The 1990s in America

Sports

by Keith J. Bell

Definition Athletic contests, both team and individual

The 1990’s experienced the usual sports dynasties, emerging athletic superstars, tragedies, triumphs, labor strikes, and even the birth of a new league.

One word could summarize the decade of the 1990’s: dynasty. The National Football League (NFL) had the Dallas Cowboys. The National Basketball Association (NBA) produced the six-time-champion Chicago Bulls led by Michael Jordan. The Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees emerged as perennial powerhouses for Major League Baseball (MLB). Dale Earnhardt won four NASCAR championships, and rookie Jeff Gordon would materialize as the face of a new generation of stock car racing in the late 1990’s. The National Hockey League (NHL) began the decade with the dominance of the Pittsburgh Penguins, and two Penguins, Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr, would win countless player of the year awards. Tennis produced a competition like no other with the rivalry between Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) formed in 1997, and the Houston Comets would win the first three WNBA championships. Finally, the one-man golfing dynasty of Tiger Woods began: In 1994, the eighteen-year-old Woods won the first of three U.S. Amateur Golf Championships, and in 1997, his first full professional year, he would win the Masters Tournament.

Basketball

If one basketball franchise were the face of the 1990’s, then it would be the Chicago Bulls. The Bulls, led by NBA great Jordan, would produce two “three-peats,” a phrase coined by former Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Riley to describe three championships in a row. The Bulls won in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, and 1998 and set an NBA record with most wins in a season with a 72-10 record in 1996. Jordan had retired in 1993 after the murder of his father and played professional baseball in the interim before returning to basketball and the Bulls in 1995. He retired a second time after the 1998 season, but his Nike shoes, hanging tongue, high-flying slam dunks, and ability to make clutch shots created a lasting legacy.

Football

Three teams dominated the NFL in the 1990’s: The Dallas Cowboys, the San Francisco Forty-Niners, and the Denver Broncos combined for seven of the ten championships won during the decade. However, it was the second-place finisher that garnered most of the headlines: Between 1991 and 1994, the Buffalo Bills represented the American Football Conference (AFC) in the NFL championship game, and each time the Bills were on the losing end. For the first time in NFL history, a team finished as runner-up in the championship game for four consecutive years. The Bills lost a heartbreaker in 1991 when Scott Norwood’s field goal attempt sailed just wide, resulting in a 20-19 loss to the New York Giants. The Bills would go on to lose in 1992 to the Washington Redskins and in 1993 and 1994 to the Dallas Cowboys.

Baseball

Major League Baseball in the 1990’s is remembered for the play of two great franchises: the Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees. The Braves won their division every year during the decade and appeared in the World Series five times, winning once in 1995. The Yankees won the World Series in 1996, 1998, and 1999.

In 1992, the Toronto Blue Jays became the first non-American team to win the World Series. The Blue Jays would win again in 1993 with Joe Carter’s famous game-winning walk-off home run against the Philadelphia Phillies’ Mitch Williams. The 1993 season also saw the birth of two new franchises. The Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins were created and joined the National League in 1993. Just four years later, in 1997, the Marlins would win the World Series, the quickest rise for an expansion team in history.

In 1994, the highlights and positive stories in baseball were replaced with a labor strike between MLB and the players’ union. The standoff would lead to the cancellation of most of the regular season and result in baseball becoming the first major sport to lose its postseason because of a strike.

In 1998, however, baseball would rebound with one of the most electrifying seasons in professional sports. Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs both chased the single-season home run record of sixty-one set by Roger Maris thirty-seven years before. Both would eclipse Maris, but it was McGwire’s seventy home runs that would outdo Sosa’s sixty-six. The home run battle is said to be responsible for bringing baseball back as the national pastime. McGwire would cap the 1998 season by being named the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year. Speculations of steroid use among athletes and the resulting inflation of statistics produced by these synthetic drugs began to swirl following the 1998 season.

Hockey

The NHL began the 1990 campaign with a win by the blue-collar Pittsburgh Penguins. That championship would be followed by a second in 1991 as team captain and new star of the NHL, Mario Lemieux, led his team to victory. Scotty Bowman, who would leave the Penguins and resurface in Detroit, coached the Penguins to one of their two championships. He then led the Detroit Red Wings to championships in the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 seasons, for a total of three championships in the 1990’s.

Another first was the play of Manon Rheaume, the goaltender for the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL who in 1992 became the first female athlete to play competitively in one of the four big sports (football, baseball, basketball, hockey). The 1994 season is also well remembered by hockey fans because on October 1, 1994, the NHL locked out the players in a labor dispute similar to that of Major League Baseball. The dispute would shorten the NHL season to forty-eight games and conclude with a New York Rangers victory. Once a perennial powerhouse of the league, the Rangers ended a fifty-four-year drought as champions of hockey with their Stanley Cup victory in 1994.

Tennis

Tennis was a sport of rising popularity in the 1990’s because of four athletes. On the men’s side, Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras dominated individual play and were responsible for seventeen grand-slam victories during the era. Sampras won Wimbledon six times during the 1990’s, as well as six additional victories in the Australian and U.S. Opens. Agassi battled Sampras throughout the 1990’s and won the 1992 Wimbledon tournament as well as four additional Australian, French, and U.S. Opens. Additionally, Agassi won gold in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics for the United States.

