Moving the Chains: Vincere aut Mori

Sometimes there’s more to sports than just winning and losing.

For example, in baseball you could see a dove obliterated by a fastball thrown at 99 miles per hour (Randy Johnson, 2001) or a seagull killed by an errant throw (Dave Kingman, 1983). Or you might even get to witness a no-hitter by a pitcher strung out on LSD (Dock Ellis, 1970).

In football, we’ve witnessed butt fumbles (Matt Sanchez, 2012), helmet catches (David Tyree, 2008), and even an immaculate reception (Franco Harris, 1973).

Basketball has had superstars known for skills other than just putting the ball in the basket, such as Bill Russell (defense), Dennis Rodman (rebounding), and Bobby Knight (throwing chairs).

In tennis, we’ve seen three players leap-frogging one another while competing to be the GOAT – the Greatest Of All Time: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadel, and Novak Djokovic. There has also been a single match lasting more than 11 hours (John Isner and Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010) and the incomparable John McEnroe dressing down chair umpires for as long as anyone can remember.

Professional golf has been the home of streaking (British Open, 1985), tackling (Peter Jacobsen, running down said streaker at 1985 British Open), and aquatics (Jerry Pate diving into the lake after throwing Tour Commissioner Deane Beaman and course designer Pete Dye in first at the 1982 Players Championship).

I doubt anyone remembers the score of – or for that matter, which team won – the Indiana-Purdue basketball game in Bloomington on February 23, 1985, when Hoosier head coach Bobby Knight lost his cool after being called for a technical foul, grabbed a chair, and threw it across the court, narrowly missing a Purdue player shooting free throws as a result of his technical.

Not that it mattered, but Purdue won, 72 – 63.

Then again, as I mentioned earlier, sports isn’t always about winning and losing.

There are many countries, however, where sports is so much more. Where sports is, literally, a matter of life or death.

I’m referring, of course, to soccer.

Vincere aut Mori.

Victory or death.

With an estimated 3.5 billion fans, soccer is the world’s most popular sport. In a Washington Post poll, 8% of all Americans said watching soccer is their favorite sport to watch.

In other words, Americans amount to a very small percentage of those 3.5 billion fans. Which is actually a good thing, once taking into account how fans react when their favorite soccer team ends up on the short end of the score.

In 1964, 328 people – although in all probability more – in Lima, Peru, died from asphyxiation and/or internal hemorrhaging during a soccer game. Police took action when fans started throwing objects onto the field during an altercation between a referee and a pair of angry fans who didn’t agree with a call the referee made against their favorite team. After that, a riot ensued, leading to the aforementioned deaths as fans made a mad dash for the exits.

That‘s just the tip of the iceberg. The death toll from the 20 deadliest soccer matches in history stands at 1,360, occurring in locales such as Peru, Guatemala, Scotland, Turkey, South Africa, Greece, Egypt, England, and Ghana.

Vincere aut Mori is apparently a world-wide phenomenon. The most recent example occurred at a soccer match in Indonesia on October 2, 2022, after – and this may sound familiar, since it happened just outside the Capitol in Washington D.C. not that long ago – police fired tear gas into crowds of rioting fans, resulting in a stampede in which 125 people lost their lives.

Sure, in America we might see coaches throwing chairs, golfers jumping in lakes, and baseball players menacing harmless birds. But we rarely see anyone die.

Of those 20 aforementioned soccer matches that resulted in mass casualties, none of them have occurred in the United States. For that we can be thankful.

Let’s just hope and pray it stays that way.