Today in Sports History: May 30th

5/30/1920 - Flack and Heathcote play both sides

A unique thing happens during a morning-afternoon doubleheader between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. In between games, the Cubs traded right fielder Max Flack to the Cardinals for center fielder Cliff Heathcote. Both players then switched sides and played for the other team in the second game of the doubleheader.

"After lunch," Flack told Baseball Digest in 1969, "I walked back to the ballpark, went into the Cubs' clubhouse and that's when I got the word. Bill Killefer, the manager, told me, 'You're in the wrong clubhouse, you've been traded to the Cardinals.' So I picked up my gear and walked over [to] the Cardinal clubhouse."

It wasn't for another 62 years, when Joel Youngblood was traded to the Montreal Expos, that another player would play for two teams in one day.

5/30/1994 - Kim Jong-Il: master golfer

In 1994, Kim Jong-Il -- who would succeed his father, Kim Il Sung, as the leader of North Korea in a few months -- played at the Pyongyang golf club, the only links course in the entire nation. Kim had never played golf before, though apparently he was a natural. In fact, if you are to believe the report issued by North Korea's government-controlled media, Kim Jong-Il is the greatest golfer of all time.

Kim shot a 38-under-par 34 in his first round, besting the PGA single-round record by 25 strokes. He made a staggering five holes-in-one (or 11 depending on who you hear it from) and scored nothing worse than a birdie.

Needless to say, people overseas were a tad suspicious that the 5-foot-3, 52 year-old dictator, who had never played a round in his life, was really that good. While there were more than a dozen notaries on scene to verify Kim's round, something about being the brutal dictator of a nation without free speech hurt his credibility.

By the way, of all the things Kim Jong-Il ever did, and he did some monstrously cruel things, the most bizarre happened in the late 70's, when he kidnapped South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and forced him to direct movies for him. The most famous film Shin made before he and his wife escaped was called "Pulgasari," the story of a rice doll that transformed into a metal-eating monster when it came in contact with blood. The person who wore the monster outfit was Kenpachiro Satsuma, who was then the actor who played Godzilla.

5/30/2007 - Kobe demands to be traded

Complaining that there wasn't enough talent around him, Kobe Bryant goes on the radio and demands to be traded... sort of. Bryant would not be dealt and management satisfied him by adding players such as Derek Fisher, Pau Gasol, and Trevor Ariza to the roster. Only two years after asking to be moved, L.A. won the NBA championship in 2009.

To read more about this story, click here for an in-depth Inhistoric article: