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    Terry Dischinger, College Basketball Star and Olympian, Dies at 82

    An all-American at Purdue, he was the youngest member of the gold medal-winning 1960 U.S. Olympic team. He later became a top N.B.A. rookie.Terry Dischinger, one of the greatest players in Purdue University basketball history and the youngest member of the U.S. Olympic team that won a gold medal in Rome in 1960, died on Oct. 9 in Lake Oswego, Ore. He was 82.The cause of his death, at a memory care center, was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, Bill Dischinger.Dischinger (pronounced DISH-ing-er) was an undisputed star at Purdue, in West Lafayette, Ind. A 6-foot-7, 190-pound center, he led the Big Ten in scoring for three straight seasons; was a two-time first-team consensus all-American; and scored at least 40 points in a game nine times, still a Purdue record.After averaging 26.3 points in his sophomore season, Dischinger made the Olympic team, which included several future members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, among them Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Jerry Lucas and Walt Bellamy. The U.S. won all eight of its games, including the final against Brazil, to earn the gold medal. Dischinger averaged 11.8 points a game, fourth best on the team.Early the next year, when Dischinger was a junior, a short profile in Sports Illustrated described the skillful fakes, fast first steps and soft jump shots that made him a Big Ten star, and recalled a moment when he vexed Robertson during a practice at the Olympics.According to the profile, Robertson, whom Dischinger idolized, “ended one frustrating Olympic scrimmage in which he was trying to guard Dischinger by shouting, ‘Man, go ahead and score. Who cares!’ as Terry faked him out for the nth time.”Dischinger went on to play in the National Basketball Association, earning Rookie of the Year and All-Star honors. He was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019.Dischinger was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019. He scored 40 points or more in nine games at Purdue University, setting a school record that still stands.Orlin Wagner/Associated PressTerry Gilbert Dischinger was born on Nov. 21, 1940, in Anderson, Ind. His father, Donas, was a high school teacher and football coach. His mother, Clara (Wood) Dischinger, was a physical education teacher.Dischinger was chosen by the Chicago Zephyrs in the first round of the 1962 N.B.A. draft and broke in with them as if he were still at Purdue. Converted to forward, he scored 25.5 points a game in the 1962-63 season, while playing only 57 games on a part-time contract that let him complete his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.Despite not playing a full season, he was voted Rookie of the Year over other future Hall of Famers like Dave DeBusschere of the Detroit Pistons and John Havlicek of the Boston Celtics.Dischinger played on All-Star teams in his first three seasons.“He was a very smart player with a great shot,” Bill Bradley, the former New York Knicks forward and U.S. senator, who frequently played against Dischinger, said in a phone interview. “I remember him as much for the 1960 Olympics as for him playing in the N.B.A.”Dischinger remained with the Zephyrs when they relocated to Baltimore and were renamed the Bullets after his rookie year. He averaged 20.8 points a game in 1963-64. After one season in Baltimore, he was traded to Detroit, where he scored an average of 18.2 points a game. After two years of Army service, he returned to the Pistons in 1967.Having played on an Army basketball team, he told The Detroit Free Press in 1971, “I thought I could make the readjustment to the pros again pretty quickly.”But, he added, “it didn’t work out that way.”A knee injury reduced his playing time and his productivity. He never averaged more than 13.1 points a game in his last six seasons, five with the Pistons and his last with the Portland Trail Blazers.By the time his basketball career ended in 1973, he was already planning his next one. A friend in the Army had piqued his interest in a post-basketball career in dentistry, and he began studying at the University of Tennessee College of Dentistry in the summers between N.B.A. seasons.He completed his D.D.S. degree in 1974 and went on to earn a certificate in orthodontics in 1977 from the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center (now Oregon Health & Science University).He held several patents, including one for a version of an appliance to help an underdeveloped jaw grow. He taught orthodontics and had a practice in Lake Oswego, which Bill Dischinger joined 24 years ago and now runs.In addition to his son, Dischinger is survived by his wife, Mary (Dunn) Dischinger, whom he married in 1962; his daughter, Kelly Loomis; his sisters, Nancy Rudolph and Tommy Groth; and nine grandchildren. Another son, Terry, died in 2010.Heading into the final game of his college basketball career against the University of Michigan in March 1962, Dischinger was tied for the Big Ten scoring lead with Jimmy Rayl of Indiana University, which was playing Ohio State.Before the game, he received a telegram from two Ohio State players — Jerry Lucas, who had become a friend during the Olympics, and John Havlicek — “telling me not to worry — get my points and they’d shut down Rayl,” he told The Journal & Courier of Lafayette in 1980.Whatever they and their teammates did seemed to work.Dischinger won the title with 30 points. Rayl scored 25. More

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    Betsy Rawls, Winner of Eight Golf Majors, Dies at 95

