Former 49er great Steve Young is the great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for whom BYU is named. In his senior season at BYU, Young set an NCAA single-season record with his 71.3% completion percentage.
In 1935, Detroit became the only city to win three major sports championships in the same year, when the Lions won the NFL title, the Tigers won the World Series, and the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup.
During the 1976 and 1977 seasons, the only thing more offensive than the Buccaneers' orange creamsicle colored jerseys was their ineptitude on the field. They managed to lose an unprecedented 26 games in a row. Things were so bad that when they finally broke their record losing streak, the opposing coach was immediately fired.
Richard Petty, nicknamed The King, won a record 200 races during his career. He won a record 27 races (10 of them consecutively) in the 1967 season alone!
Rocky Marciano retired with a career record of 49-0, including 43 knockouts. His knockout-to-win percentage of 87.75 remains one of the highest in heavyweight boxing history.
Johnny Vander Meer pitched two consecutive no-hitters on June 11 and 15, 1938. The prospect of a pitcher breaking this record by hurling three consecutive no-hitters is so unimaginable that LIFE described this as "the most unbreakable of all baseball records."
UCLA won the men's NCAA Basketball Title for 7 consecutive years (1967-73).
For the first decade of Madden football, the "cover athlete" was none other than John Madden himself. The first player to be featured was Garrison Hearst in 1999. Hearst led the 49ers to the playoffs that year, only to suffer a horrifying broken ankle in the team's second-round game, giving rise to the legend of the "Madden Curse".
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