Few would have predicted that Tiger Woods would be playing in the P.G.A. Championship this week. He had three failed back surgeries, starting in 2014. He had taken opioids. His astonishing career seemed over.
Then he had one more operation, a spinal fusion, the most complex of all, in 2017. And last month he won the Masters, playing the way he used to.
An outcome like his from fusion surgery is so rare it is “like winning the lottery,” Dr. Sohail K. Mirza, a spine surgeon at Dartmouth, said.
… It’s February, and McKillop is about to complete his 30th season as the basketball coach at Davidson College. I have come to speak with him because Curry has said McKillop is a reason he did play D1 basketball, and also a reason he has been able to revolutionize the sport.
Although a stickler for discipline and a guardian of tradition, McKillop decided to let Curry shoot at Davidson with an abandon that he has never relinquished and that an emerging generation has now taken as its birthright.
But he doesn’t want to talk about Steph’s shot. “He had the shot when he came here,” McKillop says. “I had nothing to do with it.”
Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr acknowledged Thursday night that Kevin Durant won’t be returning to the court anytime soon because of the strained calf he suffered in Game 5 of the team’s playoff series with the Houston Rockets last week. Durant hasn’t been cleared for on-court work, Kerr said, and won’t be evaluated again for another week. Suffice to say, he won’t be traveling to Portland with the team for Games 3 and 4 of the Western Conference finals on Saturday and Monday and almost certainly won’t be fit for Game 5 on Wednesday if it comes to that. Games 6 and 7, if necessary, seem doubtful, too.
“Hopefully he continues to progress, and he has made progress, but it’s a little more serious than we thought at the very beginning,” Kerr said after Thursday night’s game. “So we’ll see where it all goes, but he’s in there all day long getting treatment. He’s done a great job of committing himself to that process. [Warriors director of sports medicine and performance Rick Celebrini] and his staff are in there all day, and hopefully he’ll be back at some point, but we’ll just wait and see.”
Mike Munchak played 159 games in his NFL career, was named to nine Pro Bowls at guard, was a four-time first-team All-Pro selection, was an all-decade selection in the 1980s, and was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2001.
And when, three years after his playing career ended, he took those credentials into coaching, he was quickly steamrolled by one overriding thought in those first weeks in the move from student to teacher.
“… I thought I knew a lot more than I did, a lot more,” Munchak said with a laugh. “You come to appreciate, right away, in coaching, you don’t know anywhere near what you thought you knew. I knew my little world, but I didn’t know the big picture. I didn’t know anything close to the big picture, I’m not sure I knew the little picture.”
“Right now, I’m just trying to show that I can compete and just trying to show that I belong,” said Roby, a native of Dixon, Illinois, two hours west of Chicago. “There’s no reason for me to declare without having a solid chance of making the NBA. I want to play in the NBA. That’s what I’m trying to get right now.”
Darius Bazley isn’t out to change the college basketball landscape or even inspire other young players.
As a potential preps-to-pros player and former five-star recruit, the 6-foot-9 forward from Cincinnati is a unique athlete trying to win over NBA scouts without having played last season.
He decommitted from Syracuse. He reneged on his initial idea to play in the G League. Unlike other players in the past who skipped college looking for an alternate route to the NBA, he didn’t play overseas for a year either.
Instead, Bazley was on no team and worked as an intern for New Balance in a carefully constructed endorsement deal that will pay $1 million. But don’t call him a pioneer.
“I’m not a basketball activist,” Bazley said this week at the NBA draft combine.
“I understand completely that each of the Premier League clubs is a business in its own right,” he says, “with its own aims and objectives that won’t necessarily align with what the national association want.
“But our job as a governing body must be to protect the interests of both. To protect the interests of the club game but to give the national team and its importance for our people the right level of support and opportunity to succeed. And I think that is possible.
“I think you can have a successful league and a successful pathway for the national team. That needs grown-up conversations and I think there are lots of good people in football who are more than capable of having that.”
The European Triathlon Union (ETU) has launched an Innovation Award. The aim is to encourage new ideas and concepts across the multisport industry. The deadline for submitting an award is December 1st 2019.
Renato Bertrandi, ETU President explained, “We are, with this Innovation Award, following the ETU Executive Board vision. With it, we hope that we can reach out to and help all of our stakeholders. This initiative that is mainly focused on the younger members of our European federations is being promoted by us in the knowledge that our sport has, for many years now, been the test bed for many innovations that have been introduced and used effectively not only in ours but also in other disciplines.”
