The 1990s Sports: Chronology

1990:     January 15 Joe Montana sets the NFL record for postseason touchdowns with numbers thirty and thirty-one, breaking Terry Bradshaw's record.

1990:     June 11 Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers pitches his sixth no-hit game, a major league baseball record, against the Oakland Athletics.

1990:     October 28 Fourteen-year-old Jennifer Capriati wins her first professional tennis tournament, the Puerto Rican Open.

1991:     March 2 Del Ballard Jr. throws the most famous gutter ball in Professional Bowlers Association history in the finals of the Fair Lanes Open. Needing only seven pins to win, Ballard hits the gutter instead, losing the thirty-thousand-dollar first prize.

1991:     July 15 Sandhi Ortiz-DelValle becomes the first woman to officiate a men's professional basketball game.

1992:     February 8 to 23 The Winter Olympics are held in Albertville, France.

1992:     July 25 to August 9 The Summer Olympics are held in Barcelona, Spain.

1992:     November 29 Jerry Rice, wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, catches his one-hundredth touchdown pass.

1993:     April 30 Monica Seles, while playing in a tennis match in Hamburg, Germany, is stabbed by a rival's fan.

1993:     September 22 The expansion Colorado Rockies franchise sets a major league baseball attendance record of 4,483,350 during the team's first season.

1993:     November 14 Don Shula breaks George Halas's career victory mark as an NFL coach with win number 325.

1994:     February 12 to 27 The Winter Olympics are held in Lillehammer, Norway.

1994:     August 12 Major league baseball players go on strike to protest the owners' plan for a salary cap. The season is ended and the World Series is canceled for the first time in ninety years.

1994:     October 31 Because she was winning every junior tennis tournament she entered, Venus Williams turns professional at age fourteen.

1995:     March 19 Michael Jordan, who had retired the previous year to play baseball for the Chicago White Sox, returns to professional basketball to play for the Chicago Bulls.

1995:     August 20 Joe Mesa, pitching for the Cleveland Indians, gets his thirty-seventh save in thirty-seven opportunities and sets a new major league baseball record.

1995:     September 6 Cal Ripken Jr., an infielder for the Baltimore Orioles, plays in his 2,131st consecutive major league baseball game, breaking Lou Gehrig's record.

1996:     July 19 to August 4 The Summer Olympics are held in Atlanta, Georgia.

1996:     September 18 Roger Clemens, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, ties his own major league record of twenty strikeouts in a nine-inning game.

1996:     November 23 Coach Pat Summitt wins her six-hundredth women's college basketball game while coaching the University of Tennessee Lady Volunteers.

1997:     April 9 Tiger Woods wins the Masters golf tournament with a record eighteen-under-par.

1997:     June 28 Evander Holyfield wins a heavyweight fight against Mike Tyson when Tyson is disqualified for biting Holyfield's ear.

1997:     October 28 Dee Kantner and Violet Palmer make history by becoming the first female referees in the NBA.

1998:     February 7 to 22 The Winter Olympics are held in Nagano, Japan.

1998:     March 1 Venus Williams wins her first professional tennis singles title in the IGA Tennis Classic.

1998:     September 8 Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals breaks Roger Maris's single-season home run record, hitting number sixty-two.

1999:     July 10 Brandi Chastain's penalty kick leads the U.S. soccer team to victory over China in the Women's World Cup.

1999:     July 25 Cyclist Lance Armstrong makes an amazing comeback after battling testicular cancer to win the Tour de France, the world's premier cycling event.

1999:     December 26 Michael Jordan is selected by the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) as the greatest North American athlete of the twentieth century.