    With a strong short game, she won four Women’s opens and a total of 55 L.P.G.A. Tour events between 1951 and 1972. She also had leadership roles with the tour.Betsy Rawls, who won eight major golf championships, including four United States Women’s Opens, in the first two decades of the L.P.G.A. Tour, and as an executive and tournament director helped propel the arrival of the women’s pro circuit as a big-money attraction, died on Saturday at her home in Lewes, Del. She was 95. Her death was confirmed by the Ladies Professional Golf Association.Rawls was the first four-time Women’s Open champion, winning in 1951, 1953, 1957 and 1960, a record matched only by Mickey Wright, who captured her fourth Open in 1964. From 1951 to 1972, Rawls won a total of 55 events on the L.P.G.A. Tour, which was founded in 1950.Her other major victories came at the Women’s Western Open in 1952 and 1959 and the Women’s P.G.A. Championship in 1959 and 1969. She was a three-time runner-up during the 1950s in the other major tournament of her time, the Titleholders Championship, and was among the six original inductees into the L.P.G.A. Tour Hall of Fame in 1967. She was also inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.Rawls received the 1996 Bob Jones Award, the United States Golf Association’s highest honor, and the L.P.G.A.’s 50th Anniversary Commissioner’s Award in 2000 for her contributions to women’s golf. She was selected in 1980 as the first woman to serve on the rules committee for the men’s United States Open.Elizabeth Earle Rawls was born on May 4, 1928, in Spartanburg, in northern South Carolina, one of two children of Robert and Mary (Earle) Rawls. In the early 1940s, the family moved to Texas, where Betsy’s father worked as an engineer at an aircraft plant in Arlington, a suburb of Dallas, during World War II.Robert Rawls, who had played golf as a young man in Indiana, hired Harvey Penick, one of the game’s most renowned teachers, to give Betsy her first lesson when she was 17. Penick charged $3 for that one-hour session at the Austin Country Club and remained her coach, free of charge, for her entire career.“He always brought me back to the basic mechanics on which a good swing is built,” Rawls recalled in “Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings From a Lifetime in Golf.”Her strong suit was the short game. “I had a reputation of being able to get the ball up and down out of a garbage can,” she told The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., in 2010. “The sand wedge, off the fairway or out of the rough, was my best club. I could get it down in two from almost any place. I was a good putter under pressure.”Rawls graduated from the University of Texas in 1950, earning a bachelor’s degree with concentrations in physics and mathematics. She also finished an astonishing second, behind Babe Zaharias, as an amateur in the Women’s Open in 1950, the L.P.G.A. Tour’s inaugural season.She turned pro in 1951 after Wilson sporting goods recruited her to join its staff of leading players who were giving clinics on its behalf around the country. That year Rawls bested Louise Suggs by five strokes to capture the Open.At the time, Wilson paid her expenses, along with a salary that she recalled was about $3,000 a year (around $35,000 in today’s dollars), since prize money at the time was meager.She led the tour in victories in 1952, 1957 and 1959, when she set single-season records with 10 wins (including two majors), $26,744 in earnings and the lowest scoring average per round, 74.03, bringing her the women’s Vare Trophy.She got a break in winning the 1957 Open, at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y.Rawls received the winner’s trophy at the 1957 Open. Jackie Pung, who was disqualified from the tournament for an incorrect scorecard, can be seen at left, with her head in her hand.Bettmann ArchiveJackie Pung of Hawaii finished with a four-round total of 298 to Rawls’s 299. But officials quickly noticed that Pung’s playing partner, Betty Jameson, who was keeping score for Pung, had listed a 5 on the fourth hole of the last round, though she had actually scored a 6. Pung had made the same error in keeping score for Jameson, who wasn’t in contention for the victory.Although Pung’s card showed a correct total score, she was disqualified, as was Jameson, the automatic penalty under golf’s rules for a player who hands in a card with an incorrect score on any hole.So the championship, along with $1,800 in prize money, went to Rawls.“It’s always great to win, I guess, but I sure hate to do it this way,” United Press International quoted Rawls as saying. “I feel sorry for Jackie.”But Pung wound up as the No. 1 money winner: Members of the Winged Foot Club, distressed over her losing the title on a technicality, raised about $3,000 to ease her loss.Rawls was the L.P.G.A.’s president in 1961 and 1962 and its tournament director for six years following her retirement from competition in 1975. After that, she was the executive director of the McDonald’s Championship, which was discontinued in 1994 when it became the longtime sponsor of the L.P.G.A. Championship. Continuing in her post with that major event, she helped raise millions of dollars for charity.Rawls in 2005. She helped raise millions of dollars for charity in her later years.Al Messerschmidt/Getty ImagesRawls was treated for breast cancer in 2000 but continued overseeing the L.P.G.A. event, held at the DuPont Country Club in Wilmington, Del. She retired from her executive director’s post in 2002 but stayed on as the tournament’s vice board chairman.Rawls’s brother, Robert Rawls Jr., died in 1992. She left no immediate survivors. Rawls earned $302,664 in her 25-year career on the pro tour, landing below the top 450 on the L.P.G.A.’s current earnings list.“Today I look at the money they play for with amazement, but not with envy or bitterness,” Rawls told The Philadelphia Inquirer shortly before receiving the Bob Jones Award. “In the beginning, we played for so little that money wasn’t the motivating factor. But when I won, it seemed like it was a lot of money at the time. I enjoyed winning when I did.” More

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    Bobby Charlton, an England Soccer World Cup and Manchester United Icon, Dies at 86

