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      Bobby Leonard, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, Dies at 88

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      He coached the Indiana Pacers for 12 seasons and took them to three A.B.A. titles. The governor of Indiana called him “the embodiment of basketball.”Bobby Leonard, an All-American guard for Indiana University’s 1953 N.C.A.A. basketball champions who later coached the Indiana Pacers to three American Basketball Association championships, died on Tuesday. He was 88.Leonard’s family said in a statement that he had experienced many ailments in recent years, but they did not provide the cause of death or say where he died. He had been living with his wife, Nancy (Root) Leonard, in suburban Indianapolis.Leonard was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2014 for taking the Pacers to A.B.A. titles in 1970, 1972 and 1973. He coached the team for 12 seasons, eight in the A.B.A. and four in the N.B.A. after the two leagues merged.“He has meant as much as anyone in the state of Indiana when it comes to the game of basketball,” Mike Woodson, who played for Indiana University in the late 1970s and became its head coach this season after many years in the N.B.A., said in a statement. “He played the game with great flair. He coached with undeniable passion.”Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana called Leonard “the embodiment of basketball.”Leonard was known as Slick. A 6-foot-3-inch guard, he was a fine playmaker in his seven seasons in the N.B.A. But his nickname wasn’t derived from his savvy on the court.As he once told the story to Carmel magazine, an Indiana monthly, while playing for the Minneapolis Lakers in the 1950s he was involved in a game of gin rummy with the team’s star center, George Mikan, on a preseason bus trip. “I blitzed him,” Leonard recalled, “and one of the players said that I was too slick. It stuck.”Leonard was an analyst and color commentator on Pacers broadcasts for some 35 years, beginning on television in 1985 and later moving to radio. He injected a colorful note with his exclamation “Boom, baby!” after an Indiana player hit a three-point shot.William Robert Leonard was born in Terre Haute, Ind., on July 17, 1932, one of three children of Raymond and Hattie Leonard. His father dug ditches during the Depression. “We used to stand in commodity lines, and they would give you a few cans of food and some flour,” he recalled in “Boom, Baby! My Basketball Life in Indiana” (2013, with Lew Freedman).Leonard was an outstanding basketball and tennis player in high school and then played for three seasons at Indiana University. His free throw with 27 seconds remaining gave the Hoosiers a 69-68 victory over Kansas in the 1953 N.C.A.A. championship game. He was named a third-team All-American in 1953 and a second-team All-American in 1954 by The Associated Press and was chosen for Indiana University’s all-century team.Leonard was selected by the original Baltimore Bullets as the 10th pick in the 1954 N.B.A. draft, but the Lakers obtained his rights in a dispersal draft later that year when the Bullets franchise folded. After serving in the Army, he joined the Lakers in 1956. He played for them for four seasons in Minneapolis and one season, 1960-61, after they moved to Los Angeles.His best season came in 1961-62, when he averaged a career-best 16.1 points and 5.4 assists with the expansion Chicago Packers. He was a player-coach in 1962-63 with Chicago, which had changed its name to the Zephyrs.When the team moved to Baltimore and became the Bullets (the second franchise by that name) in the 1963-64 season, he was the full-time coach. But he resigned after posting a losing record.Leonard watched as a banner in his honor was hung during halftime of a game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis in October 2014, shortly after he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.Aj Mast/Associated PressLeonard’s Pacer teams won 529 games and lost 456. He was voted the A.B.A.’s all-time most outstanding coach by a national sportswriters and broadcasters association.A banner at the Pacers’ Bankers Life Fieldhouse honors Leonard with the number 529.In addition to his wife, Leonard’s survivors include five children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.The Pacers and three other A.B.A. teams that joined the N.B.A. before the 1976-77 season were stymied by financial burdens imposed by the league — essentially the cost of their entry. Leonard and his wife turned to TV to boost ticket sales.“If it weren’t for Slick, this franchise wouldn’t be here,” the Boston Celtics’ Hall of Fame forward Larry Bird, who had played for Indiana State in Terre Haute and later was a coach and president of basketball operations for the Pacers, told The New York Times in 2000. “I can remember in 1977, he had a telethon. I can remember being glued to the TV watching him. He was singing ‘Back Home in Indiana,’ trying to do everything to sell season tickets. I know the history behind the Pacers, and most of the history is Slick Leonard.” More

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      Howard Schnellenberger, College Coach Who Built Winners, Dies at 87

