Today in sports history

Fifty years ago today, an airplane carrying the Manchester United soccer team crashed on the runway at the Munich airport, killing 23 people ― eight players, a team secretary, nine journalists, two members of the flight crew, an assistant coach, a trainer, a travel agent and a fan who was a friend of the team's manager (which is apparently equivalent to a baseball manager).

The team was trying to return home from a European Cup match in Yugoslavia, with a scheduled refueling stop in Munich. Slush on the runway kept the plane from building up enough speed to get properly airborne.

A Hollywood film about the crash was reportedly in the works a couple of years ago, but the most recent news about that appears to be from 2005, so I don't know what came of it. I can tell you that the movies "Alive" (1993), about the 1972 plane crash in the Andes that killed most of the members of an Uruguayan rugby team; and "We Are Marshall" (2006), about the aftermath of the 1970 crash that killed most of the Marshall University Thundering Herd football team, were both pretty good. But those movies were made with extensive involvement from the people involved in the real-life stories; reportedly, none of the survivors of the Manchester United crash were contacted.