    A mainstay of Manchester United and one of the game’s best-loved figures, he won the World Cup in 1966 and the European Cup in 1968. Bobby Charlton, one of soccer’s greatest players, who won the World Cup with England in 1966 in a dazzling career that was tinged by the tragedy of losing eight of his Manchester United teammates in a plane crash at the start of his playing days, died on Saturday. He was 86.His death was confirmed in a statement from Manchester United, which called him one of the club’s “greatest and most beloved players.” The statement did not say where he died or cite a cause. It was revealed in November 2020 that Charlton had dementia.Charlton was famed for his bullet shot and his relentless goal scoring, even though he did not play as a traditional striker. He was England’s top scorer, with 49 goals, for 45 years until Wayne Rooney beat the mark in September 2015. Charlton was also Manchester United’s top scorer for decades, with 249 goals in 758 appearances over 17 years, until Rooney surpassed that figure, too, in January 2017. In addition to his scoring feats, Charlton’s career was indelibly marked by a plane crash in 1958, shortly after he had become a professional player. Following a European Cup match against Red Star Belgrade, the plane on which the Manchester United team was traveling crashed in heavy snow during a refueling stop in Munich. Of the 23 who died, eight were players. Charlton, who was dragged from the wreckage by a teammate, was 21 years old at the time.Barely three weeks later, with the United manager, Matt Busby, still in a hospital in Germany, Charlton was back on the field. Because of his dignity in leading the Manchester United team through that dark period, his sportsmanship, and his central role in United’s revival and in his country’s sole success on the international stage, several commentators referred to him as the first gentleman of soccer.Charlton became a director and ambassador of Manchester United in 1984. A statue of Charlton, alongside his fabled teammates George Best and Denis Law — known as the United Trinity — was erected outside Manchester United’s stadium, Old Trafford, in 2008, and in 2016 the club renamed the south stand of the stadium in his honor. Charlton is also credited with giving Old Trafford its nickname, the Theater of Dreams.Robert Charlton was born on Oct. 11, 1937, in Ashington, Northumberland, in the north of England, to Robert and Elizabeth (Milburn) Charlton. His father was a miner, but the family had soccer in its genes. Four of his uncles were professional players, and his mother’s cousin Jackie Milburn was a legendary striker for Newcastle United; Bobby’s brother Jack became a professional player with Leeds and also represented England.“There was nothing else in life, it didn’t appear to me, except football,” Bobby Charlton said in a 2010 Sky Sports documentary.Charlton turned professional in 1954 and made his first appearance for Manchester United on Oct. 6, 1956, at age 18. When called up to the first team by Busby, he had to hide the fact that he had an injury.“I actually had a sprained ankle, but I wasn’t going to admit to it,” Charlton said in a 2011 BBC documentary. He scored twice in his debut.Manchester United won the league title in the 1956-57 season, with Charlton becoming a central player. The team was known as the Busby Babes after the manager, who had combed the playing fields of England to find the best young talent to fit his vision of soccer played with panache, pace and quick passing.Its league success earned Manchester United a place in the European Cup, the forerunner of the Champions League, the next season. After a 3-3 draw with Red Star secured a spot in the semifinals, the plane carrying the team home stopped to refuel in Munich. Amid terrible weather conditions, two attempts to take off were aborted. On the third, the plane crashed.Crawling to safety through a hole in the fuselage, the team’s goalkeeper, Harry Gregg, dragged Charlton and another teammate, Dennis Viollet, clear. “I left them there dead,” Gregg told the BBC in 2011. “The biggest shock I had was when I turned and there was Bobby Charlton and Dennis Viollet staring at the rest of the plane exploding in the petrol dump. Just staring.”Charlton was 21 years old in 1958 when the plane carrying the Manchester United team crashed in a heavy snowfall. The crash killed 23, people including eight of his teammates.Allsport/Hulton ArchiveCharlton returned home to recover from his injuries, which were relatively minor. He also faced the psychological trauma of trying to return to the field of play without his lost teammates.But after watching a scratch United team featuring several youth-team players and loanees overcome Sheffield Wednesday in an F.A. Cup fixture soon after the accident, Charlton told the acting manager, Jimmy Murphy, that he would return. Many saw Charlton’s stoicism and refusal to give up as a ray of hope amid the tragedy.United rebuilt around Charlton. Busby recovered from his injuries, and through the course of the 1960s he set about creating a new team. By the middle of the decade, Charlton was a Manchester United mainstay and a linchpin of the England side as the country prepared to host the 1966 World Cup.England started the tournament slowly, but in the second game, against Mexico, Charlton provided the inspiration with a trademark goal. Advancing across the halfway line, he bore down on the opposition penalty area as the defender retreated, and he thumped a shot into the top corner of the net with such languid violence that the ball almost tore the goal posts out of the ground.“I hit it, and it was sweet as a nut,” Charlton said in 2011. “I thought, people will remember that, because I’ll remember it for a long time.”In the semifinal against Portugal, Charlton scored two more goals to put his team into the final against West Germany, thus setting up one of the most memorable games in World Cup history.Charlton was told by the England coach, Alf Ramsey, to shadow Germany’s best player, Franz Beckenbauer. Unknown to the English, Beckenbauer had been given the same instructions in reverse by his own coach.