You'll recall last Thursday's post, where I explained about weekly bar trivia. You can probably expect as a pretty regular feature on this blog the "random factoid of the week" I learned from playing.
The "big question" of the night was to rank these four "numeric sports career records" in order from largest to smallest:
* Number of horses ridden by Willie Shoemaker
* Number of passing yards accumulated by Dan Marino
* Number of "at bats" by Pete Rose
* Number of points scored by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Most of our team was missing tonight, including any with any strength at all in the category of sports. But this one was sort of mathematical in nature, and we felt we could work it out. We had what we thought were pretty good "guest-imates" for how many games are in a football, baseball, and basketball season; how many seasons those three players played; what their game average for the feat in question probably was. So, we decided... "come on, how many horses could you possibly ride?" And thus we arrived at this order:
* Dan Marino's passing
* KAJ's points
* Pete Rose's at bats
* Shoemaker's horse-riding
I am pleased to report that our mathematically driven estimates on the football, basketball, and baseball parts of the questions were spot on. When they read the actual figures for each, our guesses were relatively close, and we had indeed placed them in the right order.
Here's the thing: Willie Shoemaker rode 40,351 horses in his career. Damn. That would make you sore, sore, sore. Consequently, the correct order was:
* Marino
* Shoemaker
* Abdul-Jabbar
* Rose
And as you can see, as good as our guessing was, our mistake on the horses meant we only got one part out of four right. That landed us in third place when we'd been first going into the big question. (sniff)
Damn... 40,000 horses? He must get up very early in the morning. What must his diary look like? "Get up in the morning, horse, horse, horse, horse, horse... lunch... horse, horse, horse, horse, horse, horse... afternoon tea... horse, horse...."
(Thanks once again, Eddie Izzard.)
3 comments:
I would have arrived at the same solution as your group, but I might have offered some concern that Shoemaker is in there just to mess with you. I could've made matters worse. :)
I came up with the same list you did, and I even know about where the three athletes ranked. I knew Rose had about 13,000 ABs and said to myself, "Surely, there's no way Shoemaker has ridden 13,000 horses!"
That's a horse a day for over 35 years. Damn.
Wait, that would be for 13,000 horses. For 40,351, that comes to two horses a day for 55 years.
What I want to know is, who counts that stuff? I mean, it seems to me like it would be like asking how many bats Barry Bonds has used in his career or how many golf balls Tiger Woods has used.
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