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      Tom Weiskopf, British Open Winner and Golf Course Designer, Dies at 79

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      A four-time runner-up at the Masters, he won 16 PGA Tour events starting in the late 1960s and later became a television commentator.Tom Weiskopf, who won 16 PGA Tour events, most notably the British Open, and became a prominent golf course architect and broadcaster, died on Saturday at his home in Big Sky, Mont. Weiskopf, who was found to have pancreatic cancer in 2020, was 79.His death was announced by the PGA Tour.Hailed for what was considered a perfect and powerful swing, Weiskopf won five times on the PGA Tour in 1973, his shining moment coming at the British Open, played at the Royal Troon Golf Club in Scotland. He led wire to wire, defeating Johnny Miller and Neil Coles by three shots with Jack Nicklaus four strokes back.Weiskopf was the runner-up four times at the Masters and tied for second at the 1976 United States Open. He also won the Canadian Open in 1973 and again in 1975, when he captured a one-hole playoff over Nicklaus, his fellow Ohio State University alumnus. Weiskopf was a member of the United States Ryder Cup teams in 1973 and 1975.Weiskopf turned pro in 1964 and played on the PGA Tour from 1968 to 1982.He later joined the Senior PGA Tour, now known as the Champions Tour, and defeated Nicklaus by four strokes in the 1995 United States Senior Open.Weiskopf in 1975 at the Masters golf tournament. He and Johnny Miller tied for second, one stroke behind Jack Nicklaus.Bob Daugherty/Associated PressThomas Daniel Weiskopf was born on Nov. 9, 1942, in Massillon, Ohio, the oldest of three children of Thomas Weiskopf, a railroad worker, and his wife, Eva Shorb, both of whom had enjoyed success playing in Ohio tournaments.His passion for golf was kindled when his father brought him to the United States Open at Inverness in Toledo, Ohio, in 1957.“He took me straight to the practice range and pointed out Sam Snead,” Weiskopf recalled in the book “Chasing Greatness,” the story of the 1973 Open, by Adam Lazarus and Steve Schlossman. “The sound of Sam’s iron shots, the flight of the ball, thrilled me. I was hooked even before I started playing.”Weiskopf helped take Benedictine High School to the Cleveland city golf championship as a junior and senior, and then was recruited to Ohio State by golf coach Bob Kepler. Nicklaus was a senior on the Buckeyes’ golf team when Weiskopf arrived in Columbus. But they were never teammates, since N.C.A.A. rules prohibited freshmen from competing.Weiskopf embarked on his second golf career, as a course designer, and teamed with the golf architect Jay Morrish to create Troon North in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1984. “I knew I had to get away from the game for at least a year so I thought I’d see if I liked architecture,” he told Golf Digest in 2009. “I could still go back on tour if I wanted but I never did.”His achievements as a golf course designer included Loch Lomond in Scotland and TPC Scottsdale’s Stadium Course, the site of the PGA Tour’s WM Phoenix Open since 1987.Weiskopf was part of the CBS team that covered Nicklaus’s victory in the 1986 Masters.When asked to provide viewers insight into Nicklaus’s thought processes in the final holes, he replied, “If I knew the way he thought, I would have won this tournament.”He also worked as a golf analyst for CBS Sports, covering the Masters, and contributed to ABC Sports and ESPN’s coverage of the British Open.Weiskopf defeated Nicklaus by four strokes in the 1995 United States Senior Open.John Ruthroff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWeiskopf’s survivors include his wife, Laurie, and his children Heidi and Eric from his marriage to his first wife, Jeanne.When Weiskopf won the British Open, he paid tribute to his father.“Even now, I wish my father was alive to see this,” he said. “I didn’t put my best in front of him and doggone it, as long as I’m playing this game I’m going to do my best. I really wanted to win this tournament more than any other major tournament I ever played in.”When he redesigned the municipal North Course at Torrey Pines at San Diego in 2016, Weiskopf reflected on his career as a golf architect.“You create aesthetic value by having big mature trees, beautiful vista water features and bunker styles,” he said. “That creates the beauty of the golf course, I think. How could you find a better piece of property than this piece of property, for 36 holes of golf?” More

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      Pete Carril, Princeton’s Textbook Basketball Coach, Dies at 92

