Sept. 24 in Sports History: Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field Farewell and Joyner-Kersee’s Olympic Gold
From the Dodgers’ final game at Ebbets Field to Olympic triumphs in Seoul and Sydney, Sept. 24 has marked major moments across sports.
On Sept. 24, 1988, an athlete raised in East St. Louis delivered a defining Olympic performance. Jackie Joyner-Kersee completed the heptathlon at the Seoul Games with 7,291 points, winning gold and improving her own world record. Her achievement gave the St. Louis region a direct connection to one of the signature performances of those Olympics.
The seven-event competition tested a combination of sprinting, jumping, throwing and endurance. Joyner-Kersee’s Seoul results included a 1.86-meter high jump, a 15.80-meter shot put and a 22.56-second 200 meters. She also long-jumped 7.27 meters and finished the concluding 800 meters in 2 minutes, 8.51 seconds. The total reflected strength across different disciplines, rather than dominance in just one race or field event.
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The final out at Ebbets Field on Sept. 24, 1957, closed more than a baseball game. Brooklyn’s Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 2-0, ending their home schedule in the ballpark they had occupied for 45 seasons. Their move to Los Angeles, alongside the New York Giants’ departure for San Francisco, would reshape Major League Baseball’s geography and leave New York with just one major league team.
Only 6,702 fans attended the farewell. Danny McDevitt pitched a five-hit shutout, striking out nine, while Gil Hodges and Elmer Valo drove in Brooklyn’s runs. Gino Cimoli scored the park’s final run on Hodges’ third-inning single. Pittsburgh’s Dee Fondy grounded out to shortstop to end the game, supplying an ordinary baseball finish to an extraordinary turning point.
The departure separated a celebrated team from its longtime neighborhood home. The Dodgers had won six National League pennants and one World Series championship in a 10-year stretch. Success would follow them west: In 1959, Los Angeles defeated the Chicago White Sox in the World Series. For Brooklyn, however, Sept. 24 marked the end of baseball at Ebbets Field.
Her breakthrough had been building for years. In 1986, she became the first woman to surpass 7,000 points in the heptathlon. She raised the standard again before reaching Seoul, where the record-setting heptathlon became part of a two-gold-medal Olympics. Joyner-Kersee also won the separate long jump competition, repeating the heptathlon-long jump double she had achieved at the 1987 world championships.
Another American made history in Seoul’s pool that Sept. 24. Matt Biondi won the men’s 50-meter freestyle in a world-record 22.14 seconds, leading a U.S. sweep of the top two places. Tom Jager took silver in 22.36, and the Soviet Union’s Gennady Prigoda earned bronze. The victory gave Biondi his fourth gold medal and sixth medal overall at those Games.
Jager had entered with an imposing sprint résumé, including victories at the 1986 world championships and 1987 Pan Pacific Championships. But Biondi gained the early advantage in the Olympic final and never surrendered it. Against a rival known for his fast starts, Biondi combined a strong beginning with his finishing speed to claim the record and championship.
The sprint victory helped define a remarkable recovery within Biondi’s Olympic meet. He had opened with bronze and silver before winning five consecutive gold medals. He ultimately left Seoul with seven medals, including victories in both individual sprint freestyle races. Rather than allowing early defeats to determine his Games, he finished with a sustained run of championship performances.
On Sept. 24, 2000, Naoko Takahashi made Olympic history for Japan in the women’s marathon at Sydney. She won in 2 hours, 23 minutes, 14 seconds, establishing an Olympic best and becoming the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic gold medal in track and field. Romania’s Lidia Simon finished eight seconds behind her.
The result extended Japan’s success in the event while taking it to a new level. Yuko Arimori had earned marathon silver at the 1992 Barcelona Games and bronze at Atlanta in 1996. Takahashi supplied the missing gold. Her winning margin also underscored how closely the championship was contested: After more than two hours on the road, just eight seconds separated the first two runners.
On Sept. 24, 2007, India defeated Pakistan by five runs in Johannesburg to win the inaugural men’s Twenty20 cricket World Cup. Gautam Gambhir scored 75, and Rohit Sharma added an unbeaten 30 as India posted 157 for five wickets. Pakistan kept the final alive into its last over, turning the first championship game in the tournament’s history into a tense finish between rivals.
Pakistan needed 13 runs from the final over with one wicket remaining. Misbah-ul-Haq hit a six to narrow the gap, but his attempted scoop on the next delivery went to Sreesanth for the decisive catch. The victory launched MS Dhoni’s championship record as India’s captain and helped accelerate the country’s embrace of the shorter format. The Indian Premier League began less than a year later, extending the momentum generated by that breakthrough title.
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