Sports

Linked media - Connected media As an old ballplayer, when the back pain attacked, he figured he would just play through it. “I took four Advil, drank a huge cocktail and usually I’d polish that off with a bottle of wine to kill the pain,” he said of his nightly regimen. But one afternoon he fell asleep, hard, on the deck, waking up only because it was dinner time for his dog, Buddy. Stubborn as his master, Buddy nudged and licked Flannery until he came to. If not for that, Flannery said, he thinks he would have died right there. Instead, the two somehow drove to his San Diego-area home, where Tim collapsed and was taken away by paramedics. As he was recovering in early 2021, Susan Walker phoned one day. Her husband, Jerry Jeff, had died from cancer in October, and she invited Flanner...

Related media - Connected media Memory, Now and Five Years Ago Chris Nilan is a quintessential Bostonian of a certain time and demographic, the kind they make movies about: A tough, working-class hockey player of Irish descent, hundreds, if not thousands, of local kids yearned to be just like him. He was born on Feb. 9, 1958, at the Faulkner Hospital in West Roxbury, Mass., the son of Henry and Leslie Nilan, a hard-working, blue collar couple who raised their four children in a strict household. Chris still found his way into scraps as a kid, and soon discovered he was a capable and fearless fighter. Often, he said, it was in defense of others. Later, he mixed it up with groups of kids and young adults on the streets and in the bars of Boston. He met Karen Stanley at Northeastern Uni...

Related media - Associated media SAN FRANCISCO — The motivational message, courtesy of the great Larry Bird, came at the perfect time. Klay Thompson was just a few days removed from the unwelcome start of his sixth-man life in Utah, where the 34-year-old Warriors legend had been asked to come off the bench after the previous 12 years as a starter. Even with Thompson’s spectacular debut in this new reserve role, a 35-point showing on Feb. 15 that helped lift Golden State over the Jazz heading into the All-Star break, this was the kind of career-changing decision that would take much more time to truly accept. The emotions were still raw. This was already a sensitive situation too, what with Thompson and the Warriors having been unable to come to terms on an extension in recent months ...

Linked media - Connected media Ohtani, though, is beating the Americans on their own terms. “He can hit a home run 500 feet and throw a ball 100 miles per hour, and he’s bigger and stronger than most Americans,” said Robert Whiting, who has written several books on baseball in Japan, including “You Gotta Have Wa.” Ohtani’s Ruthian contract might never have been signed if Nomo, Hideki Irabu and Alfonso Soriano hadn’t challenged Japanese restrictions on the movement of players in the 1990s. Nomo, for instance, retired from Japanese baseball so he could sign with the Dodgers, while Irabu pushed back when his old team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, cut a deal to send him to the San Diego Padres. Irabu was later sent to the Yankees, his preferred destination. A couple of years later,...

Connected media - Associated media “Once you’re here, it doesn’t matter,” said Gabriel Arcos, a systems engineer who grew up cheering for a Leones rival in Venezuela and moved to Bogotá in 2016. “Maybe you don’t like the Leones of Caracas, but like I always say, these are the Leones of Bogotá.” Four years ago, when Iraida Acosta took over as president of the Leones, she said there were only six Venezuelan children. Now, she said, most of its 64 players are Venezuelan. Ms. Acosta, 54, said that in 2017, she and her 9-year-old son left their Venezuelan hometown near the Caribbean coast to visit her husband, who had come to Bogotá six months earlier to find work. They ended up staying because the economic opportunities were better. Still, it wasn’t easy. “The culture, although being bro...

Connected media - Linked media Hernández led major league pitchers in appearances (80) and games finished (68) in 1984, when he posted a 9-3 record with a 1.92 earned run average. He had 32 saves in 33 chances after tallying a total of only 27 saves in his seven previous seasons. The 1984 Tigers finished 104-58 in the regular season, then swept the Kansas City Royals in the American League Championship Series and defeated the San Diego Padres, 4-1, in the World Series. Hernández appeared in three games in the World Series and had saves in two of them. He yielded just one run and four hits in 5⅓ innings. He earned the final out of the clinching Game 5, getting Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn to hit a soft fly to left field. Hernández became only the third pitcher in major league history, aft...

Related media - Related media The box went to an anonymous buyer in Canada, Mr. Simonds said, breaking the record for the most money spent on unopened sports cards and the most anyone has spent on a hockey collectible. Baseball Card Exchange, an authenticator that specializes in unopened vintage sports cards, confirmed that 16 wax boxes were inside the case. Each box contains 48 packs of cards, with 14 cards per pack, for a total of more than 10,000 cards. The set contains 396 different player cards, which means that if the assortment were perfectly random, it would contain 27 Gretzky cards, according to the auction house’s listing. If the case does contains a couple dozen of the prized Gretzky cards, they might not be in good condition, Mr. Simonds warned. The cards could be slightl...

Associated media - Related media Geraldine Tkachuk, the players’ grandmother, was spotted in the stands looking less than impressed. As remarkable as the 10-man ejection may have been, it barely seemed to faze the participants. “I mean, I don’t think it’s bad to play with emotion,” Brady Tkachuk told The Associated Press. “I think when this group plays with emotion, we’re a tough team to beat, and I think we rely on our emotion and it shows that we care, shows that we care about what we’re doing here and about the guy next to us.” Two more players got misconduct penalties later in the third period, bringing the total penalty minutes in the game to 167. Still, this being hockey, that wasn’t close to a record. In 2004, a series of brawls late in a game between the Senators and the Phil...

Connected media - Associated media For more than a month, the smoke signals out of Rafael Nadal’s camp have kept the tennis world on its toes, sparking predictions of everything from a triumphant spring on the red clay of Paris to him never playing another competitive match following yet another hip injury in Australia in January. The only thing that seemed clear was that the 22-time Grand Slam champion was prioritizing the clay court season in Europe this spring. Nadal said as much in January when he returned following a year-long layoff because of hip surgery. Sure, he was happy to be back and competing in Australia, where he won the year’s first Grand Slam as recently as 2022, but he was singularly focused on being in top form — or, at least, as close as he can get to it at this p...

Related media - Associated media The Phoenix-area franchises are part of a growing wave of teams doing the same. The San Diego Padres, like the Diamondbacks, ended their agreement with Diamond Sports, the largest regional sports network provider. Major League Baseball used its broadcasting and streaming capabilities to keep the teams on the air and guaranteed they would get 80 percent of the revenue they received in their Diamond Sports deals. Diamond Sports, which must make at least $400 million in annual debt payments, is in talks with its creditors, some of whom want to reshape the company’s business while others want to be bought out. Diamond Sports is also in talks with the N.B.A. and other leagues about reducing their rights fees. A company spokesperson declined to comment on t...