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      After assembling the formidable offense for the unbeaten 1972 Miami Dolphins, he breathed new life into football programs at two universities.Howard Schnellenberger, who built the offense for the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ unbeaten Super Bowl champions, then revived downtrodden football programs as head coach at the Universities of Miami and Louisville, died on Saturday. He was 87.His death was announced by Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, whose football program he had created. The university did not say where he died or give the cause.Brash and supremely confident and a distinctive figure on the sidelines, usually wearing a sports jacket and tie and sporting a bushy mustache, Schnellenberger was eager to defy the odds.And he was very much the taskmaster.“Football is the last place, outside of the military, where we have an opportunity to develop the proposition that the team is more important than the individual,” he told Sports Illustrated after putting his 1995 Oklahoma Sooners — the third of four college teams he coached — through a grueling spring workout.Schnellenberger was the offensive coordinator under Coach Don Shula for the 17-0 Dolphins of 1972, assembling a unit featuring Bob Griese and Earl Morrall at quarterback, Larry Csonka at fullback, Mercury Morris at running back and Paul Warfield at wide receiver.He embarked on his collegiate head-coaching career in January 1979, when the Miami Hurricanes hired him to take over a football program that was in disarray. Two weeks earlier, Lou Saban, the latest of several head coaches Miami had gone through in the 1970s, had suddenly departed for Army.Schnellenberger watching his Florida Atlantic University team run drills in 2008. He coached Florida Atlantic to a bowl game in his fourth season there.J. Pat Carter/Associated PressIn his five seasons with the Hurricanes, Schnellenberger focused on recruiting players from Florida high schools, proclaiming that “the State of Miami,” delineated by an imaginary line that ran from Tampa eastward, would be the northern boundary of his prime recruiting territory. And he installed professional-type offensive and defensive schemes.The rebuilding program reached its pinnacle when quarterback Bernie Kosar (who was from Ohio) led the Hurricanes to an 11-1 record and a No. 1 ranking for the 1983 season, capped by a 31-30 victory over the previously undefeated Nebraska in the Orange Bowl.After posting a 41-16 record at Miami, Schnellenberger left in 1984 for a prospective head-coaching post in the short-lived United States Football League. But that deal collapsed, and in 1985 he returned to Louisville, where he had grown up, to coach the Cardinals.He said he was unfazed by the challenge of reviving a football program that had long been in the shadow of the school’s basketball squads.“We’re on a collision course with the national championship,” he said at his introductory news conference. “The only variable is time.”He coached Louisville to a pair of bowl victories, most notably a 34-7 rout of Alabama in the 1991 New Year’s Day Fiesta Bowl, the climax of a 10-1-1 season.Schnellenberger became the head coach at Oklahoma in 1995. But the Sooners went only 5-5-1, and he resigned.He retired after that, but Florida Atlantic University hired him in 1998 to raise funds for the creation of a football program. He began recruiting players as the head coach a year later, and his first team took the field in 2001, in Division 1-AA. Florida Atlantic transitioned to the higher Division 1-A in 2004 and won the 2007 New Orleans Bowl and the 2008 Motor City Bowl at that level.Howard Leslie Schnellenberger was born on March 16, 1934, in Saint Meinrad, Ind. He was of German-American descent. His father was a truck driver, and his mother worked in a munitions plant during World War II. He played for Kentucky under Bear Bryant and Blanton Collier, as an end, and was named a first-team All-American by The Associated Press in 1955. He was an assistant coach under Collier at Kentucky in 1959 and 1960 and under Bryant at Alabama from 1961 through 1965. Schnellenberger’s wife, Beverlee, bronzed a pair of shoes that she said he had worn during every game he coached from 1959 to 1972.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesSchnellenberger recruited Joe Namath and Ken Stabler for the Crimson Tide. When he went to Beaver Falls, Pa., to induce Namath to play for Bryant, he once told The Sun Sentinel of South Florida, “a three-day recruiting trip turned into 10 days,” since Namath and his family took some persuading.“I was out of money and had to buy him a plane ticket to return with me,” he recalled. “I wrote a bad check to Eastern Airlines to get both of us to Alabama.”When Stabler asked Schnellenberger to bring a small gift for his mother when he was wooing Stabler for Bryant, Schnellenberger recalled, “I took his mom a fifth of bourbon.”Schnellenberger was an offensive coach on Bryant’s national championship Alabama teams of 1961, ’64 and ’65. He became the receivers coach for George Allen’s Los Angeles Rams in 1966, then was hired by Shula as the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator in 1970.Coming off the Dolphins’ unbeaten season, he was named the Baltimore Colts’ head coach in 1973. But after the Colts went 4-10 and then got off to an 0-3 start the next season, he was fired. He was the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator again from 1975 to 1978.Schnellenberger with the Peach Bowl trophy after Miami beat Virginia Tech in 1981.Joe Sebo/Associated PressSchnellenberger had a career record of 158-151-3 as a collegiate head coach. He was 6-0 in bowl games, coaching Miami, Louisville and Florida Atlantic to two bowl triumphs apiece. He retired a second and final time after Florida Atlantic’s 2011 season.He is survived by his wife, Beverlee; his sons Stuart and Timothy; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His son Stephen died in 2008.Miami and Florida Atlantic met for the first time in August 2013. The Hurricanes won, 34-6, with Schnellenberger and players from his 1983 Miami team on hand to mark the 30th anniversary of their national championship season. Schnellenberger was both a winner and a loser at that 2013 matchup: He was the honorary captain for both teams. More