“He was so fit,” Beckenbauer later recalled. “He was running like a horse. It was very, very difficult to stop him. It was almost impossible.”Beckenbauer and Charlton largely canceled each other out, but the pulsating game went to extra time, when England took the lead, 3-2, with a disputed goal by Geoff Hurst. The shot hit the crossbar and bounced down, and the Russian linesman, Tofiq Bahramov, flagged for a goal. Whether the ball crossed the line is still a subject of dispute. Buoyed by the lead, England scored a fourth, with Hurst hitting his third of the match in the dying seconds. As Hurst lined up his shot and fired into the net, the BBC commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme uttered perhaps the most famous lines in English football: “Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over. It is now! It’s four!”Charlton and his wife, Norma, were applauded after a stand was named in his honor in 2016 at the Old Trafford stadium in Manchester.Nigel Roddis/European Pressphoto AgencyWith the trophy won, Charlton and his teammates were feted as heroes. But the Charlton fairy tale had not yet turned the final page.Busby had added Law, a predatory Scottish striker, and Best, a willowy, mercurial genius from Northern Ireland, to his retooled Manchester United team, which still had Charlton as its fulcrum. In the 1967-68 season, a decade after the Munich disaster, Manchester United again qualified for the European Cup.The team overcame Real Madrid, then a six-time champion, in the semifinal, and went on to meet Benfica of Portugal in the final at Wembley Stadium in London. Flushed with the memories of the players lost a decade before, the occasion dripped with poignancy.“The most important thing leading right up to it was that we were going to win the match,” Charlton said. “There was no alternative. We had to win that match.”Charlton opened the scoring with a headed goal, but the match went to extra time. Drooping with exhaustion but fired with the determination to finally win the trophy that had cost the club so much, United’s players dug deep. Best put the team ahead, Brian Kidd scored a third, and Charlton added the coup de grâce with a fourth.“We’d done it,” Charlton recalled in 2011. “When the final whistle went, everybody dashed to Sir Matt. They were his players that got lost in Munich. They were his lads, his team, and everybody in the whole crowd, maybe even in the whole country, thought a little bit about Matt Busby’s feelings that night.”Charlton is survived by his wife, Norma, whom he married in 1961; two daughters, Suzanne and Andrea; and grandchildren.Charlton finished his career in 1973 with a playing record that bears comparison with the world’s greatest. In his later role as a Manchester United director, he provided an important link between the era of the Busby Babes and a new period of dominance forged by another Scottish manager, Alex Ferguson.“Unquestionably the best player of all time,” Ferguson said of Charlton in 2011. “He could float across the ground just like a piece of silver paper.”Beloved by Manchester United fans, Charlton was also lionized by supporters of all teams, not only at home but also throughout the world. He became the embodiment of the fabled, perhaps mythical, nobility of English soccer.Hurst, his England teammate, said that when talking to people who didn’t speak English, Charlton’s reach became clear. “There’s only one piece of English they can say,” Hurst explained. “And that’s ‘Bobby Charlton.’” More

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    Andy Bean, 11-Time Winner on the PGA Tour, Dies at 70

    “One of golf’s most appealing players,” he was an imposing and emotional presence on the course. Three times he came in second in major tournaments.Andy Bean, who won 11 times on the PGA Tour winner and three times was a runner-up in major tournament play, died on Saturday in Lakeland, Fla. He was 70.The PGA Tour said the cause was complications of double-lung replacement surgery, which he underwent in September. He was reported to have developed severe respiratory problems after a bout with Covid-19. He was a longtime resident of Lakeland.At 6-foot-4 and about 210 pounds, Bean was an imposing presence on the tour. In 1978, the columnist Dave Anderson of The New York Times called him “one of golf’s most appealing players.”“He’s big and strong and emotional,” Anderson wrote. “Whether it’s a tee shot or his annoyance at a bad shot, he lets it all hang out. The other touring pros call him Li’l Abner for his strength.”He was known to win bets in bars by biting a chunk out of the cover of a golf ball.Bean’s best year was 1978, when he won three times, including back-to-back weeks at Quail Hollow, in Charlotte, N.C., for the Kemper Open and then at the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic in a playoff over Lee Trevino. He finished third on the money list that year.His 11 victories — he also won twice on the Japan Golf Tour — covered 1977 to 1986. In March 1986, Bean became the first golfer on the tour to win the Doral Eastern Open, in South Florida, three times, defeating Hubert Green on the fourth hole of a sudden-death playoff. Bean had come back from five strokes behind with nine holes to go in regulation to force the playoff.His 11th and final tour victory, by one stroke, came that May, at the Byron Nelson Classic, outside Dallas.Bean also played on the Ryder Cup teams in 1979 and 1987.In major tournaments, he made a late charge at Royal Birkdale, in northwest England, in the 1983 British Open, finishing one shot behind Tom Watson. In 1980, he finished second to 40-year-old Jack Nicklaus in the PGA Championship at Oak Hill in Rochester, N.Y. And he was runner-up by one shot to Payne Stewart in the 1989 PGA Championship at Kemper Lakes, outside Chicago.A three-time winner on the PGA Tour Champions, Bean retired from competition in 2014 because of wrist injuries from a car accident.Thomas Andrew Bean was born on March 13, 1953, in Lafayette, Ga., near the Tennessee border, and grew up in Jekyll Island, on the Atlantic coast. His father, Tom Bean, was a club pro. The family moved to Florida, settling in Lakeland when Andy was 15. He played golf for the University of Florida on a team that included Gary Koch, Woody Blackburn and Fred Ridley, the former U.S. Amateur champion and now chairman at Augusta National.He is survived by his wife, Debbie; their three daughters, Ashley, Lindsay and Jordan; and grandchildren.Aside from biting chunks out of golf balls, Bean was known for having once subdued an alligator while trying to qualify for the PGA Tour. The story got out that he had wrestled with the animal and threw it into a pond.But he threw cold water, so to speak, on that story. The incident “was nothing big,” he told Anderson, for his Sports of The Times column. “I just saw a little five‐foot alligator once near a water hole in Florida and flipped it over by its tail. That’s easy. But the guy I was playing with made it sound like I wrestled it.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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    Phil Sellers, Whose Basketball Stardom Was Short-Lived, Dies at 69

