And on this day...

It has been 50 years, to the day, since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. That assassination is still a topic of conversation among all kinds of people all over the country. What went wrong? Who really shot Kennedy? What the hell is a grassy knoll anyways?

A recent television special focused on a book written by a man who maintains that Lee Harvey Oswald did take two of the three shots that killed JFK, but that fatal head shot came from a Secret Service agent in the car behind Kennedy. That was a new one. There was an agent in the car behind Kennedy with what looked like a machine gun. That agent allegedly and accidentally shot JFK in the confusion. Plausible? Probably not. The agent was supposedly falling backwards when the gun accidentally went off and hit the president in the head. Yeah, probably not.

What about the grassy knoll? A knoll, in case you were wondering, is a small hill. In this case, there was a small, grassy hill that would have been an excellent place for a shooter to hide and take that fatal shot. The only problem is that no one anywhere near the grassy knoll is seen reacting to a shot being fired in the Zapruder film, and it has been proven that the fatal shot came from behind the president.

Conspiracy theories are fun to think about, but the president was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in a lone attempt to alter the future. Americans hate the idea that our president could be taken down by some lone nut with an Italian rifle, but that is exactly what happened. Lee Harvey Oswald was an expert marksman and the shots he took were relatively simple for a guy with his abilities. One guy, one gun, one president. It sucks, but that is what happened.

What about the rest of the fallout from the assassination? When NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue canceled games after the September 11th attacks, he really didn't have a choice. The airlines were not flying and the country was on hold. But two days after the Kennedy assassination, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle had to decide if the league would play its games. College football played on Saturday November 23, 1963, so why not the NFL?

Rozelle decided to play the games and got punched in the face for it. A fan in Yankee Stadium stopped Rozelle in the stadium walkway during the New York Giants - St. Louis Cardinals game and punched Rozelle in the face for holding the game. This, of course, after the man had purchased his ticket to see the frigging Giants destroy those lowly Cardinals. Football fans really need to think before they act.

The Chicago Bears were NFL champions in 1941 and they played a road game against the Chicago Cardinals on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. During that game, there are no reports of NFL commissioner Elmer Layden getting punched in the face despite the fact that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor just hours earlier. Football fans are apparently a fickle bunch.

President Kennedy was one of the few presidents to ever visit Lockport, NY. He was also the only president to ever have to face the real threat of nuclear war. And on this day in history, he was also the only president to have his assassination filmed for the world to see. Fifty years later, we still don't know what really happened that day . . . and we probably never will.