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winning the first World Series in 1903 and amassing five World Series titles prior to selling Ruth

he once-lackluster Yankees became one of the most successful franchises in North American professional sports.

ended in 2004, when the Red Sox came back from a 0-3 best-of-seven deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series and then went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals to win the 2004 World Series.

the curse

In 1949, the Red Sox needed to win just one of the last two games of the season to win the pennant, but lost both games to the Yankees, who would go on to win a record five consecutive World Series from 1949 to 1953.

In 1967, the Red Sox surprisingly reversed the awful results of the 1966 season by winning the American League pennant on the last weekend of the season. In the World Series, they once again faced the Cardinals, and just as in 1946, the Series went to a seventh game. St. Louis won the deciding contest 7-2

In 2003, the Red Sox were playing the Yankees in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. Boston held a 5-2 lead in the eighth inning, and manager Grady Little opted to stay with starting pitcher Pedro Martínez rather than go to the bullpen. New York rallied off the tired Martínez, scoring three runs off a single and three doubles to tie the game. In the bottom of the 11th inning, Aaron Boone launched a solo home run off knuckleballing Boston starter Tim Wakefield (pitching in relief) to win the game and the pennant for the Yankees.

In 2004, the Red Sox once again met the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. After losing the first three games, including a 19–8 drubbing at Fenway in Game 3, the Red Sox trailed 4-3 in the bottom of the 9th inning of Game 4. But the team tied the game with a walk by Kevin Millar and a stolen base by pinch-runner Dave Roberts, followed by an RBI single off Yankee closer Mariano Rivera by third baseman Bill Mueller, and won on a 2-run home run in the 12th inning by David Ortiz. The Red Sox would go on to win the next three games to become the first Major League Baseball team to win a seven-game postseason series after being down 3 games to none.

The Red Sox then faced the St. Louis Cardinals, the team to whom they lost the 1946 and 1967 World Series, and won in a four-game sweep. Cardinals shortstop Edgar Rentería—who wore number 3, Babe Ruth's uniform number with the Yankees—hit into the final out of the game. The final game took place on October 27 during a total lunar eclipse—the only post-season or World Series game to do so. It also took place exactly 18 years to the day the Red Sox last lost a World Series game. Three years later, the Red Sox would sweep the Colorado Rockies to win another World Series.

Barnstormers, who were in fact aerial showmen, fired the imagination of aviators and skydivers after World War I. The barnstormers showed airborne performances and parachute jumps and travelled every year throughout the United States. Competitions began as a result of the increase of parachuting awareness. The first contest of accuracy landing was held in 1930 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The military used paratroopers in World War II , that is between 1939 and 1945. The paratroopers were parachute-equipped soldiers and had the most famous use on D-Day, the invasion of Normandy (Normandie), France, on June 6, 1944

The surplus of nylon parachute equipment after World War II and the fact that the U.S. Army had started the first military sport parachuting clubs, set the grounds of skydiving in the United Dtates, as a pleasant and relaxing activity. The same thing happened in many other countries, and thus , the first parachuting world championships were organized in 1951 in Yugoslavia.

Little by little, in the mid 1960, systems specially made for sport parachutes took the place of the military surplus systems. Parachutists started to call this activity skydiving and calling themselves skydivers. In order to improve the opening characteristics and to make them more maneuverable, there were a few sport modifications to military parachutes. A French Canadian kite builder, Domina Jalbert, developed in 1964 the the ram-air design, that has set the tendencies for parachutes in skydiving from then on.

Sport skydivers constantly tested new and revolutionary designs and materials. Apart from sport uses , there have also been designed sport-generated designs like military HAHO (high altitude, high opening) designs, smoke jumping designs and many types of equipment for two-person and four-person tandem jumping. The military HAHO designs allowed soldiers to silently fly over large areas. The smoke jumping designs aimed to put firefighters into remote forest fires from low altitude.

Skydiving has kept on becoming more and more popular after the late 1980s, and this is because the equipment, that is reliable, lightweight, and easy-to-operate, picture this sport as accesible to many people. The U.S. president George H. W. Bush also jumped , thus increasing the popularity of skydiving.