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      Tony Murray, Moral Support for a Gay N.B.A. Player, Dies at 60

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      Mr. Murray, along with his husband, helped their nephew Jason Collins become the first player in the league to come out publicly. He died of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When Jason Collins stepped onto the court on Feb. 23, 2014, as a member of the Brooklyn Nets, it was a historic event: He was the first openly gay player in the National Basketball Association, and this was his first time in uniform since he had come out.Among the thousands cheering him on in Los Angeles, in a game against the Lakers, were his uncle, Mark Collins, and Mark’s husband, Tony Murray. “Congratulations,” they said to Mr. Collins over drinks after the game. “We love you.”They were more than just supportive family members. Mr. Collins and Mr. Murray married in 2013, the same year Jason Collins came out in a cover story in Sports Illustrated. In that article, and in many other places, he talked about how important his uncles were to him as examples of gay men — and, as he began to tell people about his sexuality, how valuable they were as guides and advisers.“For a confused young boy,” Mr. Collins wrote, “I can think of no better role model of love and compassion.”They also paved the way for Jason to come out to his family by showing them that gay men were nothing to be afraid of. Some relatives had difficulty accepting that Mark Collins was gay — until they met Tony.“I think once we saw how Mark and Tony were, the love they had for each other, we knew Mark was going to be fine,” Mr. Collins, who played for six teams in a 13-year N.B.A. career, said in a phone interview.Mr. Murray died on March 16 at a hospital in Valley Stream, N.Y. He was 60. The cause was Covid-19, Mark Collins said.Antoine Murray was born on Nov. 16, 1960, in Philadelphia. His father, William Murray, was unemployed; his mother, Phyllis (Turner) Murray, worked as an office clerk at a supermarket.Along with his husband and nephew, he is survived by his sisters Cynthia and Darlene and his brothers William and Brian.Mr. Murray graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in communications and received a master’s in education from West Chester University in Pennsylvania.While in college he interned at WCAU, a TV station in Philadelphia, and was later hired there as a mail clerk. He rose steadily, becoming its manager of community relations.It was that job, which involved a heavy dose of educational outreach, that took him to an educators’ conference in Philadelphia in 1995. Also in attendance was Mr. Collins, who is a social worker for the Hempstead, N.Y., public schools.The two began a long-distance relationship, visiting each other and taking trips to explore their respective home states. They both loved casinos, and traveled to Atlantic City and Las Vegas.They loved food, too. Along with vacations to foodie-friendly cities like New Orleans, Mr. Murray cooked for them at home, lavishly and often. His tastes were eclectic, but he had a spot for making huge spreads of soul food.“When he cooked, he always cooked for 30 people,” Mark Collins said. “He didn’t know how to cook in small portions.”After Mr. Murray moved to New York in the mid-2000s to work in administration for the YMCA, the couple settled in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. There they would host neighborhood barbecues on their front lawn, with Mr. Murray essentially catering the whole spread. He became one of the most popular people in the neighborhood, Mark Collins said.Jason Collins played center for the Brooklyn Nets in a game against the Toronto Raptors in 2014. “Tony was so proud of Jason,” Mark Collins said of his husband. Kathy Kmonicek/Associated PressBoth Jason and Mark Collins described Mr. Murray as an old soul, relaxed and somewhat reserved, committed to his Baptist faith but adamant in defense of gay rights.Mr. Murray and Mr. Collins marched every year in the New York City Pride parade, and in 2013 they traveled to Boston to join Jason Collins in his first Pride march. The basketball player was there at the invitation of Rep. Joe Kennedy III, his former college roommate, who was leading a contingent in the parade.His uncles smiled as the crowd cheered for Jason.“It was a beautiful day,” Mark Collins remembered. “Tony was so proud of Jason. He was just humbled by the whole experience.” More

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      Elgin Baylor, Acrobatic Hall of Famer in N.B.A., Dies at 86

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      Foreshadowing the likes of Michael Jordan, he was a star with the glamorous Lakers and was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years.Elgin Baylor, the Lakers’ Hall of Fame forward who became one of the N.B.A.’s greatest players, displaying acrobatic brilliance that foreshadowed the athleticism of later generations of stars, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 86.His death, at a hospital, was announced on Twitter by the Lakers. The team did not specify a cause.In his 14 seasons with the Lakers, first in Minneapolis but mostly in Los Angeles, with another pair of Hall of Famers, Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain, as teammates, Baylor played with a creative flourish that had never been seen in pro basketball.He was only 6 feet 5 inches — relatively short for a forward even then — but he played above the rim when he soared toward the basket. His ability to twist and turn in midair on his way to the hoop previewed the freewheeling shows put on by stars like Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and LeBron James.When Baylor arrived in the N.B.A. in 1958, an All-American out of Seattle University, the pros usually scored on one-handed set shots or running hooks. Baylor added a new dimension.