Neil Armstrong’s relatives have confirmed what we kind of all figured, that he’d worked out his “one small step” line before landing on the moon.
But more importantly, he did so while locked in a battle for global supremacy with his brother Dean:
He said ‘why don’t you and I, once the boys go to bed, why don’t we play a game of Risk’.
“I said I’d enjoy that. We started playing Risk and then he slipped me a piece of paper and said ‘read that’. I did.
“On that piece of paper there was ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. He says ‘what do you think about that?’ I said ‘fabulous’. He said ‘I thought you might like that, but I wanted you to read it’.”
He then added: “It was ‘that is one small step for A man’.”
Having seen quite a few commercials for Risk on TV as a kid, I can only say that I’m glad Neil Armstrong used this line, instead of a Risk tagline.
Imagine if he’d come down the ladder, planted his foot on lunar soil and said, “Win the game… and you win the world”?
