Black - Sports

Sports

  • The national rugby union team of New Zealand is called the All Blacks, in reference to their black outfits, and the color is also shared by other New Zealand national teams such as the Black Caps (cricket) and the Kiwis (rugby league).
  • Association football (soccer) referees traditionally wear all-black uniforms, however nowadays other uniform colors may also be worn.
  • A large number of teams have uniforms designed with black colors—many feeling the color sometimes imparts a psychological advantage in its wearers. Among the more famous (or infamous) include Oakland Raiders and Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL, the San Antonio Spurs and Miami Heat of the NBA, and Inter Milan of the Serie A of the Italian soccer leagues.
  • In auto racing, a black flag signals a driver to go into the pits.
  • In baseball, "the black" refers to the batter's eye, a blacked out area around the center-field bleachers, painted black to give hitters a decent background for pitched balls.

  • The All-Blacks of New Zealand play England in 2006

  • A black belt is a mark of a high level of proficiency in many martial arts.

  • The black uniforms of the Oakland Raiders professional football team matched their "outlaw" image.

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Famous quotes containing the word sports:

    “Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
    Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
    Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
    And desolation saddens all thy green;
    One only master grasps the whole domain,
    And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;”
    —Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)

    “Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
    —Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)

    “In the past, it seemed to make sense for a sportswriter on sabbatical from the playpen to attend the quadrennial hawgkilling when Presidential candidates are chosen, to observe and report upon politicians at play. After all, national conventions are games of a sort, and sports offers few spectacles richer in low comedy.”
    —Walter Wellesley (Red)