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      Without athletic scholarships, he made outgunned teams winners by keeping them moving and unnerving opponents, leading to one of the biggest upsets in college basketball.Pete Carril, who coached men’s basketball at Princeton for 29 years and scared big-name opponents with his undersize, often underskilled scholars playing an old-fashioned textbook game, died on Monday. He was 92.His family announced the death in a statement posted on the Princeton Tigers’ website. It did not say where he died or give the cause of death.As the men’s head coach from 1967 to 1996, Carril (pronounced care-ILL) taught a thinking man’s basketball at Princeton. As an Ivy League member, Princeton could not offer athletic scholarships, and its academic demands were high, but Carril’s teams, almost invariably outmanned and overmatched, still won twice as often as they lost.His record at Princeton was 514-261, with 13 Ivy titles, 11 appearances in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s championship tournament, two in the National Invitation Tournament (his team won in 1975) and only one losing season. Fourteen of his Princeton teams led the nation in defense. In 1997, he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.He emphasized a deliberate off-the-ball offense that kept players passing the ball and setting screens until a shooter was open or someone broke free to the basket in a patented backdoor play. The scores were low, and no matter how much opponents prepared, they were frustrated and often lost their poise.“Playing Princeton is kind of like going to the dentist,” said Jim Valvano, the North Carolina State coach who died in 1993 at 47. “You know that down the road it can make you better, but while it’s happening it can be very, very painful.”The New York Times sportswriter Bill Pennington wrote: “The most unsophisticated basketball fan could admire and understand a Pete Carril team at first glance. The most devoted hoops junkie could be spellbound by a Pete Carril team in motion. It was basketball not of talent, but of team. It may not be the way everybody should play, but it was the way everybody used to try to play.”In the N.C.A.A.’s annual tournament, Carril’s teams might lose to national powers but not before unnerving them and threatening an upset. In the first round alone, Princeton lost to Georgetown by 50-49 in 1989, Arkansas by 68-64 in 1990 and Villanova by 50-48 in 1991.Carril’s final college victory came on March 14, 1996, in Indianapolis, in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament against U.C.L.A., the defending champion. Thirteenth-seeded Princeton, 7 points behind with six minutes left, scored on — what else? — a backdoor with 3.9 seconds left and won. The next day, The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper, ran this headline across Page 1:“David 43, Goliath 41.”Carril said he was under no illusions: “If we played U.C.L.A. 100 times, they would win 99 times.” (The Tigers went on to defeat, 63-41, in the second round against Mississippi State.)Around the Princeton campus he was a revered, raspy-voiced figure in a well-worn sweater and baggy khakis (or, when he dressed formally, a bow tie). A colleague once described him as “a rumpled Lilliputian who would look as out of place in an Armani suit as he would in a Vera Wang gown.” And during games he was known for an animated coaching style.Every year at his first practice session, Carril made the same speech to his players.“I know about your academic load,” he said. “I know how tough it is to give up the time to play here, but let’s get one thing straight. In my book, there is no such thing as an Ivy League player. When you come out of that locker room and step across that white line, you are basketball players, period.”But he also told his players:“Princeton is a special place with some very special professors. It is something special to be taught by one of them. But you are not special just because you happen to go here.”Pedro José (later known as Peter Joseph) Carril was born on July 10, 1930, in Bethlehem, Pa. His father, an immigrant from Spain, worked for 40 years at the blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel and, his son said, never missed a day of work.In high school in Bethlehem, Pete was an all-state basketball player, and at Lafayette, where he played for Butch van Breda Kolff, he was a Little All-American. Then, for 12 years, he coached high school basketball in Pennsylvania while earning a master’s degree in education from Lehigh University in 1959.In the 1966-67 season, he coached Lehigh to an 11-12 record. Then, van Breda Kolff, who was coaching Princeton, left to coach the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association. Princeton considered Bobby Knight and Larry Brown as successors. Instead, it took Carril.He left college coaching after the 1995-96 season.“I’ve been dodging bullets for 30 years,” Carril said. “I find I’m not seeing as much. I used to think the kids felt my coaching was worth five points a game to them. Maybe it was, but I get the sense they don’t feel that way now. I think I make less of a difference.”The next year, he became an assistant coach of the Sacramento Kings of the N.B.A. under Coach Rick Adelman, spending most of his time breaking down game tapes. He remained with the team for most of the next decade, retiring in 2006, but three years later, at 78, he rejoined the Kings as a consultant.