I'm as annoyed at the anti-Houston ESPN/SI/East Coast media bias as the other guy, but it's hard to argue with this (although I would argue that Phi Slamma Jamma lost to good teams twice and only choked once in the Final Four): http://msn.espn.go.com/page2/s/list/chokers.html Worst choke artists of all-time Page 2 staff Every year around NCAA Tournament time, it seems folks start talking about "choking." Roy Williams' Kansas team avoid a gag this year to reach the Final Four, but Bob Huggins' Cincinnati squad wasn't quite as fortunate. All this got Page 2 to thinking about the 10 worst choke artists in recent sports history. We've compiled our list of the 10 worst offenders, and we want to here your choice. Click here to identify your choice for the top choke artist. Later this week, we'll run our readers' top 10, along with a poll to determine who's most in need of the Heimlich. 1. Greg Norman For a few years during the mid-1990s, the Great White Shark was considered the best golfer in the world ... yet he constantly fell apart during majors. His most egregious choke job came in the 1996 Masters, when Norman entered the final day with a six-stroke lead over Nick Faldo. The Shark gagged by shooting a 78, while Faldo shot a 67 to win the green jacket by five strokes. 2. California Angels In 1982, with a 2-0 lead in the best-of-5 AL Championship Series against the Milwaukee Brewers, the Halos lost three straight in Milwaukee and were eliminated. In 1986, up 3-1 in the ALCS and a single pitch from their first World Series appearance, ace reliever Donny Moore gave up a two-strike, two-out homer to the Dave Henderson of the Red Sox, who went on to run out the series (and suffer their own humiliating choke to the Mets in the World Series, though that's another story). In 1995, holding a 13-game lead over the Mariners in August, the Angels managed to blow the lead and the division title. 3. University of Houston men's basketball With Akeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler leading the way, Houston's "Phi Slamma Jamma" squads made three straight Final Fours in 1982-84 -- not surprising, since they featured two of the Top 50 NBA players of all-time -- but the Cougars never won a title. The absolute nadir was losing to the severely outmanned North Carolina State team of Jim Valvano in 1983, probably the biggest final game upset ever. 4. Minnesota Vikings The Purple People-Eaters were 0-4 in Super Bowl games, including at least two where they probably had the superior team. But the worst chokes for the Vikes were a couple of times they failed to reach the Super Bowl: In 1998, when they were 15-1 but lost the NFC title game to the Falcons, and in 2000, when they lost the NFC title game to the underdog New York Giants by an embarrassing score of 41-0. 5. 1994 Seattle SuperSonics The Sonics had the NBA's best record (63-19), but managed to become the first No. 1 seed ever to lose to a No. 8 seed when they blew a 2-0 lead in games in a best-of-5 series against the Denver Nuggets, a team with a 42-40 regular-season record that had lost the first two games of the series by an average of 17 points. 6. Michelle Kwan Though she has been generally considered to be the world's best figure-skater for the past five years, Kwan was twice upset by American teenagers in the Olympic Games -- first by Tara Lipinski in 1998 and then by Sarah Hughes earlier this year. In both cases, she was obviously tight and failed to skate anywhere near her best, failing to win even though the judges were clearly dying to give the four-time world champion the gold. 7. 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball's most famous collapse. The Dodgers had a 13-game lead over their local archrivals, the New York Giants, late in August. The Giants managed to pull into a tie at the end of the regular season, then captured a best-of-3 playoff series on Bobby Thompson's ninth-inning three-run jack off Ralph Branca, "The Shot Heard 'Round the World." 8. 1992-93 Houston Oilers Up 35-3 at halftime against the Buffalo Bills in an AFC wild-card game, the Oilers managed to turn backup Bills quarterback Frank Reich into a one-day folk hero by losing 41-38 in OT, the biggest in-game turnaround in NFL history. This was particularly painful, since the Oilers never made the Super Bowl during their years in Houston. 9. Boston Red Sox Does the name "Bill Buckner" mean anything to you? How about the name "Bucky Dent"? How about no World Series titles since 1918? We rest our case. 10. 1975 Pittsburgh Penguins One of only two teams in any of the four major professional sports to blow a 3-0 lead in a best-of-seven series, the Pens let the Islanders off the hook big-time in their 1975 NHL playoff series. (The other team was the 1942 Red Wings, and we weren't around to see that one.)