    He led Rutgers to an undefeated 1975-76 regular season and into the Final Four, where the Scarlet Knights lost in the semifinals. But his N.B.A. career was brief.Phil Sellers, a brash, high-scoring forward who helped transform Rutgers University into a national basketball power in the 1970s, but whose N.B.A. career lasted only one season, after which he led a quiet life in business, died on Sept. 19 at a hospital in Livingston, N.J. He was 69.His daughter, Kendra Palmer, said that she did not know the cause, but that he had recently had a stroke, an intestinal perforation and other health issues. A GoFundMe campaign raised more than $100,000 to cover the health costs that his insurance did not.Sellers was recruited to Rutgers in 1972 after averaging 33.2 points and 22.6 rebounds a game at Thomas Jefferson High School in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He was considered the best high school player to come to a New Jersey college since Bill Bradley arrived at Princeton University from Missouri a decade earlier.“Phil Sellers is the biggest catch in Rutgers history,” Dick Weiss, a columnist for The Courier-Post of Camden, N.J., wrote soon after Sellers agreed to play there.He rarely disappointed. He was called “Phil the Thrill,” and, with Sellers leading a team that also included Eddie Jordan, Mike Dabney and Hollis Copeland, Rutgers kept improving. During Sellers’s junior year, when he averaged 22.7 points and 9.4 rebounds a game, Rutgers had a record of 22-7 and played in the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, losing in the first round.Rutgers was undefeated in 26 games during the 1975-76 regular season, Sellers’s senior year. Late in a conference tournament game against St. John’s University that preceded the start of the N.C.A.A. tournament, Sellers clashed with his coach, Tom Young.“Give me the ball,” Young recalled Sellers saying when he described the incident to The New York Times in 1983. “I said, ‘Phil, we’re going to run our offense.’ He said it three times, ‘Give me the ball.’”Sellers scored six points in the next 90 seconds, and Rutgers won.Rutgers then won its first three games in the N.C.A.A. tournament, despite subpar scoring performances from Sellers, to raise its record to 31-0. But the Scarlet Knights lost the semifinal game to Michigan, 86-70, with Sellers scoring only 11 points against the strong defense of Michigan’s Wayman Britt.Sellers’s college career totals of 2,399 points and 1,115 rebounds are still Rutgers records.It was the end of his glory years.Sellers in 1983. His basketball career ended abruptly, but he understood and accepted that he had another, more everyday life ahead of him.William E. Sauro/The New York TimesPhillip Alexander Sellers Jr. was born on Nov. 20, 1953, in Brooklyn, to Phillip and Rita (Bacon) Sellers. As a teenager, he played so much basketball, he told Sports Illustrated in 1975, that “people used to tell me I was going to turn into a basketball.”He was heavily recruited by colleges nationwide and signed a letter of intent to attend Notre Dame, but his concerns about his academic skills led him to back out of the commitment. Instead he chose Rutgers, whose lead recruiter was Dick Vitale, the future ESPN broadcaster, who was then one of the team’s assistant coaches.“Dick Vitale was there all the time,” Sellers told The Courier-News in 2010, referring to his high school games in Brooklyn. “He was an Italian guy; he could talk more trash than the guys who lived there.”Vitale recalled in a text message that Sellers had a “fierce competitiveness that separated him from many,” was “a man playing vs. boys” and “always competed with a chip on his shoulder.”Vitale’s assessment was borne out: At Rutgers, Sellers was a strong rebounder, despite not being very big for a forward — he was 6-foot-4 and weighed 195 pounds — and he played with a confidence that seemed like arrogance at times, and with a scowl on his face. Sports Illustrated wrote in 1975 that he was “always jawing at referees, teammates and opponents,” and “taking dramatic falls during games.”As he explained it: “I get involved when I’m playing. Sometimes I just get carried away.”Sellers became the cornerstone of a strong Rutgers team.“We weren’t a premier program on the East Coast, but when we got Phil he changed everything,” John McFadden, a Rutgers assistant coach, said in a tribute to Sellers posted on the school’s athletics website.“We weren’t a premier program on the East Coast,” an assistant Rutgers coach said, “but when we got Phil he changed everything.”Rutgers AthleticsSellers, a consensus second-team all-American in 1976, was chosen in the third round of the N.B.A. draft by the Detroit Pistons. Converted from forward to guard, he played in only 44 games, averaging 4.5 points a game.“I couldn’t play guard,” he told The Times in 1983. “They had doubts. Even me, I had doubts. There was no way I was going to be too sure of myself. That’s probably where the arrogance went.”He was released before the start of the 1977-78 season but continued to play for a short while, for the minor league Jersey Shore Bullets and for HV Amstelveen, a team in the Netherlands.After he stopped playing, he was a Rutgers assistant coach for four years and worked at various jobs, including records manager at Chemical Bank and the mortgage banking firm Margaretten; bus driver for New Jersey Transit; and, for about a dozen years, assistant to the chief executive at Northeast Sequoia Private Client Group, a real estate investment firm, where his roles included chief of staff, bodyguard and driver.In addition to Ms. Palmer, whose mother, Patricia (Robertson) Sellers, married Sellers in 1999 and died 20 years later, he is survived by a son, Phillip III, from whose mother, Jean Edmonson, he was divorced; a sister, Diane Deas; a brother, Tyrone; and four grandchildren.Although his basketball career ended abruptly, Sellers recognized with clarity that he had another, more everyday life ahead of him.“I’m not going to be one of those guys sitting in the park saying, ‘I’ve been there,’” he told The Times in 1983, when he was back living with his parents. “Kids ask you, ‘What do you do?’ I tell them, ‘I go to work every day, shirt and tie.’ People see me. They say, ‘Phil’s working.’” More

