Sport by Numbers: Number 15

Today's notable sporting integer is 15. Fifteen is the first number, counting from one, which is not immediately associated with handfuls of notable sporting heroes. Why should this be? I have absolutely no idea, as it seems to me to be a perfectly serviceable number . Anyone wearing it would no doubt look very handsome and make their grandmother enormously proud.

It is the number that is always worn by the full back in rugby union however, so there is no shortage of competition for our purposes: even if they haven't strictly chosen it for themselves. I like to think that if they could have, they would.

As such, I have picked one of the most notable rugby full backs ever to play the game, a legend of the sport in the British Isles: former Scotland captain and six-time British and Irish Lion, Gavin Hastings. Hastings also played 61 tests for Scotland and, with a combined 733 points, he is the all-time British rugby union top scorer.

Sport by Numbers: Number 3

Today's sporting number comes from the hotly contested series from one to fifteen. These are the numbers that cover the action for all but the most lunatic of sporting occasions and, as a result, have come to be associated with all kinds of different personalities and disciplines. Number 3 is the number that AC Milan retired in honour of their stalwart defender Paolo Maldini; it is also the number carried by the legendary Dale Earnhardt throughout his career in stock car racing.

However, it would have been remiss of me to not award my number 3 to the Sultan of Swat. The 20th Century saw the invention of many things that we now accept as facts of life without really thinking about them and one of these was international sporting superstars. George Herman "Babe" Ruth was one of the first and, over a century on from his Major League Baseball debut, he remains one of the biggest. If he hadn't been born, someone would have had to invent him.

Sport by Numbers: Number 33

Today begins a new series of pictures combining sport and the iconic numbers associated with some of its greatest practitioners. I'll be trying to add a new one every Friday morning, but you know what I'm like. Flaky.

Keen-eyed viewers will also notice that I am not doing them in any kind of order, least of all numerical order. This is a deliberate strategem on my part to make the project seem like more fun and less like a self-imposed prison. Where, of course, the gaoler is me and the terms are fairly lenient. Flaky, you see.

Anyway, the first entrant is probably best known to British people as the co-pilot in the 1980 disaster comedy film Airplane! but the majority of Americans recognise him instead as perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Virtually every other rival he has for that title is also on my list awaiting being drawn by the way, so don't panic too much.

He is also an excellent reminder that US sporting greats can appear in motion pictures and not subsequently murder their wife.