“You could not stop Elgin from driving to the basket,” the Hall of Fame guard Oscar Robertson recalled in his autobiography “The Big O” (2010), adding, “You sure couldn’t out-jump him, or hang in the air any longer than he did.”“Elgin,” Robertson wrote, “was the first and original high flier.”Baylor’s sturdy 225-pound frame complemented his finesse. He could muscle his way to the basket, and he followed up his missed shots by maneuvering to score over bigger players. He was also an outstanding rebounder and passer.Baylor driving to the hoop against Tom Sanders of the Boston Celtics, the Lakers’ perennial nemesis, in the 1962 championship series. Boston won, as it so often did against the Lakers. Associated PressBaylor was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years. He was a 10-time N.B.A. first-team All-Star selection and averaged more than 30 points a game for three consecutive seasons in the early 1960s.He set a league record by scoring 64 points against the Boston Celtics in November 1959, then scored 71 against the Knicks in November 1960, only to see Chamberlain score 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the Knicks in March 1962.Baylor joined with West and later with Chamberlain to turn the Lakers into a glamour team. He played in eight N.B.A. final series, but the Lakers lost seven times to the Celtics in the Bill Russell era and then to the Knicks in a memorable Game 7 at Madison Square Garden in 1970.He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1977.But Baylor had little success when he turned to coaching and front-office positions. He coached three losing teams with the New Orleans Jazz (now the Utah Jazz) in the 1970s and later spent 22 mostly frustrating seasons as the general manager of the Los Angeles Clippers.In the days when the N.B.A.’s TV coverage was limited, Baylor had never viewed a pro game before he played in one.“I had never seen anyone else do my moves,” he told Terry Pluto in the N.B.A. oral history “Tall Tales” (1992). “It starts with talent; you have to be able to jump. But more than that, things I did were spontaneous. I had the ball, I reacted to the defense.”And he had a nervous facial twitch that sometimes made defenders think he was setting off in one direction only to find him heading the other way.As the center Johnny Kerr put it, “You didn’t know if it was a head fake or what was going on.”Baylor, second from right, as coach of the New Orleans Jazz in 1979. With him, from left, were Kent Benson of the Milwaukee Bucks and Tommy Green and Jimmy McElroy of the Jazz.Associated PressElgin Gay Baylor was born in Washington on Sept. 16, 1934. He was a high school basketball star, then played for one season at the College of Idaho and two seasons at Seattle University, leading his team as a senior to the 1958 N.C.A.A. tournament final, a loss to Kentucky.The Minneapolis Lakers selected Baylor as the league’s overall No. 1 pick in the 1958 draft. He took them to the 1959 N.B.A. final series, where he averaged nearly 25 points a game in a losing cause, the Lakers being swept by the Celtics. He was named rookie of the year.The Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960, the year West arrived to provide an outside game to go with Baylor’s all-around skills.Baylor was eventually hampered by knee surgery that diminished his spring, but he remained an offensive force. He retired after his injuries limited him to two games in 1970-71 and just nine at the outset of the 1971-72 season, when the Lakers went on to defeat the Knicks for the championship.“Winning that championship was marred for me by the sad, conspicuous absence of Elgin Baylor,” West recalled in his memoir “West by West” (2011), written with Jonathan Coleman. “The guy that shared all the blood, sweat and tears wasn’t there to realize what it felt like.”Baylor averaged 27.4 points and 13.5 rebounds for his career and played in 11 All-Star Games.He was fired as the Jazz coach in 1979. He became the head of basketball operations for the Clippers, essentially their general manager, in 1986.The Clippers made the playoffs only four times in Baylor’s tenure, which ended before the 2008-09 season opened. The Clippers said he had resigned, but he filed a lawsuit in March 2009 against the Clippers’ owner, Donald T. Sterling, and the N.B.A., maintaining that he had been fired as a result of age and racial discrimination.The lawsuit contended that Sterling had described Baylor as “a token” and that he had wanted the team to be composed of “poor black kids from the South” with a white head coach. The N.B.A. was accountable, according to the suit, because league officials knew of a large salary disparity between other general managers and Baylor, an African-American.A jury decided in the Clippers’ favor, concluding that Baylor had lost his job because of the team’s poor showings.But in April 2014, the N.B.A. imposed a lifetime ban on Sterling shortly after a recording obtained by TMZ caught him making racist comments in a conversation with a female acquaintance. The team was sold to the businessman Steve Ballmer in August 2014.Baylor is survived by his wife, Elaine; a daughter, Krystal; two children from a previous marriage, Alan and Alison; and a sister, Gladys Baylor Barrett.Long after Baylor’s playing days ended, his reputation endured.Tom Heinsohn, the Hall of Fame forward on Celtic teams that bested Baylor’s Lakers, marveled at his feats.“Elgin Baylor as forward beats out Bird, Julius Erving and everybody else,” Heinsohn told Roland Lazenby in his biography “Jerry West” (2009), referring to the Celtics’ Larry Bird. “He had the total game: defense, offense, everything, rebounding, passing the ball.” (Heinsohn died in November at 86.)Bill Sharman, the Celtics’ sharpshooting guard who coached Baylor in his brief, final season, was even more succinct, telling The Los Angeles Times back then, “Elgin Baylor is the greatest cornerman who ever played pro basketball.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Irv Cross, First Black Network TV Sports Analyst, Dies at 81

