August 7

Vancouver, the Empire Games, and the first time two men ever broke four minutes in the same race. John Landy led it almost the whole way, then made the one mistake that outlives everybody: on the final bend he glanced back over his inside shoulder to find Roger Bannister, and Bannister swept past him on the outside at that exact second. Bannister ran 3:58.8, Landy 3:59.6, and there is a bronze statue of that glance standing to this day. Look back and you lose, they should teach it in schools.

That same afternoon, in that same stadium, it went the other way in the cruelest fashion. Jim Peters, the world record holder, staggered through the tunnel with the marathon basically won, seventeen minutes clear of second, and then his body quit on him in front of everyone. He fell and got up, fell and got up, spent about eleven minutes trying to cover the last stretch, and never made the line. They carried him off, he never raced again, and he said later he was lucky he did not die out there.

Roy Jones Jr had a score to settle. Five months earlier Montell Griffin had taken a knee, Jones clipped him anyway, and just like that the best fighter on the planet had the first loss put on his record by disqualification. The rematch this night lasted about two and a half minutes, Jones dropping him, hunting him down, and knocking him cold in the first round to take his light heavyweight belt back. Message sent.

The Hungaroring, 1988, right in the middle of that ridiculous McLaren season where the two of them won just about everything and could not stand each other. Ayrton Senna put it on pole and then did the hard part on a track where passing is next to impossible, holding Alain Prost behind him for the whole afternoon to win it. The teammate stuck in his mirrors was a two-time world champion, and Senna never gave him a sniff. That is how you win the ones where you cannot overtake, from the front and with your elbows out.

August 7, 2007, Barry Bonds turned on a Mike Bacsik fastball in San Francisco and hit number 756, one clear of Hank Aaron, to become the all-time home run king. His own park went nuts. The rest of the sport sat on its hands, because by then everybody had an opinion about how those numbers got put up. Greatest hitter I ever saw on film, and still the most complicated record in the game, and both of those things are true.