“Being an assistant doesn’t bother me at all,” he said. “The aggravation and the pain in your stomach and the headaches that you get when you see things that are done wrong or when you lose, or all those problems you have as a head coach, I’d had enough.”With Dan White he wrote “The Smart Take From the Strong: The Basketball Philosophy of Pete Carril” (1997). His coaching methods were even the subject of an academic paper by a Fordham University marketing professor, Francis Petit, titled, “What Executives Can Learn From Pete Carril.”Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Carril at Princeton in 2007. “People ask me, ‘How do you want to be remembered?’” he once said. “I tell them I don’t.”Aaron Houston for The New York TimesCarril was ambivalent about his success. He once said: “People ask me, ‘How do you want to be remembered?’ I tell them I don’t.”But he will be remembered, even though none of his teams gained the ultimate honor. He brushed that off, too.“Winning a national championship is not something you’re going to see us do at Princeton,” he said in his final years there. “I resigned myself to that years ago. What does it mean, anyway? When I’m dead, maybe two guys will walk past my grave, and one will say to the other: ‘Poor guy. Never won a national championship.’ And I won’t hear a word they say.”Frank Litsky, a longtime sportswriter for The Times, died in 2018. William McDonald contributed reporting. More

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      Uwe Seeler, One of Germany’s Greatest Soccer Players, Dies at 85

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      He led West Germany to the 1966 World Cup, but his teams never won a title. Pele included him on his list of the world’s premier living players.Uwe Seeler, who led West Germany to the 1966 World Cup final as captain of the national team, has died. He was 85.Christian Pletz, a spokesman for Hamburger SV, the club Seeler played for from 1953 to 1972, said on Thursday that Seeler’s family had confirmed the death. The cause was not given. A local newspaper in Norderstedt, north of Hamburg, said he died at his home in that city.Regarded as one of the best German players of all time, Seeler was famous for his overhead kicks and his ability to score goals from the unlikeliest of angles.He was also known for his humility and fairness, and respected for his unwavering loyalty to his hometown club. He received offers from clubs in Spain and Italy, most notably a huge offer from Inter Milan in 1961, but he opted to stay with Hamburg.Seeler scored 445 goals in 519 appearances for Hamburg in the Oberliga and Bundesliga leagues. He remains the team’s all-time high scorer in the Bundesliga, the top league in Germany, with 137 goals.Hamburg, which had been the only remaining team to have played every season in the Bundesliga since the league’s formation in 1963, was relegated to the second division in 2018.Seeler scored 43 goals in 72 games for West Germany, which was the runner-up to England in the 1966 World Cup and won a third-place medal four years later in Mexico. He was a member of the German team for 16 years.“While I was at four World Cups, I’d have liked to have won the title once,” he said. “I didn’t have the luck.”“Still,” he added, “everything was wonderful. I regret nothing.”He was voted German soccer player of the year in 1960, 1964 and 1970.Pele, the Brazilian soccer great, included Seeler in his list of the world’s greatest living players in 2004.“His handling of the ball was perfect, his shot precise, and what really amazed me was his ability to head the ball,” Pele said.In a special supplement to celebrate Seeler’s 80th birthday in 2016, the Hamburg club wrote: “If Uwe Seeler laced up his boots, then the opposing goalkeeper could dress up warmly and preferably put on a second pair of gloves, because Seeler scored from everywhere and in every possible way. Whether overhead kicks, flying headers, shots from distance, volleys, lobs, opportunist strikes — he always found a way to get the ball over the line.”Seeler won the German championship in 1960 and the German Cup in 1963 with Hamburg, but he also endured heartbreak with near misses in the European Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Hamburg lost to Barcelona in the European Cup semifinals in 1961 and to Milan in the Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1968.Seeler, who was born in Hamburg on Nov. 5, 1936, suffered repeated health setbacks in recent years. In May 2020 he underwent an operation to repair a broken hip after a bad fall at home. He lost his hearing in his right ear and had problems with balance after a car accident in 2010. He also had a pacemaker fitted and had to have a tumor removed from his shoulder, the news agency DPA reported.Seeler and his wife, Ilka, were married for more than 60 years. They had three daughters. His grandson Levin Öztunali plays for the Bundesliga club Union Berlin. Seeler’s older brother, Dieter, also played for Hamburg. His father, Erwin, worked on a barge in Hamburg’s port and was also known for playing soccer in that city.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Lennie Rosenbluth, Who Led North Carolina to a Title, Dies at 89