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIrv Cross, First Black Network TV Sports Analyst, Dies at 81After playing defensive back in the N.F.L., he made history when he joined CBS Sports’ pregame show, “The NFL Today.”Irv Cross in 1985. He had a 15-year run as an analyst on “The NFL Today.”Credit…George Rose/Getty ImagesMarch 1, 2021Updated 7:48 p.m. ETIrv Cross, a Pro Bowl defensive back with two N.F.L. teams who later made history as the first Black full-time television analyst for a network television sports show, died on Sunday in a hospice in North Oaks, Minn. He was 81.The cause was ischemic cardiomyopathy, a heart disease, said his wife, Liz Cross. He also had dementia, which he believed had been caused by concussions he endured in his playing days. He had arranged to donate his brain to the Boston University Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center.By 1975, after nine seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Los Angeles Rams and four years as a game analyst for CBS Sports, the network hired Mr. Cross to join the cast of its pregame show, “The NFL Today,” beginning a 15-year run as a high-profile commentator. He, Brent Musburger and Phyllis George — and, starting a year later, the betting maven Jimmy Snyder, who was known as the Greek — previewed and analyzed the day’s coming games and gave half-time scores.The cast was unlike others in N.F.L. television programming, with Mr. Cross in a job that no other Black sports journalist had held before, and Ms. George, a former Miss America, becoming one of the first female sportscasters. With entertaining banter and byplay, the combination of personalities proved extremely popular.“Irv was a very smart, hardworking, hugely kind person who always had a warmth about him,” Ted Shaker, the former executive producer of CBS Sports, said in a phone interview. “He had built up his credibility as a player and game analyst, and he was our anchor at ‘The NFL Today.’” He added, “Like Phyllis, Irv was a true pioneer.” (Ms. George died in May at 70.)In 1988, CBS fired Mr. Snyder over widely publicized comments he had made in an interview about the physical differences between Black and white athletes. His comments, Mr. Cross said at the time, “don’t reflect the Jimmy the Greek I know, and I’ve known him for almost 13 years.” (Mr. Snyder died in 1996.)After CBS fired Mr. Musburger in a contract dispute in 1990, the network overhauled “The NFL Today,” ending Mr. Cross’s long run on the program. He returned to being a game analyst at CBS for two years, but after his contract was not renewed he did not work in network television again.“I didn’t have an agent, and I didn’t search for a TV position as aggressively as I should have,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1996.“I just quietly faded away.”His broadcasting work was honored in 2009 when he received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.Mr. Cross in 1976 with his “NFL Today” colleagues Brent Musburger and Phyllis George.Credit…CBS ArchivesIrvin Acie Cross was born on July 27, 1939, in Hammond, Ind., the eighth of 15 children. His father, Acie, was a steelworker; his mother, Ellee (Williams) Cross, was a homemaker.Mr. Cross said his father, a heavy drinker, had beaten his mother. “It tears me up,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2018. “It was frightening. You could tell it was coming. We tried stopping him a few times. We’d jump on his back. It’s absolutely raw for me.”Ellee Cross died in childbirth when Irv was 10, leaving him to wonder whether the beatings had worsened his mother’s health problems.After excelling at football at Hammond High School — which earned him a place in its hall of fame — Mr. Cross was a wide receiver and a defensive back at Northwestern University under Coach Ara Parseghian. As a junior, he caught a 78-yard touchdown pass during a 30-24 Northwestern victory over Notre Dame.“We didn’t have much depth, but Parseghian was great at moving guys around and getting the most of them,” Mr. Cross told a Northwestern online publication in 2018. “His teams beat Notre Dame three straight times from 1958 to 1961.” Mr. Parseghian left Northwestern after the 1963 season to begin a storied run as coach of Notre Dame.As a senior, Mr. Cross was named Northwestern’s male athlete of the year.The Eagles chose him in the seventh round of the 1961 N.F.L. draft. He intercepted a career-high five passes in 1962 and played in the Pro Bowl in 1964 and 1965. The Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown once said, “No one in the league tackles harder than Cross.”After five seasons with the Eagles, Mr. Cross was traded to the Los Angeles Rams in 1965 and played there for three years. He returned to the Eagles in 1969 as a player and a defensive backs coach. After retiring as a player at the end of the season, he continued to coach for one more year.Mr. Cross when he played for the Philadelphia Eagles in the early 1960s. He was a two-time Pro Bowl defensive back before becoming a sportscaster.Credit…Philadelphia EaglesMr. Cross began planning for a television career while he was with the Eagles, working as a radio sports commentator and a weekend TV sports anchor in Philadelphia during the off-season. Though tempted by the Dallas Cowboys’ offer of a front office job in 1971, he chose to work for CBS Sports instead.Joining “The NFL Today” came with a certain amount of pressure. He recalled in the Northwestern interview that in 1975 “the TV landscape was much different, much whiter.”