… The 2019 startups will now begin a three-month program run by both UQ and HYPE Sports innovation, where they will receive expert mentorship, and learn how to take their businesses to the next level. Eventually, they will also be considered for the $75 million HYPE Capital fund – a new HYPE Sports Innovation initiative to support developments in eSports, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, fan engagement, monetisation, and performance analytics.
The Polish government is set to invest in the innovation of football, in an effort to boost the development of the sport.
On Friday, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki rolled-out plans which will see the introduction of new training facilities and stadium safety programs in a country, famed for its devotion to the ‘beautiful game’.
“We want football to be the king of sport. We want a Polish club to play in the Champions League and be able to win against the best,” Morawiecki told journalists in Warsaw.
From using footwear to cutting down marathon running time to under two hours to using math to improve triple jumps, Olympics Sports Research Center focuses on winning.
The National Basketball Association (NBA; also referred to as “the league”) has established a centralized, audited electronic medical record (EMR) system that has been linked with external sources to provide a platform for robust research and to allow the NBA to conduct player health and safety reviews. The system is customized and maintained by the NBA and individual teams as part of the employment records for each player and is deployed uniformly across all 30 teams in the league, thereby allowing for standardized data on injuries, illnesses, and player participation in NBA games and practices. The EMR data are enriched by linkage with other league external data sources that provide additional information about injuries, players, game and practice participation, and movement. These data linkages allow for the assessment of potential injury trends, development of injury-prevention programs, and rule changes, with the ultimate goal of improving player health and wellness. The purpose of this article is to describe this NBA injury database, including the details of data collection, data linkages with external data sources, and activities related to reporter training and data quality improvement.
… or a team that has been known for years to churn out productive shifty, smaller slot wideouts like it owned a 3D player printer, the desire to gobble up 6-foot-3 pass catchers offers a different makeup to the 2019 edition of Josh McDaniels’ offense.
Thus far, the Patriots drafted N’Keal Harry (6-foot-2) in the first round, signed Demaryius Thomas (6-foot-3), Maurice Harris (6-foot-3), and most recently Dontrelle Inman (6-foot-3). The new addition of Inman coupled with the jettisoning of smaller slot receiver Bruce Ellington underscored that the Patriots want to be bigger across the board at the receiver spot this year. Currently, only Julian Edelman, Phillip Dorsett, Braxton Berrios and Ryan Davis stand under 6-foot-2 in the entire corps. If Josh Gordon gets reinstated at any point this year, that’s another 6-foot-3 frame to add to the mix.
succeed
McDaniels, when asked about how Harry’s skills fit with how the Pats’ offense runs, explained last week that New England tries never to pigeonhole a player into a specific job, but rather conceive an offense that meshes with what the comprised talent does best.
American Soccer Analysis, Cheuk Hei Ho & Jason Poon from
For years, FC Dallas has been lauded for having one of, if not the best, Academy programs in the United States. Dallas has signed the most Homegrown players in the league history (25), with no slowing down in sight. Despite having such a prolific Academy, it wasn’t until recent years that the club started taking full advantage of this system. And when former Academy Director Luchi Gonzalez took over as the head coach, it was finally go-time for the entire “Play Your Kids” movement. Part of that was by design; who else would know the former Academy players better than Luchi? Part of it was also timing; most of the Academy graduates had spent a significant amount of their formative soccer development years in the Dallas Academy and were ready to make the jump. With Gonzalez at the reign, it only made sense to usher in a youth movement.
When Dallas decides to start five or six of its graduates in MLS this season, it showcases not just its Academy players, but the Academy program as a whole. It says that the FC Dallas Academy is so good, it may be the best way for them to compete. However, playing the kids in real games is different from growing them behind closed doors. It means experimentation. It also means trial and error. It means risk.
Risk doesn’t deter Gonzalez though. He doesn’t just let the the kids play. he wants them to dominate.
… “It’s a different era,” future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols said. “I came into this league almost 19 years ago. You would never expect the same thing over and over. You have to always try to improve and find different things to help your game and help winning games. I think that’s the era that we’re in right now. Everybody focused in on different details, like shifts and everything, bringing in a reliever to start games. Whatever it takes to win the game, we understand that.”
[Luke] Voit has a point, in that batting average as a bottom-line evaluative tool has slipped into permanent obsolescence. Teams don’t value or pursue players because of it. Analysts and columnists don’t make their cases based on it. You can’t. We’ve learned too much. Without further information, batting average doesn’t tell you a whole lot. It’s virtually impossible to know whether a .305 hitter is better than a .295 hitter.