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    Overlooked No More: Lily Parr, Dominant British Soccer Player

    She persevered at a time when women were effectively banned from the sport, and was the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Hall of Fame.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1921, the Football Association, English soccer’s ruling body, effectively banned women from playing the sport, deeming it “quite unsuitable for females.” But by then, a standout player named Lily Parr had already gained fame for her skill on the field.Her renown was part of the growth of women’s soccer at the time, exemplified by a match in which she played at Goodison Park in Liverpool that drew a crowd of about 53,000, with thousands more outside the stadium. (It would remain the largest crowd for a women’s club soccer match for 99 years, until Atlético Madrid hosted Barcelona in front of 60,739 fans in March 2019.)Though the association’s ban would hamper Parr’s career, barring her and other women from playing in stadiums, she competed where she could, in fields and parks in England and abroad, and continued drawing attention over her 31 years with the same team, Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club.In 1927, the English newspaper The Leicester Mail called her “a remarkably nimble and speedy performer” with “a kick like a cart-horse.” By the time she retired from soccer, in 1951, she had scored an estimated 1,000 goals.Parr was “a great player in a great team,” said Gail Newsham, author of the 1994 book “In a League of Their Own!: The Dick, Kerr Ladies 1917-1965,” and she contributed to the club’s immense success alongside other star goal scorers like Florrie Redford, Jennie Harris and Alice Kell, the team’s longest serving captain.Soccer officials began lifting the ban in England — as well as those in other countries — in the 1970s. The first official Women’s World Cup was held in 1991, and interest in the event has grown considerably since then.This year, the Women’s World Cup, which is currently underway in Australia and New Zealand, includes an expanded field of 32 teams, up from 24.Club competition in England has grown, too; the Women’s Super League, which began in 2011, became fully professional in 2018. In the United States, the National Women’s Soccer League began in 2013.In 2002, Parr became the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Museum Hall of Fame, now in Manchester, and in 2019, the museum installed a life-size statue of her there, also a first for a British female soccer player.“We have come a long way since Lily Parr’s days, and she deserves recognition as a true pioneer of the sport,” Marzena Bogdanowicz, a spokeswoman for women’s soccer at the Football Association, was quoted as saying in The Guardian in 2019.Parr, with dark hair, leaps while training with her team. She drew attention as “a remarkably nimble and speedy performer” with “a kick like a cart-horse,” as one newspaper wrote.GettyLilian Parr was born on April 26, 1905, in St Helens, about 10 miles northeast of Liverpool, to Sarah and George Parr, a glassworks laborer. Growing up, she played soccer in the street with her brothers.Women had been playing soccer in Britain since the late 19th century, but World War I offered an opportunity for them to blossom. As men were sent to fight and women filled the country’s factories, the government encouraged soccer as an after-work activity.Parr went to work for Dick, Kerr & Co., a locomotives factory that had switched production to munitions during the war, and joined the company’s team as a left back when she was about 15.Her manner could be rough and abrupt, but with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor she enjoyed strong friendships with many of her teammates, Newsham wrote.In one perhaps apocryphal story, the team was playing at Ashton Park in Preston, England, northwest of Manchester, when a male professional goalkeeper declared that a woman would never be able to score on a man. Parr, famous for her powerful left foot, accepted his challenge. She lined up to take a penalty kick against him and broke the man’s arm with her shot.Parr and her team in 1939 discussing tactics for a forthcoming match.GettyParr, who later moved to left winger, exploded onto the scene in 1921.On Feb. 5 that year, she scored a hat trick — three goals in a single match — at Nelson, England; she scored another three days later at Stalybridge in a 10-0 win. In a 9-1 win in Liverpool at Anfield Stadium the next week, she netted five goals against a team of all-stars assembled by the comedian Harry Weldon. That May she scored every goal in a 5-1 win over a visiting French team.Parr’s shooting and crossing abilities, as well as her impressive physique (she was a sturdy 5 feet 10 inches tall or so), quickly made her a star, and she finished 1921 with 108 goals, according to Newsham.That year the team won all 67 games it played and scored some 448 goals in the process while allowing just 22. Other players, including Redford and Harris, contributed to the team’s dominance. In one April 1921 match at Barrow, for example, the team won 14-2 with seven goals from Redford, four from Harris and three from Parr. Redford led the year’s scoring with a 170 goals.On Dec. 5, 1921, the Football Association unanimously passed its resolution declaring that soccer “ought not to be encouraged” among women. It mandated that all of the association’s clubs “refuse the use of their grounds for such matches.” Because association clubs owned virtually all stadiums, women’s soccer on any significant scale was, in effect, banned.Similar bans were common across the world for much of the 20th century. The momentum that had been building since World War I screeched to a halt, and the sport, for women, withered on the vine.Parr’s team nevertheless continued to play in front of smaller crowds and on tours abroad. In 1922, she captained a trip to the United States. That October, the team tied a men’s team, 4-4, in Washington, D.C. Some sources suggest that President Warren G. Harding kicked off the game and autographed the match ball.As she continued playing, Parr trained to be a nurse and worked at what was then known as Whittingham Hospital, a psychiatric facility northeast of Preston. Some have viewed Parr as a queer icon, but there is no evidence that she was gay. “Like all our great football stars there are as many myths as there are facts, and we all embroider her story with our own influences,” said Jean Williams, a professor of sports history at the University of Wolverhampton. “That is why she means so much to so many.”Parr’s career lasted into her 40s; she played her last game in 1951. In 1965, she retired from nursing. A few years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. She lived to see the ban on women’s soccer lifted in 1971, but died of cancer on May 24, 1978, at her home in Preston. She was 73.Only in recent decades has recognition of Parr and her club’s accomplishments gained momentum. Historical markers for her team are now at the Preston factory site, Preston North End’s stadium and Ashton Park. The English National Football Museum installed a permanent display about her life in 2021.