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    New York Women’s Basketball Coach Fired After Pulling Player’s Ponytail

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    The coach of the women’s varsity team in Northville, N.Y., was caught yanking a player’s hair on a television broadcast of a championship game on Friday.The coach of a high school women’s basketball team from a community in New York’s Adirondacks was fired after he pulled a player’s ponytail at the end of a state championship game on Friday, the school district confirmed.Videos on social media and local television news show an older man yanking a distraught player’s hair, talking emphatically and scolding her while another player attempts to separate the two.The hair pulling happened after the girl’s varsity team for the Northville Central School District lost to LaFargeville Central School District in the Class D New York State championship game.The district in Northville, which is in Fulton County about 60 miles northwest of Albany and on Great Sacandaga Lake, said that it was “deeply disturbed” by the conduct of its coach and that the “individual will no longer be coaching” for the district.The statement did not say that the coach had been fired, but Sarah Chauncey, the district superintendent, said in a phone interview on Saturday that the coach’s “service with the district has been terminated.”Dr. Chauncey declined to confirm the identities of the coach or player.According to MaxPreps, a website that tracks high school sports rosters, the head coach for the team is Jim Zullo. The player appears to be a high school senior based on her jersey number.A contact for Mr. Zullo was not immediately accessible.Mr. Zullo told News10 ABC that before the episode, the player had directed an expletive at him when he instructed her to shake hands with the opposing team.Alyssa Leroux, 31, of Watertown, N.Y., was watching the broadcast of the game with her family on Friday. The placement of the team from LaFargeville, which is about 90 miles north of Syracuse, in the championship was a “big deal” in the community, she said.At the very end of the game, as Northville’s six-point loss was finalized, she thought she saw something strange. Then she got a text from a friend who asked her if she “saw that coach pull that girl’s hair.”She replayed the broadcast and confirmed it. Aghast, Ms. Leroux wanted to draw attention to it. She took a video from the television showing the episode and posted it to Facebook.Her video so far has gained 500 reactions — most of them angry emojis — and nearly 900 shares. It was also featured in local news reports“I just felt terrible for the girl,” Ms. Leroux said. “I mean she just played her heart out.”“You can’t do things like that when you’re an older man with a young kid,” she added. More

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      Slick Watts, N.B.A. Fan Favorite and Headband Pioneer, Dies at 73

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      An undrafted, 6-foot-1 point guard with patchy hair, he made an enduring fashion statement and became seen as the ultimate Seattle SuperSonic.Slick Watts, an unheralded, undersized, patchy-haired point guard who turned his obstacles into springboards, endearing himself to fans of the Seattle SuperSonics long past the team’s existence and helping to invent the headband as a basketball fashion signature, has died. He was 73.His son Donald announced the death on social media on Saturday in a statement that did not provide further details. In 2021, Watts had a major stroke, and he spent recent years dealing with lung sarcoidosis, an inflammatory condition.Watts played for the SuperSonics for just four and a half seasons, from 1973-78. Though he helped lead the team to its first playoff berth, he was not around in 1979 for the team’s first and only finals victory.Still, fans and fellow players held him in a singular regard.In 2012, decades after his retirement — and four years after the team moved and became the Oklahoma City Thunder — a Seattle rap duo called the Blue Scholars made Watts’s name the title of a song about the Sonics. James Donaldson, a Sonics center in the 1980s, told The Seattle Times after Watts’s death, “He epitomized the Seattle SuperSonics.”That reputation came from a combination of pluck and generosity.Watts’s basketball origins were modest. He was an impressive collegiate shooter, averaging 22.8 points per game and shooting 49 percent from the field. But he was just 6-foot-1 and played for Xavier University of Louisiana, alittle-known historically Black Catholic university in New Orleans (not Xavier University of Cincinnati). He went undrafted in 1973.That might have been the end of his basketball career, except for the fact that Watts’s college coach, Bob Hopkins, was a cousin of Bill Russell, the Celtics great then coaching the Sonics. He secured Watts a professional tryout. The team was already loaded with shooting talent, so Watts devoted himself to passing. Russell offered him a $19,000-a-year contract, paltry by N.B.A. standards.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Junior Bridgeman, N.B.A. Player Turned Mogul, Dies at 71

