sports Page 305 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Long Live the LIV?
The LIV Invitational Golf Series has been a drag on a PGA Tour that was already flailing to find its next superstar. LIV, which is funded by blood money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has sparked a mini-exodus of several PGA stars. By offering boatloads of cash for appearance fees, LIV ha...

The Celtics can win the title, but won’t if they continue to allow these 3rd quarter runs
The first two games of the NBA Finals have been much more evenly played than the final scores show. The teams alternated two-point halftime leads, but a couple of second-half runs put the game out of reach for both the Golden State Warriors in Game 1 and the Boston Celtics in Game 2. However, the te...

Who’s going to win (lose?) the Rudy Gobert trade extravaganza?
Rudy Gobert is this offseason’s CJ McCollum in that every GM is going to call about the star player and get counteroffered with the secondary player. Yes, we know you called about Donovan, but for the low price of a couple draft picks and a salary dump, you can have Rudy at $38 million to $46 millio...

LeBron James wants to play with Steph Curry
This year’s NBA postseason has been pretty good, minus all the injuries, even with the absence of LeBron James. While the era of James playing into June every year is over, that doesn’t mean we won’t hear from the King during the playoffs and especially once the NBA Finals roll around. And one thing...

The Tampa Bay Lightning have channeled Admiral Ackbar to get back into the series
Perhaps the biggest sign that a team has entered its own class in the NHL is that it can play any way it has to, or wants to, to win. Whatever you ask of them, they have an answer. Some pretenders like the Hurricanes, once you take away their preferred style — in the case of the Canes it’s dump it i...

Stop comparing viewership numbers for the NFL and NBA
Viewership for the 2022 NBA Finals is up 37 percent from last year and its ratings are the highest they’ve been since the last time the Warriors were in the Finals in 2019. That said, there are some worrisome figures. For one, while viewership is up from 2020 and 2021, Game 1 of these Finals were th...

The Trail Blazers' offseason is a high-wire balancing act
This is the most important summer of Damian Lillard’s reign in Portland. For the past decade, the Portland Trail Blazers have been the Warriors’ little brother. Think Seth Curry and Steph Curry, but in franchise terms....


Jackie Robinson: His Life and Career in Pictures
When Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, he not only integrated Major League Baseball. He was signaling to the nation—on one of its biggest stages—that Black Americans would no longer accept second-class status. ...

6 Decades Before Jackie Robinson, This Man Broke Baseball's Color Barrier
Sixty-three years before Jackie Robinson became the first African American in the modern era to play in a Major League Baseball game, Moses Fleetwood Walker debuted in the league on May 1, 1884 with the Toledo Blue Stockings in a 5-1 loss against the Louisville Eclipse. Walker, a 26-year-old African...

4 Black Baseball Players Who Followed Jackie Robinson's Lead in 1947
Jackie Robinson wasn’t the only Black baseball player to suit up in the big leagues in 1947. After he broke the color line and became the first Black baseball player to play in the American major leagues during the 20th century, four other players of color soon followed in his footsteps....

The odd construction around Shohei Ohtani certainly didn’t help Joe Maddon
With every passing year, the pressure on the Angels ratchets up just a little more as Mike Trout ages. It’s now common thought that the Angels have basically wasted the career of perhaps the best player of all time, and there’s a breaking point somewhere in the future but getting bigger on the horiz...

Richard Jefferson’s rant on shortening the season is off-base
Professional sports is not the easiest way to earn a living. That was part of what Richard Jefferson was trying to get at during his viral rant after Adam Silver dained to consider the idea of shortening the NBA season. Jefferson was drafted in 2001 and to his credit, the first 10 seasons of his 17 ...

In this edition of ‘Should That Be a Statue?'
Imagine if your lowest moment was so abysmal that people would want to build a statue to it? No, I’m not talking about the Southern part of the United States, I’m referring to Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt of Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup Final that earned him a red card before France fell to I...

You won’t have 15-year old figure skaters to kick around anymore
Anyone remember the hot garbage fire that was the Olympic figure skating finals in February? For those who don’t, allow me to jog your memory — 15-year-old star Kamila Valieva, the center of a Russian Olympic Committee doping scandal, sobbing after falling twice as the pressure of the PED investigat...

9 Black Athletes Who Integrated Professional Sports
After Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, ending a six-decade ban on Black players in Major League Baseball, opportunities slowly began to expand for athletes of color. Robinson’s historic achievement—a formative moment of the postwar civil rights moveme...

It looks like the NFL is getting a new owner — Rob Walton, another white guy
When Maya Angelou said, “When people show you who they are, believe them,” she was foreshadowing the actions of the NFL. ...

Pat Riley challenges Heat stars Tyler Herro and Kyle Lowry to be better
The Miami Heat had a great season that ended one missed Jimmy Butler three-point attempt short of their second trip to the NBA Finals in three years. Heat President Pat Riley addressed the media this week to close out the year, and addressed many concerns for the team moving forward. Two of the more...

Aaron Judge’s soaring cost is something Yankees haters can take solace in
Those of you waiting for the Yankees to cool off might be in for a long summer of chafing, as the best team in baseball keeps churning along with the Dark Side theme, increasing in volume after every towering Aaron Judge home run. As we know, Palpatine is never truly dead, and as soon as you think t...