“Lily is a lens through which to look at the women’s game in the ’20s,” Belinda Scarlett, then the curator of women’s football at the museum, told The Guardian in 2020. “It will tell the stories of all the women she played with and against.”She added that “women’s football probably wouldn’t have continued if those groups of women didn’t fight that ban and just play wherever the hell they could find a space to play football.” More

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    Nikki McCray-Penson, Basketball Star and Coach, Dies at 51

    After a standout college career at the University of Tennessee, she won two Olympic gold medals, played nine years in the W.N.B.A. and was the head coach at two universities.Nikki McCray-Penson, an all-American point guard for the powerhouse University of Tennessee women’s basketball team, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a three-time All-Star in the W.N.B.A., died on Friday. She was 51.Her death was announced by Rutgers University, where she was about to enter her second season as an assistant coach of the women’s basketball team. The school did not say where she died or cite a cause. McCray-Penson had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013.“Thank you my little sister, my friend, my foxhole partner, my teammate, my fast food snacker, my basketball junkie, my fellow Olympian, my gold medalist and now my angel,” Dawn Staley, the women’s basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, where McCray-Penson was an assistant coach for nine years, wrote on Twitter.At Tennessee, McCray-Penson was a two-time all-American and a three-time all-Southeastern Conference player. She helped lead the Lady Vols to three consecutive regular-season conference titles and two conference tournament championships.She began as a defensive specialist, but she evolved into an offensive force.“It bothered her that she was considered so much of a defensive player,” her Basketball Hall of Fame coach, Pat Summitt, told The Tennessean of Nashville in 1994, late in McCray-Penson’s breakout season, when she averaged 16.3 points a game as a junior. “She wanted to develop the total game, and she has.”In the same article, McCray-Penson said, “I had to learn to respond when being criticized and learn from mistakes. Pat is not going to motivate you.” She added, “You have to come out with an attitude about yourself, and that comes from maturity.”Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist who collaborated with Summitt on three books, said in a phone interview that there was a special connection between the coach and McCray-Penson. “Pat glowed when Nikki came to visit,” she said.She added: “There were a lot of players who came to Tennessee who were like 15-story buildings, but the elevators only went to the 10th floor. Some kids found a way to get to the top and develop all their promise. Nikki was one of those.”McCray-Penson at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. She was a two-time Olympic gold medalist.Darren McNamara/Getty ImagesAfter graduating from Tennessee in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in education, McCray-Penson became part of the U.S. team that would win the gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. After an early-round victory over South Korea, in which McCray-Penson led the team with 16 points and nine rebounds, she said, “We want to be the best basketball team in history.”Overall, she averaged 9.4 points a game in the tournament and provided some of the stifling defense that limited opponents’ scoring. Four years later, when the U.S. team won the gold medal in Sydney, Australia, McCray-Penson averaged 5.1 points.By then, she had turned professional. With the Columbus Quest of the short-lived American Basketball League, which preceded the W.N.B.A. as a women’s league, she averaged 19.9 points a game, led the team to the league championship in 1997 and was named most valuable player.She did not stay with the A.B.L. for long. She jumped after one season to the Washington Mystics of the W.N.B.A., which had been created by the National Basketball Association.“I saw what the N.B.A. can do to promote women’s basketball,” she told The Associated Press in 1997.Starting in 1998, she spent four seasons with the Mystics, averaging 15.4 points a game and was chosen for three All-Star games. She had less success over the next five years, when she played in Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Antonio and Chicago. She retired in 2006.McCray-Penson in Norfolk, Va., in 2017, when she was the women’s basketball coach at Old Dominion University there.Steve Earley/The Virginian-Pilot, via Associated PressShe quickly moved into coaching: She was an assistant women’s coach at Western Kentucky University for two years before moving to South Carolina in 2008, where she joined Staley, her teammate on the 1996 and 2000 Olympic teams.After helping lead South Carolina to its first N.C.A.A. women’s basketball title in 2017, McCray-Penson was hired for her first head coaching job, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. She coached the team to a 53-40 record over three seasons; in the 2019-20 season, she led the Monarchs to a 24-6 record and was named Conference USA coach of the year.In 2020, she was named the head coach at Mississippi State University, but she resigned for health reasons after a 10-9 record in her only season there.In 2022, Rutgers hired her as an assistant.“Simply put, Nikki is a winner,” Coquese Washington, the Rutgers coach, who was a teammate of McCray-Penson’s with the W.N.B.A.’s Indiana Fever, told The Associated Press. “She has excelled at the highest levels of our game.”McCray-Penson was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, in Knoxville, Tenn., in 2012.Nikki Kesangane McCray was born on Dec. 17, 1971, in Collierville, Tenn. Her survivors include her husband, Thomas Penson, and her son, also named Thomas. Her mother, Sally Coleman, died of breast cancer in 2018.“We know there’s no cure,” McCray-Penson told The Clarion Ledger of Jackson, Miss., in 2020. “We live with it. Every day, you don’t let that define you. You live life. You make every day count. That’s what I saw my mom do.” More