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      He became an entrepreneur during a solid career with the Milwaukee Bucks. He later bought hundreds of fast-food outlets, a Coca-Cola bottling business and Ebony and Jet magazines.Junior Bridgeman, who followed a strong N.B.A. career with a remarkable run as an entrepreneur, acquiring hundreds of fast-food restaurants, a Coca-Cola bottling business and a minority stake in the Milwaukee Bucks, his team for a decade, died on Tuesday in Louisville, Ky. He was 71.The cause was a cardiac event, a family spokesman said. Mr. Bridgeman had been talking to a reporter for a local television station during a charity event at the Galt House Hotel when he said he felt that he was having a heart attack, the spokesman said, and he was taken to a hospital, where he died.Mr. Bridgeman’s business success brought him a net worth of $1.4 billion this year, Forbes magazine said, putting him in “rare air alongside Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and LeBron James as the only N.B.A. players with 10-figure fortunes.”Mr. Johnson, writing on X after the death, recalled that Mr. Bridgeman, a former small forward, had “one of the sweetest jump shots in the N.B.A.” Mr. Bridgeman, he added, had helped create a blueprint for “so many current and former athletes across sports that success doesn’t end when you’re done playing.”Mr. Bridgeman was not a major star during his 12 seasons in the N.B.A., 10 with the Bucks and two with the Los Angeles Clippers. But he stood out as a sixth man who provided a scoring boost off the bench for a Milwaukee team that largely excelled under Coach Don Nelson. From 1975 to 1987, Mr. Bridgeman averaged 13.6 points a game.Mr. Bridgeman on the bench during a game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Washington Bullets in the early 1980s. He played for the Bucks for a decade.Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gene Hackman in ‘Hoosiers’: On Camera, ‘He Really Went to Town’

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      Hackman’s fellow actors from the 1986 film remembered him as an actor who offered wise advice but hated rehearsing and multiple takes.Gene Hackman portrayed a long list of acclaimed characters in his career: Buck Barrow, Little Bill Daggett, Popeye Doyle. But one of his most beloved roles was that of Coach Norman Dale in “Hoosiers,” a 1986 film that is often cited as one of the greatest sports movies ever made.In the film, set in the 1950s, Hackman’s character arrives at tiny Hickory High in Indiana. Ups and downs, and eventual sporting triumph, await. The story is inspired by the real success of Milan High, a small school that won an Indiana state title in 1954.While Hackman, who was found dead on Wednesday in New Mexico, didn’t win either of his two Academy Awards for the film, his character’s presence and quotability make him one of the actor’s most memorable creations.After Hackman’s death, we spoke to cast members from the film about working with him to make an enduring underdog story.‘Leave the ball, will you George?’“My first day on the set was the ‘Leave the ball, George’ scene,” said Chelcie Ross, who played George, the movie’s antagonist. In the scene, George starts coaching the team without permission, only to be ordered out of the gym by Coach Dale, who says: “First of all, let’s be real friendly here. My name is Norm. Secondly, your coaching days are over.”“As a young actor walking in to do a scene with Gene Hackman, it was a little intimidating,” Ross said in a phone interview. “I was very nervous, and we did the one and only rehearsal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Adrian Wojnarowski Auctions Old Phones to Raise Money for St. Bonaventure

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      Adrian Wojnarowski, the former king of the N.B.A. scoop at ESPN, is auctioning off personal items to raise money for his employer, St. Bonaventure University.Sports journalists can collect a lot of detritus: old ID cards, press credentials to get into big games, phones that stop working or become obsolete. Most of it winds up in the trash, unvalued and worthless.Unless it belongs to Adrian Wojnarowski.Wojnarowski, the basketball news-breaker who recently retired from ESPN, is auctioning his castoff items to benefit the men’s basketball program at St. Bonaventure University, where he now works as the team’s general manager.Want the credential that got Woj, as he has long been known, into the 2023 N.B.A. draft? As of Tuesday morning, the bidding was at $900. His ID badge for ESPN? That’s at $2,000 (and no, you can’t use it to actually get into the network’s headquarters).But the likely stars of the auction are the smartphones that buzzed in Wojnarowski’s pockets at all hours with texts and calls from N.B.A. owners, agents, coaches or others offering coveted scoops. The iPhone that was used to break the news of the huge Paul George trade in 2019 is at $1,500, while a different phone that he used to report the 2023 N.B.A. draft lottery is at $900.Dinner with Wojnarowski and a video call from him are also available. Bidding closes next Tuesday.Wojnarowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment through the university.Wojnarowski is now the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team’s general manager.Ryan Sun/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘We Beat the Dream Team’ Puts a Twist on the Sports Movie Formula

