Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
SportsTalk: Albert Pujols signs with the Angels and Prince Fielder joins the Tigers. Which team is better now?
Ryan Callahan scored for the fifth time in four days and defenseman Ryan McDonagh snapped a second-period tie to lift the New York Rangers to a 3-2 victory over the Washington Capitals on Sunday.
Kobe Bryant hit a baseline jump shot with 4.2 seconds left and the Los Angeles Lakers wrapped up a six-game road trip by holding on to beat the Raptors 94-92 on Sunday, their eighth victory in nine meetings with Toronto
Arc's five up, five down: After No. 11 Michigan State's 58-48 upset of No. 3 Ohio State, you'd be a fool to discount the Spartans' national title chances now.
Miami coach Al Golden says the worst is behind him, but his headaches figure to continue now that former booster Nevin Shapiro, now in jail, says his involvement with the Hurricanes program will result in stiff penalties.
Golf's dream pairing - Woods and Mickelson - is on the course in the final round at Pebble Beach. Jason Sobel has hole-by-hole reports.
The United States completed a 5-0 rout of Switzerland in the Davis Cup on Sunday, with 19-year-old Ryan Harrison and John Isner winning closing singles matches.
Euro Roundup: First-place Manchester City won 1-0 at Aston Villa on Sunday on Joleon Lescott's goal in the 63rd minute, maintaining its two-point lead over Manchester United in the Premier League.
Tessa Worley of France fought off gusting winds to win a second consecutive World Cup giant slalom Sunday in the Andorran Pyrenees. Overall leader Lindsey Vonn was more than a second behind and finished eighth.
Robins: It’s the Year of the Dragon on the Lunar calendar, and this Chinese influence could extend to it also being the year of the Pekingese on the green carpet at the 136th Westminster Dog Show on Tuesday.
ASSOCIATED PRESSThe Globetrotters’ win was big news in Chicago and made big headlines in both the black and white newspapers. But while the black Chicago Defender trumpeted the victory in its headline, not all the white papers did. “Mikan, Trotters Thrill 17,823” read the Chicago Daily News. And the Daily Sun and Times focused on the individual scoring battle with a headline that read: “Mikan Cooks Tatum’s Goose.”
“You can’t tell by the story that the Globetrotters won,” Christgau said.
But fans, both black and white, knew the score.
“Damn right we bragged about that,” Chaney said.
Up in Minneapolis, the game shook up more than Christgau’s confidence in his Lakers.
“Unless you were just a die-hard racist, which I wasn’t, you had to re-examine your premises and begin to take a look at what it was that black players could do on a basketball court,” he said.
It got others thinking, too — particularly after the Globetrotters played the Lakers again and beat them again, this time with Movietone news cameras capturing the action.
“You know what happened?” Haynes asked. “Well, they started taking black ballplayers into the league.”
In fact, in 1950, the NBA drafted its first black player, Chuck Cooper, who went to the Boston Celtics. Saperstein sold the contract of one of his stars, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, to the New York Knickerbockers.
The Globetrotters had not only shown they could play with white teams, they’d also shown that fans — white and black — would watch them. At a time when white teams were drawing small crowds and losing money, it wasn’t lost on the owners that the crowd was the largest ever to see a professional game in Chicago.
John Chaney knew nothing about any of that. As a boy whose only connection to whites was the $3.50 a week his mother made each week cleaning their houses, he didn’t think there was any way that basketball could take him or any of his friends out of Jacksonville.
“We almost always assigned ourselves to playing sports in a local area,” he said. “That was as far as you could go.”
But this game, he said, helped change all that.
“It gave rise to access and opportunity,” he said. “That was a start in the right direction.”
Kobe Bryant hit a baseline jump shot with 4.2 seconds left and the Los Angeles Lakers wrapped up a six-game road trip by holding on to beat the Raptors 94-92 on Sunday, their eighth victory in nine meetings with Toronto
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Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.
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Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.