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      With a starting lineup of New Yorkers, the undefeated Tarheels beat a Kansas team led by Wilt Chamberlain in triple overtime to win the 1957 N.C.A.A. championship.Lennie Rosenbluth, the All-America forward who led a North Carolina team with a starting lineup of New Yorkers to an unbeaten season and a thrilling victory over Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas squad in the 1957 N.C.A.A. basketball tournament championship game, died on Saturday. He was 89.His death was announced by North Carolina’s athletic department, which did not cite the cause or say where he died. He had been living in Chapel Hill, N.C., home to the university’s main campus.Rosenbluth, at 6 feet 5 inches, averaged 28 points per game in the 1956-57 season and beat out Chamberlain for the Helms Foundation College Basketball Player of the Year award. His Tar Heels went 32-0 and capped their season with a 54-53 triple-overtime victory over Kansas, with Rosenbluth scoring 20 points before fouling out late in regulation. Chamberlain, who went on to become one of the National Basketball Association’s most dominant players, was held to 23 points after averaging 30 during the regular season.In the semifinals, Rosenbluth hit two jump shots in the third overtime of North Carolina’s 74-70 victory over Michigan State and finished with 31 points.A native of the Bronx, he played sparingly for the basketball team at James Monroe High School in that borough but made an impressive showing playing basketball at Catskill summer resort hotels, a magnet for leading New York metropolitan area players. He came to the attention of Frank McGuire, who was named the North Carolina coach in 1953 after taking St. John’s, located in Brooklyn at the time, to the N.C.A.A. title game.Rosenbluth was in the vanguard of a player pipeline from New York to North Carolina orchestrated by McGuire.“Basketball was not yet a truly national sport, and the game was still more often than not a city game, played best, it was believed, in New York,” David Halberstam wrote in The New York Times in 1999. “But it was a bad time for the college sport in New York. The point-fixing scandals of the early ’50s had destroyed the sport locally.”McGuire developed a North Carolina team that thrived in a largely Protestant region with a lineup that featured Rosenbluth, who was Jewish, and four Catholic teammates: Tommy Kearns, who had played high school ball at St. Ann’s, in Brooklyn; Pete Brennan, from St. Augustine, also in Brooklyn; Joe Quigg, from St. Francis Prep, in Queens; and Bobby Cunningham, from All Hallows, in the Bronx.Members of the 1957 North Carolina Tar Heels championship team, including Lennie Rosenbluth, center, during a game against the Michigan Wolverines on November 29, 2017.Photo by Peyton Williams/UNC/Getty ImagesRosenbluth averaged 28 points and 8.6 rebounds a game in the Tar Heels’ 1956-57 regular season. His 2,047 career points are the most ever by a North Carolina player who appeared in only three seasons.He was named a second-team All-American by The Associated Press and United Press International for the 1955-56 season, when he was a junior, and a “consensus” All-American for the 1956-57 championship season, meaning that a host of outlets agreed that he was among the top five players in college basketball.He was drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors as the sixth player chosen in the 1957 N.B.A. draft. But the Warriors already had the high-scoring Paul Arizin at small forward. Rosenbluth, his backup, averaged only 4.2 points a game in his two pro seasons.Leonard Robert Rosenbluth was born on Jan. 22, 1933, a son of Jack and Rose Rosenbluth. His father worked in the television manufacturing business.After graduating from North Carolina and playing for the Warriors, Rosenbluth taught American history and coached basketball at a high school in Wilson, N.C., east of Raleigh. In a comparison of sorts to his Tar Heel national championship team, he once quipped how “my first year, we had a perfect season again, except we lost every game.”Rosenbluth again taught history and coached high school basketball in Florida for some 35 years. When his first wife, Helen (Oliver) Rosenbluth, known as Pat, was found to have cancer, they returned to Chapel Hill so that she could be treated in the University of North Carolina hospital system. She died in 2010. He married Dianne Stabler in 2011.Rosenbluth had a daughter, Elizabeth; a son, Steven, and grandchildren from his first marriage. A list of survivors was not immediately available.He was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel and the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in Commack, N.Y., on Long Island.In 2002, the Atlantic Coast Conference selected Rosenbluth for its 50th-anniversary basketball team and named him one of the 50 greatest athletes in the history of the conference. North Carolina retired his No. 10.During the 2006-2007 college basketball season, Michael Jordan and James Worthy, who played on the Tar Heel championship team of 1982, attended an event for North Carolina title teams. They thanked the players who brought North Carolina to national basketball prominence in 1957.As Rosenbluth told it to The New York Times, “They were saying things like, ‘You guys got it all going.’” More

