10 Fun Sports Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

The longest tennis match in history lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes, spread over three days at Wimbledon in 2010, when John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut.

Olympic gold medals are not solid gold. Since 1912, they have been made mostly of silver with just a few grams of gold plating on the surface; the 1912 Stockholm Games were the last to award solid gold medals to individual champions.

Bo Jackson is the only athlete to be named an All-Star in two major American professional sports, Major League Baseball and the NFL.

Basketball began with a literal peach basket. Dr. James Naismith invented the game in 1891 and nailed a peach basket to a gymnasium balcony because he didn't have a proper net or backboard.

A golf ball's dimples reduce air drag and help create lift, allowing a dimpled ball to fly roughly twice as far as a smooth one struck the same way.

The fastest tennis serve ever recorded was hit by Australian player Sam Groth in 2012, clocked at about 163 mph (263 km/h) during a Challenger-level match in South Korea.

In ice hockey culture, losing a tooth to a puck, stick, or check is often worn as a badge of toughness, and some players skip replacing missing teeth during the season.

The modern American football's elongated "prolate spheroid" shape traces back to early versions of the game, when balls were made from inflated pig bladders wrapped in leather.

Early baseball players caught the ball bare-handed. Fielding gloves weren't widely adopted until the late 19th century, and for years wearing one was even considered a sign of weakness.

Soccer (association football) is the world's most popular sport by a wide margin, with FIFA estimating billions of fans and participants across virtually every country.

The modern Olympic Games were revived in 1896 in Athens, Greece, by French educator Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the International Olympic Committee.

A regulation basketball hoop sits 10 feet above the floor, a height Naismith chose simply because that's where the balcony railing happened to be in the gymnasium where he hung the first peach basket.