned to Oakland—would relocate
in the 1990’s.
Baseball In 1981, the Major League Baseball
(MLB) season was damaged by a strike that lasted
about two months and canceled more than seven
hundred games. Many fans blamed the owners, al-
though it was the players who decided to walk out.
The strike also overshadowed the remarkable rookie
season of Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher Fernando
Valenzuela. He began his first year in the majors with
an 8-0 record and an earned run average (ERA) of
0.50. He finished the season with a 13-7 record, a
2.48 ERA, seven shutouts, and as the winner of
the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards. The
Dodgers also won their first world championship
since 1965, defeating the New York Yankees in six
games.
An even more improbable Dodgers team won the
World Series in 1988, when it defeated the Oakland
Athletics. Los Angeles pitcher Orel Hershiser com-
pleted an amazing season, which included setting a
major-league record for consecutive shutout innings
(fifty-nine), by being named the League Champion-
ship Series and World Series Most Valuable Player
(MVP). Fittingly, he threw a complete game in the
decisive game 5, which the Dodgers won 5-2.
In 1989, Nolan Ryan, baseball’s all-time leader in
career strikeouts with 5,714, recorded 301 strike-
outs, marking the sixth and final time he reached
the 300 plateau in a single year. Roger Clemens, who
currently ranks second in all-time strikeouts, began
his remarkable career in the 1980’s. He went 24-4 in
1986, when the Boston Red Sox won their first divi-
sion title in more than a decade. Two years later, he
struck out 291 batters; only once has Clemens re-
corded more strikeouts in a single season. In fact,
the top eight pitchers in all-time strikeouts played
during some or all of the 1980’s.
One of baseball’s most historic records fell on
September 11, 1985, when Cincinnati’s Pete Rose
hit a single to left field. It was career hit 4,192 for
Rose, eclipsing Ty Cobb’s record. Rose ended his
playing career one year later, finishing with 4,256
hits, but he remained the Reds’ manager through
August, 1989. His Hall of Fame credentials seemed
secure: He had won three World Series champion-
ships and an MVP award, and he was a seventeen-
time All-Star. However, Rose’s professional creden-
tials were crushed by a looming controversy—did he
bet on baseball games, including some involving the
team he was managing? A damaging report, written
by investigator John Dowd, left little doubt in the
minds of the sport’s executives that Rose was gam-
bling (including on his Reds games) and therefore
had to be banned from the game. Rose maintained
that he did nothing wrong, but in late 1989 he
agreed to be placed on baseball’s ineligible list and
resigned as manager.Basketball Basketball during the 1980’s was domi-
nated by two men, although by the end of the decade
a third man had come along to earn his spot among
National Basketball Association (NBA) superstars.
Earvin “Magic” Johnson proved that he was going to
be something very special during his rookie year of
1979-1980, when he averaged more than eighteen
points and seven rebounds per game for the Los An-
geles Lakers. In the critical sixth game of the NBA fi-
nals, Johnson moved from guard to center, starting
for the injured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and scored
forty-two points and grabbed fifteen rebounds, as
the Lakers held off the Philadelphia 76ers and won
their first NBA championship in almost a decade.
Johnson also won the first of his three NBA finals
MVP awards that year.
Larry Bird entered the league in the same year
Johnson did. Bird won the league’s Rookie of the
Year award, averaging more than twenty-one points906 Sports The Eighties in America