Obscurity of the Day: Sports Hall of Shame

Here's a good obscurity to bring you down from last night's Super Bowl. Sports Hall of Shame was by writers Allan Zullo and Bruce Nash along with cartoonist Bill Maul. It plied the familiar waters first sailed by the venerable Ripley, with the twist that this feature limited it's strange but true factoids to the world of sport (which, incidentally, was also Ripley's original subject). The panel feature ran both Sunday and daily starting May 7 1990* and ended on October 22 1994. Maul bailed on the feature on January 15 1994 and a cartoonist named (Marty?) Bucella took up the reins until October 22 1994. The strip was retired without ever having much caught on with newspaper editors. Nash and Zullo had quite the little cottage industry going with sports anecdote books. They published a slew of different titles, but my impression is that only two, Sports Hall of Shame Cartoon Classics and Sports Hall of Shame Golf Cartoons Classics, are reprints of the newspaper feature.

* EDIT 6/20/2021: Strike that start date. Seems to have started as a weekly panel in October 1989, graduated to daily in January 1990.