Sixty years ago, LIFE magazine tapped into the joys and tortures of football fandom by traveling north of the…

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the Rumble in the Jungle. A lot has been written about that fight. Movies…

In a sport so endearingly perverse that a hitter who fails in seven out of 10 trips to the plate is considered…

"Particularly for young people," Thomas Maier noted in a recent essay, "unaware of Masters and Johnson, it's…

Theodore Bernard "Big Klu" Kluszewski played in the majors for two decades, more than half of those years with the…

"It is a teeth-jarring sport for skaters who race 30 miles every night," LIFE magazine wrote of the then-young…

You might think that a huge amount of information about a 12-year-old girl once celebrated as the "world's strongest…

So much has changed since the Long Island University Blackbirds were a force to be reckoned with in men's college…

These are some damn good pictures. There is energy here — a genuine playfulness and terrific personalities. But the…

Fifty years ago tomorrow, in Miami Beach, 22-year-old Cassius Clay beat the hell out of Sonny Liston and took the…

In the 1960s, the likelihood of taking at least one photograph of Mickey Mantle ripping — or pretending to rip — a…

The 50th anniversary edition of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue hit newsstands this week, which (inevitably,…

I watch the Olympics, winter and summer, with my bullshit detector turned off. That's to say, I embrace the IOC's…

Here's the Chiefs' Len Dawson sucking hard on a cancer stick at halftime of the 1967 AFL-NFL World Championship…

Today is Muhammad Ali's 72nd birthday. Four decades ago, after three-and-a-half years away from the ring, he was…

Way back when, at a time when organized football for school kids was something of a rarity, LIFE's Alfred…

In February 1946 readers of a popular weekly magazine were introduced to exactly the sort of scene Henry Luce likely…

In January 1960, an undefeated Syracuse team whipped Texas, 23-14, in the Cotton Bowl. [See rare photos from the…

"Casey Number Two, who is more temperamental than her colleagues, jumps on the playing field to peck at the first…

"Pro football is almost a different game from college football," LIFE magazine helpfully informed its readers in…