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      Bob Lanier, a Dominant Center of the 1970s and ’80s, Dies at 73

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      Playing for the Detroit Pistons and the Milwaukee Bucks, he held his own against titans of the era like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Willis Reed.Bob Lanier, who as a center for the Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks in the 1970s and ’80s parlayed a deft left-handed hook shot, a soft midrange jumper and robust rebounding skills into a Hall of Fame career, died on Tuesday in Phoenix. He was 73.The N.B.A. said he died after a short illness but provided no other details.Lanier, who stood 6-foot-11 and weighed about 250 pounds, excelled in an era of dominant centers like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Nate Thurmond and Wes Unseld.“Guys didn’t change teams as much, so when you were facing the Bulls or the Bucks or New York, you had all these rivalries,” he told NBA.com in 2018. “Lanier against Jabbar! Jabbar against Willis Reed! And then Chamberlain and Artis Gilmore and Bill Walton! You had all these great big men, and the game was played from inside out.”He added: “It was a rougher game, a much more physical game that we played in the ’70s. You could steer people with elbows. They started cutting down on the number of fights by fining people more. Oh, it was a rough ’n’ tumble game.”As a Pistons rookie in the 1970-71 season, Lanier shared time at center with Otto Moore. In his second season, as a full-time starter, he averaged 25.7 points and 14.2 rebounds a game, putting him in the league’s top 10 in both categories.“He understood the small nuances of the game,” Dave Bing, a Pistons teammate and fellow Hall of Famer, said in a video biography of Lanier shown on Fox Sports Detroit in 2012. “He could shoot the 18-to-20-footer as well as any guard. He had a hook shoot — nobody but Kareem had a hook shot like him. He could do anything he wanted to do.”Lanier wore what were believed to be size 22 sneakers. In 1989, however, a representative of Converse disputed that notion, saying that they were in fact size 18 ½. Whatever their actual size, a pair of Lanier’s sneakers, bronzed, is in the collection of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.During nine full seasons with the Pistons, Lanier played in seven All-Star Games. He was elected most valuable player of the 1974 All-Star Game, in which he led all scorers with 24 points.But the Pistons had only four winning seasons during his time with the team and never advanced very far in the playoffs. The roster was often in flux. Coaches came and went. Lanier dealt with knee injuries and other physical setbacks.“It was like a life unfulfilled,” he told Fox Sports Detroit.In early 1980, with the Pistons’ record at 14-40, the team traded Lanier to the Milwaukee Bucks for a younger center, Kent Benson, and a first-round 1980 draft pick. Frustrated by the Pistons’ lack of success, Lanier had asked to be sent to a playoff contender.“I’m kind of relieved, but I’m kind of sad, too,” he told The Detroit Free Press. “I’ve got a lot of good memories of Detroit.”Lanier averaged 22.7 points and 11.8 rebounds a game with the Pistons.Lanier in his college years at St. Bonaventure, resting during a game against Marquette in 1969. A pair of his exceptionally large sneakers is in the collection of the Basketball Hall of Fame.AP PhotoRobert Jerry Lanier Jr. was born on Sept. 10, 1948, in Buffalo to Robert and Nannie Lanier. Young Bob was 6-foot-5 by the time he was a sophomore in high school, and he played well enough there to be wooed by dozens of colleges. He chose St. Bonaventure University in upstate Allegany, N.Y.He was a sensation there, averaging 27.6 points and 15.7 rebounds over three seasons.In 1970, the Bonnies defeated Villanova to win the East Regional finals of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, sending them to the Final Four. But Lanier injured his knee during the game, forcing the Bonnies to face Jacksonville in the national semifinal game without him. St. Bonaventure lost, 91-83.“I didn’t even know at the time I tore my knee up,” Lanier told The Buffalo News in 2007. “But when I ran back down the court and tried to pivot, my leg collapsed. I didn’t know at the time I had torn my M.C.L.”Lanier was still recuperating from knee surgery when the Pistons chose him No. 1 overall in the N.B.A. draft; he was also chosen No. 1 by the New York (now Brooklyn) Nets of the American Basketball Association. He quickly signed with Detroit.Although he had statistically better years with the Pistons, Lanier enjoyed more team success with the Bucks (and also played in one more All-Star Game). Under Coach Don Nelson, the Bucks won 60 games during the 1980-81 season, and they advanced to the Eastern Conference finals in 1982-83 and 1983-84.Lanier was also president of the players’ union, the National Basketball Players Association, and helped negotiate a collective bargaining agreement in 1983 that avoided a strike.Lanier at an N.B.A. roundtable discussion before Game 5 of the 2005 finals between the Pistons and the San Antonio