Billy Sunday

Billy Sunday (full name: William Ashley Sunday) (1862-1935) was a famous baseball player who became an even more famous revivalist minister. He set baseball records by rounding the bases in fourteen seconds, and in 1891 set a record by stealing 90 bases in 116 games. In that year, Philadelphia Phillies offered Sunday $400/month, but he turned them down to accept an $83/month job as "Secretary of the Religious Department" at a YMCA. He hosted his first revival meeting in Iowa in 1897 and became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1903.

By 1914, he was a national celebrity, conducting multi-day campaigns in big cities which attracted tens of thousands of people. He fiercely opposed alcohol:

Whiskey and beer are all right in their place, but their place is in hell.... The saloon is the sum of all villainies. It is worse than war or pestilence. It is the crime of crimes. It is parent of crimes and the mother of sins. It is the appalling source of misery and crime in the land and the principal cause of crime. It is the source of three-fourths of the taxes to support that crime. And to license such an incarnate fiend of hell is the dirtiest, low-down, damnable business on top of this old earth.