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One of the most contentious elections in memory will soon be over (we hope) as Americans go to the polls today to decide whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be their next president.
By all accounts, it’s pretty much a 50/50 race. Considering those odds, and the fact that everyone seems pretty stressed about what our neighbours might do, I thought it might be fun to look at some famous coin flips in sports.
Before we indulge our inner Anton Chigurh, a little background.
Coin flips have a regular place in a variety of sports. In tennis, for instance, they determine who gets first serve. In soccer, which team kicks first in a shootout. In cricket, the winner decides whether to bat or bowl to begin the match.
Sometimes, a coin toss can even be used to settle a tie. A famous example came during soccer’s 1968 European Championship, which happened before the adoption of the penalty shootout. With host Italy and the Soviet Union still knotted at 0-0 after extra time in the semifinals, a coin flip determined who would advance. The Italians won it, then defeated Yugoslavia to capture their first Euro title. (That matchup initially ended in a tie too. But, under the rules at the time for settling a final, the game was replayed a couple days later and Italy won 2-0).
Among the major North American team sports, football is the only one that uses coin flips regularly. The team that wins the referee’s toss at midfield before the game can choose to receive the opening kickoff, kick the ball away, defend a certain endzone or defer their option to the second half.
I’m pretty sure this has never happened before, but the NFL’s criteria for breaking a tie in the standings also include a coin toss. For that to happen though, at least 10 other tiebreakers needed to be exhausted first.
The NHL, NBA and MLB do not currently have a coin flip among their potential tiebreakers. But, in the past, the NBA used a toss to decide whether the Eastern or Western Conference would get the first pick in the draft. This resulted in Magic Johnson going to the Lakers in 1979 instead of Chicago, which had to settle for David Greenwood.
Here are some other great coin-toss moments:
Tails fails for Jerome Bettis
Joe Namath jumps the gun
Broadway Joe came dressed to the nines to perform the opening coin toss at Super Bowl XLVIII between the Broncos and Seahawks, rocking an outrageous fur coat at chilly MetLife Stadium just outside New York City.
But the Jets legend came in too hot, flicking the coin up before anyone had a chance to call it. Luckily, alert ref Terry McAulay caught it in midair and Namath got it right on take two.
The XFL’s human coin toss goes awry
When Vince McMahon’s football league debuted in 2001, it promised to disrupt the sport in a number of ways. Some of the innovations were actually pretty good and ended up being absorbed by the NFL, like skycams and mic’ed-up players. But the so-called “human coin toss” turned out to be as dangerous as a chair shot.
Rather than flip a coin to determine who got possession first, XFL referees placed the ball on the ground and one player from each sprinted for it. To be honest, the idea was kind of exciting, but the downsides became obvious right away when Orlando Rage safety Hassan Shamsid-Deen separated his shoulder on opening night.
The Canucks and Sabres spin their wheel of fortune
OK, this wasn’t actually a coin flip. But it was the same thing, basically. Except way more fun. Because why flip a boring old coin when you can use an elaborate (and unnecessarily confusing) carnival wheel to do the same job?
That was the NHL’s move ahead of the 1970 draft, when the top two picks were promised to expansion Vancouver and Buffalo. Whoever got the No. 1 choice would take Gilbert Perreault, who scored 51 goals in 54 junior games that season.
Instead of flipping a coin or pulling ping-pong balls like we see in today’s draft lotteries, the league decided that the best thing for this high-stakes moment was one of those big carnival-style wheels. The funniest thing about this is that they didn’t even make a special wheel with a Canucks or Sabres logo in each of the spots. It looked like it came from an actual carnival. It was red and white with a bunch of numbers ranging from (for some reason) 2 to 12. Vancouver had all the numbers below 7 while Buffalo had all the numbers above 7. If the wheel stopped on one of the big red sevens, it would trigger a re-spin.
Confused? So was NHL president Clarence Campbell. The wheel stopped on 11, but Campbell thought it said 1 because of the way the digits were displayed. Forgetting there was no 1 at all on the wheel, Campbell announced Vancouver as the winner before Buffalo pointed out the mistake and claimed the top pick.
Perreault went on to score 512 goals for the Sabres and get inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. No. 2 pick Dale Tallon spent only three seasons in Vancouver and bounced around the league for about a decade before retiring and later becoming an executive for several teams.
Here’s a good story on the goofy carnival wheel from the Vancouver Is Awesome website. And here’s more on the tradition of coin flips in sports from Slate.