Spurs. In retirement, he worked with the N.B.A. as a global ambassador and special assistant to the commissioner.Melissa Majchrzak/NBAE via Getty ImagesEarly in the 1983-84 season, his last as a player, Lanier became angry with Bill Laimbeer, the Pistons’ center, for riling him under the boards at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich. Lanier retaliated with a left hook that leveled Laimbeer and broke his nose.The act not only earned Lanier a $5,000 fine; it also delayed the retirement of his No. 16 jersey by the Pistons until 1993. The Bucks retired his number in late 1984.He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992.In retirement, he owned a marketing firm and worked extensively with the N.B.A. as a global ambassador and special assistant to David Stern, the league’s longtime commissioner, and Adam Silver, his successor. Lanier was also an assistant coach under Nelson with the Golden State Warriors during the 1994-95 season and replaced him as interim coach for the final 37 games of the season after Nelson’s resignation.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Lanier said that after he retired, he was less likely to be recognized by the public than when he was a player. After Shaquille O’Neal, one of the league’s most dominating centers, came along in the early 1990s, people figured he must have been O’Neal’s father, he told NBA.com in 2018.“‘You’re wearing them big shoes,’” he said people would tell him. “I just go along with it. ‘Yeah, I’m Shaq’s dad.’” More

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      Jack Newton, Golfer Whose Career Was Ended by an Accident, Dies at 72

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      He won several tournaments before losing an arm when he walked into the propeller of a small plane. After he recovered, he taught himself to play golf one-handed.Jack Newton, who lost to Tom Watson in a 1975 British Open playoff and tied for second behind Seve Ballesteros at the 1980 Masters before his professional golf career ended in a near-fatal aircraft propeller accident, died on Friday. He was 72.His family said in a statement that Newton, who had been living with Alzheimer’s disease, died from “health complications.” The statement did not say where he died.Newton won the Buick Open on the PGA Tour in 1978 and the Australian Open in 1979, as well as three tournaments in Europe, before his career — and nearly his life — ended when he walked into the propeller of a small plane he was about to board at Sydney airport on July 24, 1983.His right arm was severed, he lost sight in his right eye, and he sustained severe injuries to his abdomen. Doctors gave him only a 50-50 chance of surviving, and he spent nearly two months in intensive care before undergoing a long rehabilitation.Despite his near-death experience, Newton returned to public life, his jovial personality intact. He became a popular television, radio and newspaper golf commentator, a golf-course designer and the chairman of the Jack Newton Junior Golf Foundation, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for up-and-coming players in Australia.Newton with his wife, Jackie, and their children, Clint and Kristie, in 1984. A year earlier, he had lost an arm in an aircraft propeller accident.William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe foundation’s annual tournament attracted a who’s who of celebrities and pro golfers in Australia, most of whom dressed up in outlandish costumes as encouraged by Newton.He taught himself to play golf one-handed, swinging the club with his left hand in a right-handed stance. He regularly had scores in the mid-80s for 18 holes — which translates to a handicap of about 12 or 14, one that most able-bodied amateur players would aspire to.Newton turned professional in 1971 on the European Tour and won his first event, the Dutch Open, the next year. A week later, he won a tournament in Fulford, England; in 1974, he won the tour’s match play championship.His playoff loss in the 1975 British Open came after Watson had a few lucky shots. A wire fence kept Watson’s ball in bounds on the eighth hole, and he chipped for an eagle at the 14th to claim the Claret Jug by a shot over Newton.“I always felt that if I came into a major with some good form, then I could be dangerous,” Newton said. “That’s the way I played golf. Once I got my tail up I wasn’t afraid of anybody.”Newton in action during the 1980 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.Augusta National/Getty ImagesAt the 1980 Masters, he finished the tournament tied for second with the American Gibby Gilbert, four strokes behind the 21-year-old Ballesteros of Spain.Gavin Kirkman, the chief executive of PGA of Australia, said that Newton’s “contribution and legacy will live on for many decades to come,” adding that he “was as tough off the course as he was on it.”Newton is survived by his wife, Jackie; two children, Kristie and Clint; and six grandchildren. His daughter was a pro golfer, and his son played rugby in Australia and Britain. More

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      Herb Turetzky, Nets’ Official Scorer for 54 Years, Dies at 76

