The 1959 announcement of the “Continental League,” set to begin play in 1961, was enough of a threat to Major League Baseball that they added four new expansion teams in 1961 and 1962 to stop the threat—successfully. Name the lawyer who proposed the new league and forced MLB’s hand. (As it happens, he was born in Washington Heights, not points east.)

Since Michigan State won the 2000 NCAA Division 1 basketball championship, there have been four title-winning men's D1 teams that hail from states that don’t share any part of their border with the Atlantic Ocean or its estuaries. Kentucky and Louisville are two. Name the two others.

In the 1840 short story “A Hero of Our Time,” Miguel Lermontov penned the first known description of a “game,” of sorts, that wouldn’t get its current name, at least in print, for another 97 years. That name, possibly invented by the writer Georges Surdez, contains a reference to another game of chance. What game did Lermontov and Surdez write about?

What *live* feat, later duplicated by organizations like the BBC, NBC, NHK, and Eurovision, was first pulled off (in limited fashion) by the German Post Office, using borrowed equipment? (Your answer must be specific.)

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars – the rest I just squandered.” This quote was uttered by the only man from Northern Ireland to win the European Footballer of the Year Award (a prize that evolved to become global and is now commonly known as the Ballon D’Or). Perhaps not surprisingly, he died in 2005 at age 59 due to complications from a liver transplant made necessary because of his chronic alcoholism. Name the player.