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      This film tells the story of the college players who defeated the 1992 U.S. men’s basketball team, filled with N.B.A. All-Stars, during a scrimmage before the Olympics.Whether documentary or fiction, the sports movie template is so well-worn — we were underdogs, then we won, and it was amazing — that it’s rare to execute a new twist on the formula. And in some ways, “We Beat the Dream Team” (streaming on Max), directed by Michael Tolajian, follows that recipe. Its title suggests the ultimate underdog story: In June 1992, a group of elite college basketball players was recruited to scrimmage the United States men’s basketball team before the Barcelona Olympics. But on the first day, kind of by accident, the underdogs beat the so-called Dream Team.It was the first year that pro basketball players were permitted to compete at the Olympics, and so that team consisted of a murderer’s row of N.B.A. players: Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen, John Stockton, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin, Clyde Drexler and, of course, Michael Jordan. One solitary college player, Christian Laettner, joined them.“We Beat the Dream Team” focuses on the story told by the other guys. They’re the college students who — as several of them point out repeatedly during the film — would have been the Olympic team, if the eligibility rules hadn’t changed. Instead, as then-college player Grant Hill says, “We were the crash test dummies.” Arriving at the training facility feeling both salty and star-struck, they were ready to hit the court and aware they were specifically there to lose.To tell the story, Tolajian assembled those players, many of whom (including Hill, Chris Webber, Allan Houston and Penny Hardaway) had their own starry N.B.A. careers since that summer over 30 years ago. They are visibly full of fire as they recall the moment. Interviews with the players and coaches are mixed with archival footage from the games to give you the sense of the proceedings, focusing on the day that the younger guys beat their heroes on the court — and what happened next.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Doncic Trade Has Mavericks Fans Feeling They ‘Lost a Family Member’

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      Dallas built its team’s identity around Luka Doncic, on the court and off. Now that he’s gone, some supporters no longer feel a connection to the franchise.When Matt Zerai heard that his favorite team, the Dallas Mavericks, had traded Luka Doncic, their 25-year-old superstar, to the Los Angeles Lakers over the weekend, he was devastated.“It kind of did feel like I lost a family member,” Zerai said. “No one trades a franchise player in their prime like that. They want to make excuses about his conditioning and about him gaining weight. He literally took us to the finals last year.”“No one trades a franchise player in their prime like that,” said Matt Zerai, a content creator and Luka Doncic fan.Allison V. Smith for The New York TimesHe and a few friends hatched a plan to host a funeral for the franchise. They ordered a coffin, blue like one of the Mavericks’ colors, and had it delivered overnight. They dressed in suits to strike a somber tone. They held a moment of silence in front of American Airlines Center, where the Mavericks play, and where others had gathered in protest.Attendees shared their favorite memories of Doncic. Much of the ire was directed at Nico Harrison, the team’s general manager. One sign had the acronym M.F.F.L., which stands for Mavs Fan for Life, crossed out with red ink.After the Mavericks traded Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers over the weekend, fans gathered outside the team’s arena to hold a mock funeral in protest.Jerome Miron/USA Today SportsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Victor Wembanyama Prepares to Become ‘Genuine’ Face of the N.B.A.

