POINT OF VIEW / BOB OATES : The Top 10 Sports Events : Olympic Hockey Game, Dempsey-Tunney Fight, Super Bowl III: Best of the 20th Century

When the 20th Century’s top 10 sports events are ranked in order of their impact on America, it’s easy enough to name the top three.

They are the U.S.-Soviet Union hockey game at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, the long-count Dempsey-Tunney fight in 1927, and Super Bowl III, the 1969 football game that created a new kind of national holiday.

It’s also easy to rule out some widely publicized events. Thus, no other Super Bowl game belongs.

Even though, as an annual series, it’s the biggest thing in U.S. sports, there hasn’t been one 60-minute drama in all the Super Bowl renewals since 1969, when, after Joe Namath guaranteed it, the New York Jets upset the Baltimore Colts.

As for the Olympic Games, even though they stir the nation and the world every four years, few renewals, when you look back, stand out. Too much happens each time. It’s all too diffused.

Lake Placid is a vivid exception. As America cheered, the United States beat a seemingly unbeatable hockey team in the kind of isolated one-shot big event it takes to emotionally involve an uncommonly large number of people.

Other hockey games and most basketball and baseball games don’t do it. Each year, those three sports present so many regular-season games and long tournaments or playoffs that the impact of any one event is diluted.

That isn’t usually true of, say, football, or heavyweight boxing.

Football leads the United States in big games not only because it is the most popular sport but also because of the nature of football: Its games are infrequently played. There’s at least a weeklong buildup each time.

For heavyweight title fights, which are even more infrequent, public interest always resolves to a basic question: Who’s the toughest guy in the world? Most men want to see or read about that--and many women want to know.

Looking back, the memorable events of a lifetime won’t all fit in anybody’s top 10, and your choice could well be better than mine. But if I were planning a science-fiction trip back through the 20th Century, these are the sports events I’d choose to see again:

1: U.S. vs. THE SOVIET UNION

The cold war seemed boundless in 1980 when, during the Lake Placid Olympics, the Soviet Union went for the gold with a team of pro hockey players who, on tour, had defeated a team of NHL all-stars, 6-0. As usual, America sent in a bunch of amateurs, who beat the Communists, 4-3, in the wildest upset of the century. It was like an astronaut reporting that the moon really is made of green cheese.

And for millions of patriotic Americans, reaction was the same as it would have been last summer had a U.S. side somehow won soccer’s World Cup. Winning internationally, it often seems, is the biggest thing that can happen to a country--Brazil, Germany, or America--and at Lake Placid, the flags were still waving when the U.S. team, after erasing the Soviet Union, beat Finland, 4-2, in the final game.

2: DEMPSEY vs. TUNNEY

In what remains the biggest national sports event of all time, the gate for this one, including only $25,000 from radio and nothing from TV, which didn’t exist, was $2,658,660--a spectacular figure that translates, in 1995 currency, to nearly $30 million. It was on a 1927 night at Chicago’s Soldier Field, in an era of 10-round bouts, that Gene Tunney took his second decision from Jack Dempsey in 12 months.

The challenger knocked Tunney down for at least 12 seconds and more like 14 in the seventh, and that should have ended it. But in the noise originating in the throats of 104,943 fight fans, referee Dave Barry said later, he couldn’t move Dempsey to a neutral corner.

3: NAMATH vs. THE NFL

On the eve of Super Bowl III, the nine-year-old American Football League, after losing Games I and II, was still presumed to be 18 points worse than the NFL, age 49. In a stunner that transformed the Super Bowl into the nation’s top annual event, quarterback Joe Namath made good on his guarantee, leading the AFL’s New York Jets past the NFL’s Baltimore Colts at Miami, 16-7, and marking the beginning of a new age. Motto: “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.” Then Namath became the first to run off the field signaling No. 1.

Still, it wasn’t the NFL’s first big title event. In 1958, Baltimore, with Johnny Unitas at quarterback, had won in overtime over the New York Giants, prompting New York reporters to claim that America had discovered pro football. In truth, California, where most national trends begin, had made the discovery years earlier with the first of many 100,000 Ram crowds at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

4: MAZ STOPS STENGEL

Second baseman Bill Mazeroski, 24, who was to average 8.1 home runs annually in 17 years with the Pittsburgh Pirates, led off the last of the ninth with the home run that defeated the New York Yankees in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, 10-9. Managed by Casey Stengel, the Yankees had won seven of the 11 previous World Series--and 10 of 12 American League pennants--and with Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, they had won Games 2, 3 and 6, 16-3, 10-0 and 12-0.

But with Roberto Clemente and pitchers Vern Law and Roy Face, the Pirates kept coming back. And in the seventh game, Stengel’s luck ran out. With his team ahead in the eighth inning, 7-4, an apparent double-play ball hit Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek in the neck. The Pirates capitalized and moved into a 9-7 lead. Then, in order, Stengel caught up, 9-9, Maz beat him, and the misguided Yankees fired Stengel.