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    Marlene Bauer Hagge, Last of the L.P.G.A.’s Founders, Dies at 89

    Emerging on the national scene at 13, she went on to win 26 pro tournaments, including the 1956 L.P.G.A. Championship. She and 12 other women started the league.Marlene Bauer Hagge, the last surviving founder of the Ladies Professional Golf Association and a member of its Hall of Fame, died on Tuesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 89. Her death was announced by the L.P.G.A.Hagge and her sister, Alice Bauer, who was six years older, were among the 13 golfers who created the L.P.G.A. in 1950, at a time when women’s golf received little attention in the sports pages.The L.P.G.A. Tour would eventually yield significant prize money. But in its early years, the Bauer sisters and renowned players like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg, Louise Suggs, Betty Jameson and Marilynn Smith competed for slim purses and were forced to crowd together in cars on their travels to tournaments.Hagge became the last living L.P.G.A. founder when Shirley Spork, who was known especially for teaching women golfers, died in April 2022.Hagge, who was a slender 5 feet 2 inches but possessed a powerful swing, won 26 pro tournaments, including the 1956 L.P.G.A. Championship, one of the tour’s majors, and her career extended through its first five decades.She was inducted into the L.P.G.A. Hall of Fame in the veterans category and the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2002. Her sister, Alice, finished in the top 10 of L.P.G.A. tournaments several times, most notably at No. 4 in the 1958 Women’s Open.Eschewing the staid long skirts that were then a staple of women golfers’ uniforms, Hagge opted for shorts. She was viewed as a glamorous figure of the women’s game, often appearing on the covers of magazines, with many admirers more fixated on her looks than her skills. (In a reflection of the time, a 1973 issue of Golf Digest included a picture of her chipping onto a green with the caption “Marlene Hagge — good and sexy.”)Recalling the golf clinics hosted by the L.P.G.A. before its tournaments, Hagge told Sports Illustrated in 2002 that Berg, as the M.C., would say to the participants, “Look at these girls.”“She would point at Alice and me,” Hagge recalled, “and say, ‘Isn’t it grand to be pretty and be able to hit it, too?’”Eight of the 13 founders of the L.P.G.A. in October 1999 during a celebration in New York City of the league’s 50th anniversary. Standing, from left, were Marilyn Smith, Marlene Bauer Hagge, Alice Bauer, Louise Suggs and Betty Jameson. Sitting, from left, were Bettye Danoff, Shirley Spork and Patty Berg. Marlene Bauer Hagge, who died on Tuesday, was the last surviving founder. Stuart Ramson/Associated PressMarlene Bauer was born in Eureka, S.D., on Feb. 16, 1934, to Dave and Madeline Bauer. Her father, an avid golfer, leased the town’s golf course, about an hour southeast in Aberdeen. When Marlene was 3 years old, he cut down the shaft of a golf club and began giving her lessons. He tutored Alice as well.The family moved to La Quinta, Calif., when Marlene was 10, seeking a warm climate where golf could be played year-round. She won the Long Beach City boys’ junior championship just after the family arrived in California, there being no comparable event for girls. By age 13, she had won several tournaments in California.She emerged on the national scene in 1947 — still at only 13 — when she finished eighth in the United States Women’s Open Championship. She won the United States girls’ junior championship in 1949 and received the Glenna Collett Vare Trophy, named in honor of one of the most prominent figures in women’s golf. Lincoln Werden, a longtime golf writer for The New York Times, described her at the time as “a cool little player who can make every kind of shot.”A few weeks later, she achieved a stunning second-round match-play victory in the national amateur women’s championship, besting Vare, the tournament’s six-time titleholder, and making it to the semifinals.The Associated Press named her Athlete of the Year and Golfer of the Year for 1949.Hagge captured her first professional title at the 1952 Sarasota Open at age 18. She was at her best in 1956, when she defeated Berg on the first extra hole of the L.P.G.A. Championship at Forest Lake Country Club in Detroit. Her victory was worth all of $1,350 (about $15,000 in today’s money). She won eight tournaments that year, finished second nine times and led the women’s tour in earnings, garnering more than $20,000.In 1971, she set a nine-hole L.P.G.A. scoring record of 29 at the Buick Open in Columbus, Ohio, a mark unequaled for 13 years.She played on the tour through 1996, when she competed in four events. She had career earnings of $481,023.Hagge’s second husband, Ernie Vossler, a PGA Tour player and course designer, died in 2013. Her first marriage, to Bob Hagge, also a PGA Tour player, who had previously been married to her sister, ended in divorce. Alice Bauer died of complications of colon cancer in 2002 at 74. Information on survivors was not immediately available.For all her accomplishments, Hagge wasn’t exactly a familiar face to the public. In 1958, she appeared on the CBS TV program “To Tell the Truth,” in which four celebrity panelists quizzed three people claiming to be the person whose biography had just been described. The actor Don Ameche disqualified himself because he had met her. Only the actress Polly Bergen correctly identified her. More