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      He recorded the statistics of more than 2,200 home games for the team in both New York and New Jersey, and in both the American and National Basketball Associations.Herb Turetzky, a passionate basketball fan who was the official scorer for nearly every home game played by the nomadic Brooklyn Nets franchise from its inception in 1967 until his retirement last year, died on Monday at his home in Whitestone, Queens. He was 76.His wife, Jane, said the cause was primary lateral sclerosis, which causes nerve cells in the brain that control movement to fail. In recent years, he attended games in a wheelchair.Over 54 years of meticulously keeping statistics, Mr. Turetzky recorded the field goals, rebounds, assists, fouls and free throws of Nets stars like Julius Erving, Rick Barry, Buck Williams, Jason Kidd and Kevin Durant. He became a forever Net, the team’s de facto historian and a gregarious friend to players and the news media.He took his seat at center court with his scorebook for more than 2,200 Nets home games, first when the team was in the American Basketball Association and later in the National Basketball Association, after the leagues merged.“He brought so much class and care to the scorer’s table, not a place where you necessarily look for that,” said Mr. Erving, who led the New York Nets to A.B.A. championships in 1974 and 1976. “The job is drudgery for some people, but not for Herb. He cared so much for it, and his reputation preceded him everywhere.”Mr. Turetzky was a senior at Long Island University in Brooklyn in 1967 when he took his future wife, Jane Jacobs, to the Teaneck Armory in New Jersey to see the first game in the team’s history. Then called the New Jersey Americans, they were playing the Pittsburgh Pipers in a matchup of two storied forwards from Brooklyn: the Pipers’ Connie Hawkins and New Jersey’s Tony Jackson, who, like Mr. Turetzky, was from the Brownsville neighborhood.“We had no money and he had free tickets, and we were going to watch the game,” Mrs. Turetzky said by phone.Before the tip-off, Max Zaslofsky, the Americans’ coach and general manager, noticed that the scorer’s table was empty and spotted Mr. Turetzky. He knew Mr. Turetzky from his attending games of an Amateur Athletic Union team that Mr. Zaslofsky had coached. He asked him if he could keep score.“Max, I’d love to,” Mr. Turetzky recalled saying, as quoted in a Sports Illustrated profile last year. “I’m here, so why not?” He added, “I’ve never left that seat since.”After one season in Teaneck, Mr. Turetzky followed the Nets to Long Island, where they played in three arenas, including the Nassau Coliseum; then to three homes back in New Jersey, including the Prudential Center in Newark; and finally to Barclays Center in Brooklyn.Between 1984 and 2018, he scored 1,465 consecutive games.“When I did my 900th straight game, they covered it on NBA TV,” he told the New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2012. “Charles Barkley was on, and when they made that comment to Barkley, all he said was: ‘Nine hundred straight Nets games? Boy, that man’s seen a lot of bad basketball.’”“I have seen some bad games,” he added, “but I’ve seen some great ones.”In 2020, when all the bad and great games — and those in between — added up to 2,206, Guinness World Records certified them as the most by an official scorer in N.B.A. history.Mr. Turetzky was inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004.Herbert Stephen Turetzky was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 19, 1945. His mother, Rose (Pearl) Turetzky, was a bookkeeper for the maker of Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup. His father, Sam, was a plumber. Herb played basketball at the Brownsville Boys’ Club (now the Brownsville Recreation Center), where he also learned how to run a scoreboard and maintain a scorebook.After he graduated from L.I.U. in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he was a teacher and then a principal at a Brooklyn elementary school. After that, he worked as a grants writer for the New York City Board of Education and owned a trophy business. He earned two master’s degrees, in education and in administration and supervision.All the while, Mr. Turetzky was traveling to Nets home games. His longest break from his scoring duties began in November 1968, when he was driving to a game in Commack, on Long Island. He lost control of his car on the Long Island Expressway, crossed a grass divider and crashed into an oncoming car. The driver was killed.“I was in a coma for about six weeks and broke my entire left side up, creating some muscular damage, had a concussion, broke my jaw,” he told The Asbury Park Press in 2005.He returned to the Nets the next season and rarely missed a game after that. Along the way, he and his family became part of the fabric of the team.He was pushed, fully clothed, into the showers at Nassau Coliseum and doused with champagne as the team celebrated its 1976 title. His family hosted the guard Levern Tart, known as Jelly, at their Thanksgiving dinners. The team’s mascot, Duncan the Dragon, was a guest at the bat mitzvah of Mr. Turetzky’s daughter, Jennifer. His son, David, was a Nets ball boy.In addition to his wife, Mr. Turetzky is survived by his daughter, his son and two grandchildren.Jennifer Turetzky recalled listening to her father call in the box scores of Nets games to the Elias Sports Bureau, the N.B.A.’s longtime official statistician.“A box score has a certain direction, and he delivered it in the same cadence, with each player on both teams, starting with minutes — say, 37 — then 5-for-12 and 6-for-9,” she said by phone, describing the field-goal and free-throw statistics. “Then the big number at the end, 45 points. He did it all through my childhood.” More