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      As the N.B.A. confronts a fast-approaching time without LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, the 21-year-old Spurs star has embraced the idea that he is the league’s future.One day last summer, Harrison Barnes, a longtime N.B.A. veteran, was finishing up an off-season workout with Victor Wembanyama, his 7-foot-4, then-20-year-old San Antonio Spurs teammate and one of the league’s most dazzling young stars.Barnes was new to the team — he had recently been traded from the Sacramento Kings — and new to Wembanyama. But he was already beginning to understand that Wembanyama was precocious in more than one way.In the N.B.A., many teams track shooting percentages and shots made in games and at practice as a way of gauging their players’ progress. The Spurs had a chart that tracked both, but ranked players based on makes. Barnes told Wembanyama that metric felt insufficient. Wembanyama pondered Barnes’s concern. Then he got to work.He picked up a marker and started to sketch out some thoughts on a white board. He wondered if a graph might be better than a chart and if it should include week-to-week changes. Wembanyama plotted ideas for three theoretical players, whom he labeled A, B and C. At one point, Barnes heard the word “coefficients.”“He was really trying to wrap his mind around like, ‘How do you get better at that?’” Barnes said. “How do you chart what progress is?”That day, Barnes saw into Wembanyama’s psyche — the sincere search for knowledge and human connection that he’s carried with him through the early part of his N.B.A. career. It leads to the kind of authenticity that marketers crave, and fans are drawn to.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Did Adrian Wojnarowski Take a 99% Pay Cut? To Save the Team He Loves.

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      One Wednesday last month, Adrian Wojnarowski made the three-hour drive from his home in northern New Jersey to Pennsylvania to see his St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team play at Bucknell. Wojnarowski is the St. Bonaventure general manager, but until recently he made his very public living by breaking news stories about the N.B.A. and then talking about them on ESPN. He was recognized by the first person he saw at Bucknell, a school official who pronounced himself a “big fan.” More encounters followed. At halftime, he tried to catch up with a childhood friend who was attending the game. Their conversation proceeded fitfully, interrupted by strangers introducing themselves and asking for selfies. Wojnarowski was invariably obliging. “I’ve become his photographer,” the friend told me.By then, St. Bonaventure’s Bonnies were ahead, 38-16. The rout underway was not entirely unexpected. Though Bucknell’s undergraduate enrollment of 3,900 makes it twice as large as St. Bonaventure, the Bonnies play in the Atlantic 10, a more competitive conference than Bucknell’s Patriot League, which includes similarly sized schools like Lafayette and Holy Cross. A successful Atlantic 10 team should be able to win this matchup, even in Bucknell’s home gym.And St. Bonaventure is successful, especially considering its size, which limits everything from alumni fund-raising to the amenities it can afford to provide to students. Back in 1970, it reached the N.C.A.A.’s Final Four; of the 99 schools that have achieved this feat, it is the smallest. And since 2007, when Mark Schmidt became head coach, the team has won two regular-season titles and two conference tournaments.But in 2021, the N.C.A.A. abandoned most of its restrictions against compensation for student athletes. This has transformed college recruiting largely into a matter of how much a team and its outside supporters are willing to pay. In 2022, the Bonnies reached the semifinals of the postseason National Invitation Tournament by beating Colorado, Oklahoma and Virginia. Four of their five starters announced their intention to return. Then the offers of name, image and likeness payments started pouring in. Such payments, known as N.I.L., allow college athletes to make money from product endorsements, donations from wealthy alumni, even contributions from ordinary fans. Within days, those four starters were all gone, off to larger state schools whose teams are often highly ranked. “I’ve never seen a good team with bad players,” Schmidt muses now. “And in order to get good players, you need money.” That’s where Wojnarowski comes in.At his old job, the one that paid him $7.3 million annually, his mobile phone buzzed with texts from morning until deep into night. Some of them came from N.B.A. owners. Some came from general managers, head coaches or sources in the league office. Others came from college coaches or agents. Occasionally he would hear from one of basketball’s top players — Russell Westbrook, say, or Donovan Mitchell. Some texts were more important than others. When Wojnarowski was expecting an especially crucial one, a confirmation of a trade or a major free-agent signing, he wouldn’t leave his house or hotel room.For more than a decade, as an ESPN reporter and podcaster (and as a columnist at Yahoo before that), he was so determined to beat every other reporter to every bit of N.B.A. news that he made it a priority to take overnight flights because news usually doesn’t happen overnight. In recent years, as the pressure for him to break stories intensified, he stopped driving anywhere more than a few minutes away and relied on a car service — he didn’t want to be on a highway and risk losing an exclusive when a source had news to break. Whenever he had a scoop, he would post it on Twitter and Instagram for his millions of followers. Wojnarowski is universally referred to as Woj, and those postings became known among even casual basketball fans as Woj Bombs. Almost immediately, they would appear across the ESPN networks, featured on the crawl at the bottom of the screen: according to Woj … Woj reports … sources told ESPN’s Woj.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More