Thomas Dwight Dike Eddleman (December 27, 1922 — August 1, 2000) was an American athlete generally considered to be the best athlete in history. Eddleman was involved in basketball, college athletics,. The Illinois Press Association and Illinois Associated Press media editors hired veteran Chicago Sun-Times sports reporter Mark Potash for the position. Here's their list of the 10 best Illinois athletes.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee greets during the medal ceremony for the women's heptathlon at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. Otto Graham (4), a stellar halfback from Northwestern, competes for 20 yards in the second quarter of a game at Dyche Stadium in Evanston. Nitschke won five NFL championships with the Packers, including the first two Super Bowls. He was the MVP of the 1962 championship game.
A 1960 photo at Wrigley Field for the Cubs' Kiddie Corps shows coach Lou Boudreau (left to right), third baseman Ron Santo, outfielder Danny Murphy, and pitcher Dick Ellsworth. No exploration of the 200-year history of Illinois would be complete without taking a look at what preceded those two centuries. Before the 1986-87 season, at age 21, Yzerman was named captain of the Red Wings and served continuously for the next two decades (he dressed as captain for more than 1300 games), retiring as the longest-serving captain of any team in North American major league sports history. Once voted the most popular athlete in Detroit sports history, locals often simply refer to Yzerman as El Capitan.
After his career in international competitions, he received his doctorate in Osteopathic Medicine in 1937 and returned to Champaign, where he practiced osteopathic medicine, continued to compete in athletics and helped the UI athletics team in the 1940s. In 1956, Eddleman was transferred to a new plant in Gibson City, Illinois, a city located just 30 miles north of Champaign. It lives through the summer and fall, shows signs of animation during the winter, and lives to the fullest during March, when one hundred thousand pairs of rubber-soled shoes hit the hardwood in a whirlwind of stops, pivots, and races on the road to the state basketball championship. Jerry Colangelo played basketball in Illinois from 1960 to 1962 before embarking on a long and influential career in professional sports as a coach, general manager, and team owner.
Yao Ming gets a vote here for his crusader appeal, as he is one of the most famous men in China, even today. The use of the Illinois River, as well as the Mississippi River, as economic engines for the transportation of goods continues today. The Wheaton and University of Illinois racer even rivaled Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey as a star of American sports in the 1920s. During his brief military tenure in Illinois, Eddleman scored 618 points in 55 games, averaging 11.2 points per game, but 606 of those points were scored in his last two seasons, averaging 13.5 points per game.
Famous for his 11 years with Ferrari, Schumacher is a seven-time world champion and holds many of the Formula 1 drivers' records, including most championships, race wins, fastest laps, pole positions, points scored and most races won in a single season (13 in 2004). She is credited with being the first athlete to perform a rear aerial fall with the balance bar in Olympic competitions. In Illinois, Craig Virgin won nine Big Ten championships, nine All-American Awards, and was the NCAA Cross Country champion in 1975. Eddleman would end his military service in the fall of 1946, returning to the life of a college student athlete. He won the NCAA and Amateur Athletic Union high jump titles in 1922, and set the world record for high jump with a 6' 8¼ jump in 1924. He is a sports icon.
There are always players who weren't necessarily popular as players, but who have become beloved as icons of the games they played (although it doesn't work for athletes who are icons but who are still remembered as salty people, I'm seeing them, Ty Cobb and Ted Williams). .