“I never focused on that,” Mr. Cross said, “but I was keenly aware that if I failed it might be a long time before another Black person got a similar opportunity.”When the cast of the show was changed in 1990, Greg Gumbel, who is Black, was hired to work alongside the former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw.After Mr. Cross left CBS he changed course, working as the athletic director at Idaho State University in Pocatello from 1996 to ’98 and at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., from 1999 to 2005.In addition to his wife, Liz (Tucker) Cross, he is survived by his daughters, Susan, Lisa and Sandra Cross; his son, Matthew; a grandson; his sisters, Joan Motley, Jackie McEntyre Julia Hopson, Pat Grant and Gwen Robinson; and his brothers, Raymond, Teal and Sam. His first marriage ended in divorce. He lived in Roseville, Minn., outside the Twin Cities.When Mr. Cross played, concussions were usually not taken seriously. He sustained several in his rookie season, enough for his teammates to nickname him Paper Head. One of the concussions knocked him unconscious and sent him to the hospital.To protect himself, Mr. Cross had a helmet made with extra padding.“I just tried to keep my head out of the way while making tackles,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2018. “But that’s just the way it was. Most of the time, they gave you some smelling salts and you went back in. We didn’t know.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Bill Wright, Who Broke a Color Barrier in Golf, Dies at 84

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBill Wright, Who Broke a Color Barrier in Golf, Dies at 84In 1959, decades before Tiger Woods, Wright became the first Black golfer to win a United States Golf Association event.Bill Wright in the Amateur Public Links Championship in Denver in 1959. His victory there was a singular moment for Black golfers at a time when the P.G.A. bylaws still had a “Caucasians-only” clause.Credit…Denver Post, via Getty ImagesFeb. 25, 2021, 6:56 p.m. ETBill Wright, the first Black competitor to win a United States Golf Association event in an era when African-Americans were not welcome either in segregated country clubs or in the top amateur and professional ranks, died on Feb. 19 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84.His wife and only immediate survivor, Ceta (Smith) Wright, confirmed the death. She said he had a stroke in 2017 and had Alzheimer’s disease.Wright was attending the Western Washington College of Education (now Western Washington University) in 1959 when he won the U.S.G.A. Amateur Public Links Championship in Denver.After barely qualifying for match play, he had little trouble in the tournament. His skill on the greens led The Spokesman-Review of Spokane to call him a “slender putting wizard.”Wright’s immediate reaction to being the first Black golfer to win a national championship was to hang up the phone on the reporter who had asked how that felt.“I wasn’t mad,” he said in an interview with the U.S.G.A. in 2009. “I wanted to be Black. I wanted to be the winner. I wanted to be all those things.” But he was struck by how quickly his victory was viewed as one for his race. As he saw it, he said, “I was just playing golf.”Wright’s victory was a singular moment for Black golfers at a time when the P.G.A. of America’s bylaws still had a “Caucasians-only” clause (which would be abolished in 1961).A Black man did not win a PGA Tour event until 1964, when Pete Brown finished first at the Waco Turner Open in Texas. The next two African-American winners of U.S.G.A. tournaments were Alton Duhon (the 1982 U.S. Senior Amateur) and Tiger Woods (the 1991 to 1993 U.S. Junior Amateurs).Victoria Nenno, the senior historian of the USGA Golf Museum and Library, said in an email that Wright’s victory “deserves recognition not just for the challenges he overcame as an African-American golfer, but for the manner in which he won — with skill, precision and, most importantly, sportsmanship.”Winning the public links title earned Wright an exemption to play in the U.S. Amateur Championship later that year at the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs. When the white golfers who were to join him for a practice round refused to play with him, Chick Evans, who had won the Open in 1920, invited him to join his group. That group included Jack Nicklaus, then 19 years old, who would win the event.“I have never forgotten it,” Wright once said of Evans’s gesture in an interview for usga.com. “He came over and made it so I could enjoy the most aristocratic hotel. It was just amazing.”William Alfred Wright was born on April 4, 1936, in Kansas City, Mo., and later moved with his family to Portland, Ore., and Seattle. His father, Bob, was a mail carrier and a skilled golfer. His mother, Madeline (Shipman) Wright, was a social worker who also golfed.Wright began playing golf at 14; a year later, he was Seattle’s junior champion. He excelled in basketball and helped his high school team win a state title in 1954. He graduated from Western Washington in 1960 and that year won the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics’ individual golf championship. He also played in his first PGA Tour event in 1960, but learned how difficult it was to play a regular schedule without sponsors.“There was really no visible hope for people of color to play professionally,” Wendell Haskins, a former director of diversity for the P.G.A. of America, said in a phone interview. “He showed all kinds of promise, but the opportunities for him were limited.”Because he could not afford to play golf professionally full time, Wright taught sixth grade in Los Angeles for nine years, then owned a car dealership in Pasadena and was the teaching pro at the Lakes at El Segundo, a nine-hole municipal golf course, from 1995 to 2017.According to the PGA Tour, Wright played in at least 17 tournaments from 1960 to 1974 — his best finish was a tie for 40th place — and in nine PGA Tour Champions events (tournaments for golfers at least 50 years old) from 1988 to 1995. He also competed in the 1966 U.S. Open — he didn’t make the cut — and five U.S. Senior Opens.“He was a barrier breaker,” Ceta Wright said. “The sad part is that he hoped his success would open the doors for other Black golfers. But it really didn’t.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Patrick Filien, Peripatetic Basketball Coach, Dies at 51

