Sam Penzenstadler was shocked.
The Loyola University junior had just lowered his personal best by nine seconds while finishing second in the mile run at February’s Meyo Invitational at Notre Dame.
That improvement alone was startling, but that wasn’t why Penzenstadler put his hands on his head in disbelief after learning how fast he had run. The important thing about the time was it began with a 3.
In 3 minutes, 58.21 seconds, Penzenstadler had done what people thought was humanly impossible until 60 years ago Tuesday, when medical student Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier in the mile on the cinder track at England’s Oxford University.
That more than 1,300 runners have gone sub-4 since then does not diminish what it means to any of them.
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“It’s your goal from when you start to run the mile, the mark everyone chases,” Penzenstadler said. “It is still that magical number.”
In much of the English-speaking world, it remains the most iconic of the magical numbers in sports, even if U.S. fans now are more familiar with other extraordinary statistical achievements: a round of 59 in golf, a 50-goal season in the NHL, a 2,000-yard season in the NFL, a 50-point game in the NBA, 20 victories or a .400 batting average in a Major League Baseball season.
Few of those numbers are exalted the way the 4-minute mile was, but each grants admission to a prestigious club in a sport, in some cases one with very few members. In the cases in which the achievement is more common, it often is the surprising members who make it special.
“People say 59 is like the 4-minute mile,” said Paul Goydos, one of just six men to shoot what remains the lowest score in a PGA tour event. “If you had told me I would shoot 59 one day, I would say that doesn’t seem possible.”
It wasn’t, until Al Geiberger did it in 1977. Nor was 50 goals in a season, until Maurice Richard did it in 1944-45. Nor 2,000 yards rushing, until O.J. Simpson did it in 1973.
“You talk to running backs now, and that is the number,” said Terrell Davis, one of just seven to rush for 2,000 or more.
After all, even in a sports world consumed by statistics, who other than the ultimate football junkie can tell you the career rushing record? But 2,000 is a nice, round number, like 4 or 50 or 20, like (under) 60 in golf, like 60 was to home runs in a season until steroids inflated the statistics as much as the bodies of the athletes who used them, including the three who expanded the club’s membership to five under dubious circumstances.
Changing times change the calculus. In baseball, innings restrictions, enlarged rotations and the reliance on multiple relief pitchers have made 20-game winners a dying breed, with just one both last season (Tigers’ Max Scherzer) and in 2007 (Red Sox’s Josh Beckett), none in 2009 and 2006. That makes it seem almost impossible to reach another magical number, 300 career victories, a club of 24 last joined by Randy Johnson in 2009.
“You get to that mark, you’re doing something pretty eye-opening,” Cubs pitcher James Russell said of a 20-game winner. “Especially nowadays.”
So what better time to indulge in a little sports numerology than this 60th anniversary of Bannister’s rewriting the formula for the computation of human potential?
*When Bobby Hull was growing up in Belleville, Ontario, 120 miles from Toronto, his exposure to hockey at large came almost exclusively from Foster Hewitt’s radio broadcasts on Hockey Night in Canada.
Hull was 6 when the Canadiens’ “Rocket” Richard scored 50 goals in 50 games. The Blackhawks’ legend is sure he must have heard Hewitt mention the number, but Hull said he did not become aware of its significance or make it one of his goals for many years.
“If I did know of it, it didn’t make a great deal of difference to me because I never thought I would have to worry about it,” he said. “But the Rocket made 50 the popular thing that it became. When you talk about scoring goals, he was the guy.”
Between periods of an April Hawks game — coincidentally against the Canadiens — Hull recalled he did not begin to do the math until his third NHL season, 1959-60, when he scored 39 in what was then a 70-game season, despite goal-less streaks of eight and five games, according to Elias Sports Bureau.
“I hated going two games without a goal,” he said. “I thought if I could score a goal every other game and throw in a few twos and threes, I’d get 50.”
A year later, the Canadiens’ Bernie Geoffrion would become the NHL’s second 50-goal scorer. In 1961-62, Hull had the first of his five 50-goal NHL seasons, remarkably topping the league’s No. 2 scorer in the first three of those seasons by 17, 22 and 17 goals. He had four more 50-plus years in the WHA, including 77 in 1974-75.
The combination of poor goaltending, expansion, an influx of generational offensive talent (Gretzky, Lemieux, Bossy and more) and an 80-game season made 50 unremarkable in the 1980s. Tactical changes and improved goaltending have swung the pendulum back: just one 50-goal scorer this season and eight in the last six seasons.
“I still think it is a great yardstick and a wonderful thing to be able to score that many goals in a single season,” Hull said. “Grabbing that biscuit and firing it past the goaltender — that’s what the game is all about, isn’t it?”
*Terrell Davis gained an aggregate 1,919 yards in 36 games over four college seasons. So it is easy to understand why the notion of his gaining 2,000 in a single NFL season was not something he really considered until midway through 1998, the year it happened.
The season before, when Davis gained 1,750 for the Super Bowl champion Broncos, Barry Sanders of the Lions joined Simpson (the only one to do it in 14 rather than 16 games) and Eric Dickerson (1984 season, all-time record 2,105 yards) in the 2,000 club.
Eight games into the 1998 season, Davis had gained 1,150.