5: THE RISE OF ROUNDBALL

At Albuquerque, in a nation-transfixing upset, North Carolina State toppled the heavily favored Phi Slamma Jamma team from Houston, 54-52, in a 1983 title game that was pivotal in the rise of the college basketball tournament to No. 2 in U.S. popularity--ahead of the World Series and behind only the NFL playoffs. In any comparison of spectator sports, basketball’s edge is that its games are frequently marked by continuous action, as this one was.

As time ran out, it was won by sophomore forward Lorenzo Charles, who caught and jammed in an airball that had originated as a desperation long shot by guard Dereck Whittenberg. Earlier in the century, John Wooden’s UCLA teams won more often without getting the national attention that came to North Carolina State that year when, under Jimmy Valvano, the Wolfpack kept upsetting tournament rivals, five in all. In baseball and football, you can’t do it that way.

6: THE THRILLA IN MANILA

This was war. And many fight fans still call it No. 1. On a Manila night in 1975, the only difference between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier--in their third fight, following Frazier’s 15-round decision and then Ali’s 12-round decision--was that Frazier quit. For 14 rounds they had injured each other terribly. Indeed, Ali hasn’t recovered yet. But he wouldn’t quit. And when the 14th was over, it was Frazier’s handlers who decided, over his protests, that he had had enough.

That night, Ali, 33, took 440 blows--most of which he would have slipped entirely as a young man--in what was either the greatest prizefight ever or the most telling argument against prizefighting. But the real Ali wasn’t there. The real Ali had won his other big fights, against Sonny Liston by not getting hit, and against George Foreman by using the “rope-a-dope” to tire him out.

7: DORAIS TO ROCKNE

Two Notre Dame students, an end named Knute Rockne and quarterback Gus Dorais, reinvented football in 1913 in the biggest college game ever played. On a field at West Point, N.Y., they beat Army with passes, 35-13, the first time a passing offense was integrated with running plays to spread out and subdue defensive players.

Although passing had been legal for seven years, football was still a game of tedious, pounding ground attacks when Dorais and Rockne opened the door to a stimulating future for U.S. sports fans. The two Notre Dame seniors, in an era when students often did much of the coaching, practiced together all summer, then surprised Army with 243 yards passing. Of Dorais’ 17 throws, Rockne caught nine--still an impressive number.

8: MONTANA TO CLARK

A six-yard play introduced the nation to West Coast football in January 1982. Known as “the Catch,” it was the symbolic beginning of pass-first football, which is often more effective than run-now-pass-later. In the last 51 seconds, two San Francisco 49ers, Joe Montana and Dwight Clark, were each running and jumping--Montana to throw the ball, and Clark to catch it along the end line in Candlestick Park--for the decisive touchdown of an NFC title game, 28-27.

The Catch ended a generation of dominance by the Dallas Cowboys, who were in the Super Bowl five times in the 1970s, and it began the age of the 49ers, who have since played in, and won, five Super Bowls. As the lead changed hands six times on a rare night of enduring football excitement, the 49ers won it in the last 4:54 with an 89-yard drive--on running plays, mostly, surprising seven Dallas defensive backs.

9: LOUIS vs. SCHMELING

In 1938, as heavyweight champion Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling in the first round at Yankee Stadium, Americans by the millions gathered around their radios--as they always did for a Louis fight in the days before TV. But this time there was more drama. For Schmeling had knocked Louis out in the 12th round two years earlier, before Louis had the title.

The rematch stopped the world in the nervous days just before the 1939-45 war, when Schmeling symbolized the master race of Hitler’s Germany against an African American artist who was to rule the heavyweights for a dozen years, destroying Schmeling and almost everyone else he fought.

10: THE ICE BOWL

With 16 seconds to play, quarterback Bart Starr’s unforgettable one-yard touchdown sneak in 19-below weather won what was then called the NFL championship game, 21-17, for the 1967 Green Bay Packers over the Dallas Cowboys.

Three other things about the Ice Bowl were more significant: that Green Bay could hold itself together in the last 4:30, in a minus-50 wind chill, for the winning 68-yard drive; that the touchdown was set up with a shocking misdirection play--Yale fullback Chuck Mercein’s eight-yard run through a hole left by a pulling guard who had suckered his man away--and that Coach Vince Lombardi recklessly chose a third-down sneak instead of a pass or a field goal and overtime.

One year earlier, forced to play the Cowboys’ game at Dallas, Lombardi had displayed an unsuspected versatility, opening and continuing with Starr’s passes to win perhaps the most artistically played game in NFL history, 34-27. Then, putting the seal of greatness on their coach, the Packers easily won the first two Super Bowls.