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose we’ve lostPatrick Filien, Peripatetic Basketball Coach, Dies at 51After assistant coaching jobs around the country, he found his dream job as the head coach at a small college in Albany, N.Y. He died of Covid-19.Pat Filien got his first head basketball coaching job in 2018, at Bryant & Stratton College in Albany, N.Y., and it came with the job of athletic director. “This was something I’ve had to create,” he said. “You name it, I’m doing it.”Credit…University of AlbanyFeb. 25, 2021, 3:45 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.After nearly 25 years as an assistant coach of men’s and women’s basketball teams at seven colleges, Pat Filien achieved his professional dream in 2018: He became a head coach.But he faced an unusual challenge. He was named not only to coach the first men’s basketball team at Bryant & Stratton’s campus in Albany, N.Y., but also to take charge of the small college’s inaugural plunge into sports as its athletic director.“Everywhere else I had been, everything was already established,” he told The Times Union of Albany in 2019. “This was something I’ve had to create. You name it, I’m doing it. This time last year, we didn’t even have a recruit. I didn’t even have a basketball.”In addition to guiding the basketball team to an 18-10 record and the small-college United States Collegiate Athletic Association tournament in the 2018-19 season, Mr. Filien oversaw the start-up of the school’s baseball team in 2018 and the creation of the women’s basketball team and the men’s and women’s soccer teams in 2019.Mr. Filien died on Feb. 4 at his home in East Greenbush, near Albany. He was 51.The cause was Covid-19, his brother Robert said.Patrick John Filien (pronounced FILL-ee-en) was born on Sept. 28, 1969, in Brooklyn and raised in Ozone Park, Queens. His father, Jean-Claude, had started a cellphone company in Haiti; his mother, Yolande (Charlemagne) Filien, was a legal secretary.Pat played football — he was the quarterback of his Pop Warner football team — as well as baseball and basketball, together with his brother Robert and another brother, Lesly.After playing for the Fashion Institute of Technology’s basketball team, he transferred to the College of Saint Rose in Albany, where he helped the Golden Knights to their first appearance in the Division II N.C.A.A. men’s tournament, in 1992.A 6-foot-7 forward, he was known for his exuberance, his embrace of opponents after a game and his fierce rebounding.“He literally rebounded the ball like he hadn’t eaten in a month and the ball was meat,” Brian Beaury, the former Saint Rose coach, said in The Times Union’s obituary for Mr. Filien.After Mr. Filien’s graduation, he embarked on a series of coaching jobs around the country that included stints at the University of Vermont, from 2001 to 2005, and the State University of New York at Albany, from 2005 to 2011. His teams won five consecutive conference titles, three of them while he was at Vermont and two more at Albany.“That’s what he talked about most,” his brother Robert said by phone.In addition to his brothers, Mr. Filien is survived by his wife, Tiffani (Adams) Filien; his parents; his daughter, Lauren, who plays high school basketball in East Greenbush; his son, Marcus, a forward on the Cornell University basketball team; and his sister, Marie Hamilton.After moving around so much in his coaching career, Mr. Filien was glad for landing at Bryant & Stratton, which allowed him finally to settle down, in Albany. And he had ambitions to move his school up in the ranks.“He loved it,” Robert Filien said of his brother’s job. “He was hoping to make a name for Bryant & Stratton and make it a Division III school.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tom Konchalski, Dogged Basketball Scout, Dies at 74

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTom Konchalski, Dogged Basketball Scout, Dies at 74He traveled to schools, camps and schoolyards to evaluate high school players, and his reports were essential to college coaches in their recruiting.Tom Konchalski in 2013 at a high school basketball game in Brooklyn. Though he didn’t drive a car, he traveled throughout the East for more than 40 years, scouting high school basketball players.Credit…Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesFeb. 21, 2021Updated 5:32 p.m. ETFor more than 40 years, Tom Konchalski was a fixture in gyms, summer camps and tournaments from Maine to West Virginia, a soft-spoken high school basketball scout whose newsletter was required reading for college coaches craving insights about potential recruits.He showed prescience about future N.B.A. players like Kyrie Irving, Bernard King and Kenny Anderson, but his focus was primarily on creating opportunities for high school players at all levels of college basketball, whether at Division I, II or III schools, or in Canada. A devout Roman Catholic, he thought of players as his ministry.