“I started to do the math from that week forward,” Davis said in a telephone interview. “Every week, I would sit in a meeting after the game, crunch the numbers to see where I was and how many yards I needed per game to get it. Then it became real.
“I was like, ‘Don’t focus on the numbers, just focus on the games, and the numbers will come.’ But it was hard not to.”
Davis, now an NFL network analyst, thought his chances ended when he gained just 29 yards in Game 15 in Miami, leaving him 170 shy of 2,000.
“On the plane going back, we were looking at the stat sheet and (teammate) Derek Loville said to me, ‘Man, you could have rushed for 2,000, ‘and I said, ‘You’re right, I could have,’ ” Davis recalled. “I figured I would never be this close again.”
But with nine minutes left in the season finale, on a play called 19 handoff, Davis gained the 15 yards that gave him 178 for the game and 2,008 for the season. He was right, however, about not being close again, as injuries would allow Davis to play only four, five and eight games the next three seasons, after which he retired.
“You think of all the backs to come through the NFL and to be only the fourth back (then) to do anything that remarkable, you’re in an exclusive club,” he said.
Three have joined since, but Davis remains its most exclusive member: the only one to reach it in a season in which his team made the Super Bowl — and won it, to boot.
*Since Bannister clocked 3:59.4, the world record for the mile has dropped 16 seconds. Since Geiberger’s 59 at the Memphis Classic, no one has shot a lower round in tournament play.
“In golf, you have 18 holes, and you’re not holing out from the fairway very often,” Goydos said in a telephone interview. “That’s a bigger barrier. In running, there is more room for improvement.”
Goydos shot his 59 on July 8, 2010, in the first round of the John Deere Classic, on a par-71, 7,268-yard course in Silvis, Ill. He had 12 birdies, including eight of the last nine holes, finishing with a 7-footer at 18.
The possibility hit him after his one par on the second nine.
“I realized if I birdied the last three holes, I would shoot 59,” he said. “It’s not the right thought process, but having said that, my attitude was not, ‘Hey, if you do this, it will be cool.’ It was, ‘This is a unique opportunity, don’t let it slip.’
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“Do I look back and think, ‘If I had done this or this, it would have been 58? The reality is, I might have shot 65. I turned that into 59 with some crazy, great putting. I left no shots on the course.”
Goydos, then 46, is the oldest to shoot 59 in an official tournament round, three years older than Jim Furyk, who became the sixth man on the list in September in the second round of the BMW Championship at Conway Farms in Lake Forest. One woman, Annika Sorenstam, is a 59-club member, doing it at Phoenix in 2001.
The striking thing about the list is it does not include any of the greatest names in men’s golf history — no Jones, Hogan, Snead, Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, Woods, Mickelson.
“(Guys like) Tiger aren’t necessarily playing the courses where 59s are shot,” Goydos said.
Modesty aside, Goydos understands the 59 is the defining moment of his career, more than his two PGA victories. He quickly learned what he thought was a personal achievement turned out to be a big national story, one that got him a live interview on ESPN, but one that soon was overshadowed.
A few hours later, LeBron James announced he was taking his talents to South Beach.
“I wanted (ESPN) to ask LeBron what he thought of my 59, but they didn’t do it,” Goydos said.
*On April 11, the Timberwolves’ Corey Brewer, whose per-game scoring average over a seven-year NBA career is 10.0 and whose single-game high had been 29, became one of the unlikeliest members of the NBA’s large 50-point club.
Sitting on a balcony overlooking the practice court at the Berto Center a week after Brewer hit the Rockets for 51, Bulls’ executive vice president John Paxson said the reaction to that performance — the lead story on SportsCenter — is a reminder that 50 gets a buzz going.
According to Elias Sports Bureau records, 116 NBA players have scored 50 to 59 points in a game, and 22 have scored 60 or more at least once, topped by Wilt Chamberlain’s record 100. Yes, Wilt had more than 100 regular-season 50-point games and averaged 50 per game for a season.
Is it still a magical number in the NBA, other than when it comes from an improbable source like Brewer?
“Absolutely,” Paxson said. “I guarantee you there have been a lot of guys who, once they were in the 40s, knew exactly what they had to do to get 50.”
It is, after all, more than a point a minute in the NBA — and at least 1.25 per minute in the WNBA, where Riquna Williams of Tulsa (51) last season became the first woman to score 50.
“When you think about an NBA game, in general if a team gets to 100 first, it’s going to win, so for an individual to get 50 is a pretty significant achievement,” Paxson said.
“Like the 59 in golf, occasionally there will be a guy who you don’t expect it to happen to. It’s a lot of points, especially in our league, where you have gifted athletes as defenders.”
Paxson was Michael Jordan’s teammate for 26 of Jordan’s 31 regular-season games of 50-plus. Remarkably, Jordan took almost no advantage of the 3-point shot in those games. For instance: he did not make a single 3 on any of the eight 50-plus games during the 1986-87 season.
“With Michael, everything he did was to demoralize an opponent, and if someone gets 50 on you, it’s demoralizing,” Paxson said. “Sure, it’s a team game, but sometimes you are the one guy accountable. Most of us would try to foul out before we get to that point.”
Fifty can make a defender vanish.
That’s a magical number.
Twitter@olyphil