Charm Offensive; Four-Peat; ADS-L archives

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:44 AM -0500 2/11/01, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>--------------------------------------------------------
>FOUR-PEAT
>
>    Today's New York Post discusses a possible New York Yankees
>"four-peat."  As in, one more than a "three-peat" and two more than
>a "repeat."  This hasn't been used often (not too many circumstances
>of a three-time champion), and it sounds ridiculous each time.
>
>--------------------------------------------------------
There are "about 969" hits on google for "four-peat", several of
which involve teams that tried for the "four-peat" and didn't make
it, one prominent recent example being the Lady Vols (U. of Tennessee
women's basketball team) who were upset by Duke on March 23, 1999.
Many of the "four-peat" cites are on the high school level, and some
involve peripheral categories (coach of the year, player of the year)
rather than team championships.  One outlier is a reference (or
several references, actually) to the Bulls winning the NBA
championship in 1996 after winning three years in a row from 1990-91
through 1992-93 (the last of which was widely proclaimed as a
three-peat, causing royalties to be paid to Pat Riley, who reputedly
copyrighted the term when his Lakers tried (and failed) to achieve
the three-peat when the Bulls unseated them in '91) and then not
winning for the two years during which Michael Jordan took his
baseball sabbatical.  The Bulls in fact three-peated twice around
that two-year hiatus, but didn't REALLY four-peat, because of that
hiatus.  The New York Islanders four-peated in the NHL, but that was
7 years before Riley coined the "three-peat" term, if indeed he did.
Of course, that doesn't prevent three-peat--or four-peat--from being
used retroactively, as in the following:

[I hope my saving the html text through Simple Text will avoid the
format issues that won me a round of complaints]

No major pro sports team has won four consecutive championships in this
decade. Not the Chicago Bulls, not the Dallas Cowboys, not the New York
Yankees, not Major League Soccer's D.C. United. A four-peat hasn't been
accomplished in hockey since 1983, in basketball since 1966, in baseball
since 1954, or in football ever. Tiger Woods is being celebrated today as
history's greatest golfer because he just became the first player in 47 years
to win three major tournaments in a year. But no current male athlete has
won four straight titles in any of these sports. That honor is about to be
earned instead by a team of women: the Houston Comets.
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