“You’d read his report, mark down names you wanted to investigate, and you took what he said as gospel,” said Dave Odom, a former coach at Wake Forest University and the University of South Carolina, where he recruited a guard, Tre Kelley, whom he learned about from Konchalski’s newsletter. “Tom saw the kid in a summer league, and I followed up with him.”Konchalski, who retired last year from publishing the newsletter High School Basketball Illustrated, died on Feb. 8 in hospice care in the Bronx. He was 74. The cause was prostate cancer, said his brother, Steve, who is retiring after 46 seasons as the men’s basketball coach at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. For his newsletter, Konchalski assessed players in 13 categories and offered colorful accompanying comments about them like “loaded with offensive chutzpah” and “scores like we breathe!”“He had a genuine interest in getting his evaluations right,” said Bob Hurley Sr., who was the basketball coach at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, N.J., for 45 years until the school closed in 2017. “He would never rush. If someone had a bad game, he promised to come back.”Konchalski’s long career made him the subject of a short ESPN documentary in 2013 and earned him a nomination in December from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in the contributor category. Honorees will be announced in April.Thomas Coman Konchalski was born on Jan. 8, 1947, in Manhattan and grew up in the Elmhurst neighborhood in Queens. His father, Stephen, was a general foreman with the New York City Department of Parks and a semipro baseball player. His mother, Marjorie (Coman) Konchalski, was a homemaker who later worked as a department store cashier.Tom was 8 when he and his brother, who is two years older, went with their father to an N.B.A. doubleheader at Madison Square Garden. The brothers eventually took the subway on their own to see games at the Garden and at schoolyards around the city.And he was 14 when he first saw Connie Hawkins play. Hawkins, the exhilarating star of Boys High School in Brooklyn, was demonstrating his prowess during a summer league game, and it was an epiphany for young Tom.“I would follow him from playground to playground,” Konchalski told The New York Times in 2013. “His game was electric. With one hand, he could palm a rebound out of the air.”At Archbishop Molloy High School in the Briarwood section of Queens, where his brother played guard on its basketball team, Konchalski covered the team for the school newspaper and learned the intricacies of basketball from Jack Curran, Molloy’s coach from 1958 to 2013.“Tom never really played,” Steve Konchalski said in a phone interview. “He’d go to the park and put up some shots, and he had a nice shooting touch. But it wasn’t his thing to compete. He got the height. I’m 6-2. He’s 6-6.”Konchalski, center, with Syd Neiman, left, and Konchalski’s uncle, John Coman, when they were officials for the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Forest Hills, Queens.After graduating from Fordham University in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, Konchalski taught math and social studies at a Roman Catholic school in Queens (and for a time pursued another sports interest, as a linesman at the U.S. Open tennis championships, and its predecessor, when they were played at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills).Konchalski’s path to scouting was accelerated by coaching Catholic Youth Organization basketball teams in New York City. His expanding knowledge of local players led him to part-time scouting in the 1970s for Howard Garfinkel, the influential founder of High School Basketball Illustrated and a co-founder of the Five-Star Basketball Camp, a celebrated youth instructional showcase for future superstars, among them Michael Jordan and LeBron James.Konchalski left teaching to work full-time for Garfinkel in 1979; five years later he bought H.S.B.I. In 1980, Konchalski famously helped get Jordan — then known as Mike Jordan — into the Five-Star camp at the request of Roy Williams, an assistant coach at the University of North Carolina, which was recruiting Jordan (and which he would attend) and wanted to see him play against high-octane competition.Not yet well-known, Jordan stunned the camp with his play.“In tryouts when people were guarding him, they were guarding his belly button,” Konchalski recalled last year in an interview with Forbes magazine. “He had a great stop/ jump. He’d stop on a dime and really elevate. He was an extraterrestrial athlete.”Konchalski — who was known for his detailed recall of games and players from decades earlier — was something of a Luddite. He did not own a computer, a cellphone or an answering machine. Working from his apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, he typed each of the 16 annual issues of his newsletter, stapled them and mailed them in manila envelopes to about 200 coaches, who subscribed for several hundred dollars a year. He did not post his publication online.“I have an electric typewriter,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1990. “That’s my concession to the ages. I always say I was born seven centuries too late.”He did not drive, so he commuted to and from games by train or bus, and was nicknamed the Glider for the way he quietly slipped into a gym, settled onto the top level of the stands and started taking notes on players on a legal pad.In addition to his brother, he is survived by a sister, Judy Ball.In 1976, Konchalski saw that Chris Sellitri, a 6-foot-5 forward at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn, had no scholarship offers from colleges in the United States.“Today, a player who made All-Brooklyn would get a scholarship,” Steve Konchalski said. “But back then, some outstanding players fell through the cracks. So Tom directed me to Chris, and he became the leading rebounder in the history of our school.”He added: “He wouldn’t tell a kid, ‘Go to my brother’s school,’ but he’d say to me, ‘This kid is still available — here’s his coach’s name and my evaluation.’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More