Seriously, I wanna know how some of you guys felt when Frank Reich comes in and wins the game for the Bills after you were up 35-3. That must have felt like a kick in the gut.
I was numb...absolutely numb. The sad part was that I was sooo numb, I couldn't move. I sat and watched every last second of it.
The Buffalo thing felt horrible. I've told the story on this board before that I was in Alaska visiting relatives watching the game. My uncle delighted in reminding me during the comeback that the Oilers always choke -- basically pouring salt on my wound for 2 hours. We were supposed to go ice fishing after the game, and I sat in the driveway in single digit weather afterwards, checking to see if it was going to be too cold for me to ice fish, but also because I felt like I needed to punish myself physically after the choke job. Hey, i didn't mean to drudge up the bad memories by posting the article. Can't we just turn this thread into an ESPN/anti-Houston bias thing instead? Like I said, UH didn't choke three times -- just once. Damn ESPN.
After (I'd guess) about halfway through the third quarter, it sort of began to be a little bit sureal and was almost comical. It was like watching a Sylvester & Tweety cartoon. You know, no matter how bad it looks for Tweety, that in just a second something really bad is going to happen to Sylvester. By the middle of the fourth quarter, I was laughing. It was, at least, much quicker than the 3 or 4 previous years of torture where the team had so much talent that you really believed in them, only to have them slowly die off during the season.
I think, BTW, that these Bristol, CT maple syrup drinking ESPN people are trying to lessen their own pain. At least in New England, the whole Bill Buckner '86 fiasco is perminantly embeded in the minds of everyone, be they Yankee, Red Sox, or Mets fans. I don't see how they ranked the Sox so low.
Get this, I was in Buffalo. They blacked out the game becasue it wasn't a sell out. I had to listen to it on radio surrounded by Buffalo fans. Imagine listening to those field goal attempts on the radio. What a nightmare. What humiliation. However, I do believe the WR stepped out of bounds on the TD. They never should have won. Redemption came in Adelphi Stadium a few years later. Now that was sweet. Why weren't the Bills on the list? It doesn't get any more pathethic than that.
Buffalo should have been there, They lost 4 straight Super Bowls. 1980 Russia Hockey team? 1998 Vikings? Brian Bosworth?
The Buffalo game was awful!!! I remember distinctly being disappointed that Kelly got hurt and Reich had to come in...my thought was, certainly Kelly can't get the job done...Reich probably can't either, but he's sort of an X factor at that point. The prevent defense makes every opponent look like champs!!! What an unbelievable game...someone else decribed it as surreal...that's EXACTLY how I would describe it, too.
What really bugs the holy crap out of me on this one is that this is one of the major reasons Guy Lewis is still on the outside of the Hall of Fame. To this day, he gets snubbed because of the perception that his teams choked. He was one of the greatest college coaches ever and built that UH program from nothing to national championship contention on a yearly basis.
I felt redemption via the "music city miracle." Hell, i've said it before, i'll say it again. I will love the texans, but the titans are still my team. I honestly couldn't afford to go to any games as a kid, so what difference does it make now where they play? They are the team that i grew up with, and it isn't the team's fault that they moved, so i harbor no bitterness towards them. I obviously cared enough about them to go virtually MAD when they blew those playoff games to Denver, Buffalo, and KC, so I've decided that we've bottomed out, and it can't get any worse than that. Sure woulda been nice to win a Super Bowl, but just getting there was redemption for all of the Oilers teams of the past who couldn't win the big game. It was pretty funny that so many ex-Oilers fans disowned them until they were in the super bowl, but it's ok. I'll have a hard time pulling for the texans over the titans until MAYBE players like kearse, rolle, eddie george, and mcnair are gone.