On the women’s side, two athletes competed as the face of the 1990’s: Monica Seles and Steffi Graf. Seles was victorious eight times between 1990 and 1993 in the four grand-slam tournaments. Graf continued her reign as the best female tennis player of the 1980’s and produced fourteen additional grand-slam tournaments in the 1990’s. She won three of the four grand-slam tournaments in 1993 and 1995, losing the Australian Open both years, once to rival Seles. Their rivalry was suspended briefly after Seles was stabbed on the court by a deranged Graf fan during a match in 1993. A rattled Seles left tennis but returned in 1995 and won another Australian Open title in 1996.

The domination of these two women opened the door for many other greats in the sport. One of them was Jennifer Capriati, but after a brief career that included an Olympic title, she would fade from glory as a result of drug use. The Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, emerged on the court in the late 1990’s and would reign supreme over female tennis by the start of the twenty-first century.

Boxing

Boxing was another sport that faced ups and downs in popularity during the decade. Heavyweight champion Mike Tyson was on the losing end of one of sports most famous upsets. On February 11, 1990, he was defeated by 42-1 underdog James “Buster” Douglas in Tokyo. Tyson was one of the most feared heavyweight fighters of all time and undefeated coming into the bout with Douglas. The boxing world would be scarred by the antics of Tyson for years to come, as he was arrested and convicted in 1992 for the rape of Desiree Washington, a Miss Black Rhode Island pageant competitor. He served three years in prison and returned to boxing in 1995.

In 1996, just as the sport was beginning to lose fan support, boxing got the fight for which it had been waiting: a match between Tyson and Evander Holyfield. Tyson lost in the eleventh round, and a rematch was scheduled for the next year. Once again, Tyson would let the sport of boxing down: Following a second attempt at biting, in which Tyson partially removed part of Holyfield’s ear, Tyson was disqualified. A near riot broke out, and several people were injured in the arena.

The 1990’s brought black eyes and bad memories for boxing, but there were a few bright spots. In 1994, George Foreman became the oldest heavyweight champion ever when he defeated Michael Moorer for the belt. The decade also saw the emergence of champions Oscar de la Hoya, Roy Jones, Jr., and Lennox Lewis.

Other Sports

The 1990’s also witnessed the beginning and end of careers in several lesser-known sports. In cycling, the Tour de France witnessed the end to the dynasty of Greg LeMond in 1990 but the beginning of seven-time champion Lance Armstrong’s reign in 1999.

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) also had some ups and downs. Early in the decade, Dale Earnhardt dominated the field, winning four major championships and finally capturing the elusive Daytona 500 race in February, 1998. The sport also witnessed the emergence of the popular Jeff Gordon. He and the Earnhardt dynasty helped catapult NASCAR into the limelight in 1995, and the sport branched out internationally in 1996 with the Suzuka Circuit in Japan. NASCAR celebrated its fiftieth anniversary two years later, in 1998. The sport was not without loss, however, as Alan Kulwicki and Davey Allison were killed in separate aviation accidents in 1993.

At the end of the decade, horse racing, and particularly the Triple Crown races, would regain glory. In 1997, the gray colt Silver Charm narrowly missed winning the final leg of the Triple Crown at Belmont Park. The following year, another near miss by Real Quiet further promoted horse racing. In 1999, the 29-1 long shot Charismatic won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness and then broke down in the Belmont, failing to win the last leg of the Triple Crown but reviving fan support in the search for a champion.

Impact

Sports in the 1990’s were a time of tragedy and triumph. The story of Dennis Byrd, the New York Jets football player who was paralyzed in a game with the Kansas City Chiefs in 1992 and later made a full recovery, was heartwarming and gave faith to many that they could overcome any obstacle. Nolan Ryan’s seventh and final career no-hitter in 1991, Cal Ripken, Jr.’s eclipse of Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak in 1998, and the U.S. dominance at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta were positive memories of the role of sports in society. However, stories such as the final-hole collapse of French golfer Jean Van de Velde in the 1999 British Open with a three-stroke lead, the Olympic Park bombing of 1996, the O. J. Simpson trial of 1995, and the deaths of great athletes such as American football player Red Grange and Croatian basketball player Drazen Petrovic were reminders of how sports is not always about happy endings. Nevertheless, sports played a crucial role in giving hope to many Americans.

Further Reading

1 

Brown, Gerry, and Mike Morrison, eds. ESPN Sports Almanac. New York: Ballantine, 2009. A definitive source for statistics and trivia.

2 

Layden, Joe. The Great American Baseball Strike. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1995. A book designed for young adults that examines the 1994-1995 baseball strike within the context of the history of the game and its past labor problems.

3 

McNeil, William. The Single-Season Home Run Kings: Ruth, Maris, McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002. Reviews the careers of each player and his record-breaking season.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Bell, Keith J. "Sports." The 1990s in America, edited by Milton Berman, Salem Press, 2009. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1990_1528.
APA 7th
Bell, K. J. (2009). Sports. In M. Berman (Ed.), The 1990s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Bell, Keith J. "Sports." Edited by Milton Berman. The 1990s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2009. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.