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      Gene Shue, All-Star and Longtime N.B.A. Coach, Dies at 90

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      He had a seven-decade pro career, starting as a guard with the Pistons before coaching for 22 years, leading the Bullets and the 76ers to the finals.Gene Shue, an All-Star N.B.A. guard of the late 1950s and early ’60s who went on to turn losers into winners in 22 seasons as a pro coach, died Sunday at his home in Marina del Rey, Calif. He was 90. Shue’s death was announced by the NBA. His partner, Patti Massey, said he had been treated for melanoma.Shue embarked on his pro career playing with the old Philadelphia Warriors in 1954, the year the 24-second shot clock was adopted. He was an N.B.A. presence for seven decades in a journey with second and even third acts.Long after joining the Warriors as a first-round draft pick out of Maryland, Shue returned to the city twice, as a coach of the 76ers (formerly the Syracuse Nationals) and later in front-office roles. He had two stints playing for the Knicks.He ended his playing career with the Baltimore Bullets and later coached them in Baltimore and Washington. He coached the Clippers in San Diego and Los Angeles. He was an All-Star for five consecutive seasons with the Detroit Pistons, twice averaging more than 20 points a game. And he was named a first-team all-N.B.A. guard in 1960, along with the Boston Celtics’ Bob Cousy.Shue was twice N.B.A. coach of the year, with Baltimore in 1969 and with Washington in 1982, and he coached the Bullets and later the 76ers to the N.B.A. finals.“I’ve never had a perfect team, and I’ve always settled for something less,” he told The Boston Globe in 1985. “My whole history involves taking weak teams and turning them around.”Eugene William Shue was born on Dec. 18, 1931, in Baltimoreto Michael Shue and Rose Rice. When he played basketball in grammar school, the court’s ceiling was barely higher than the hoops, so he developed a line-drive feet-on-the-floor set shot. He went on to average more than 20 points a game at Maryland in his junior and senior seasons.A slender 6 feet 2 inches, Shue was selected by the Warriors as the third overall pick in the 1954 N.B.A. draft. But after six games with them, he was sold to the Knicks and spent two seasons in New York playing in a backcourt with Carl Braun and Dick McGuire.The Knicks traded Shue to the Pistons in 1956, during their final season in Fort Wayne, Ind., when the N.B.A. still included medium-size cities and travel was hardly luxurious.“Every time we flew from Fort Wayne to the East Coast, we had to stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, to gas up or we’d run out of gas over the Great Lakes,” he told Terry Pluto in the oral history “Tall Tales” (1992), recalling trips on the owner Fred Zollner’s DC-3.Shue was an All-Star with the Detroit Pistons from 1958 to 1962. He played his final two seasons with the Knicks and the Bullets, then retired with a scoring average of 14.4 points a game for 10 seasons.He began his coaching career with Baltimore in 1966, taking over a Bullets team that had won 16 games the previous season. His Bullets went 57-25 in 1968-69 behind Earl Monroe and Wes Unseld, whom Shue selected in the two previous drafts. They won the Eastern Conference title in 1971 with a seven-game playoff victory over the Knicks, the defending N.B.A. champions. But they were swept in the finals by the Milwaukee Bucks of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson.Shue became the coach of the 76ers in 1973, when he was asked to resurrect a team that had gone 9-73. He coached them to the N.B.A. playoff finals in 1977 behind Julius Erving, but they lost to the Portland Trail Blazers in six games. When the 76ers got off to a 2-4 start the following season, Shue was fired.Shue, right, was an All-Star guard for the Detroit Pistons when he drove to the basket by Richie Guerin of the Knicks during a game at Madison Square Garden in 1961. At left was the Pistons center Walter Dukes.BettmannHe became the coach of the San Diego Clippers in 1978-79 after they won 27 games as the Buffalo Braves. He took the Clippers to a 43-39 record, but he departed midway through the following season when they were losers once more.Shue had a costly run-in when his Clippers were facing the Bulls in Chicago in January 1980. After referee Dick Bavetta called a technical foul on the Clippers for having too many men on the court, Shue shoved him.Commissioner Larry O’Brien fined Shue $3,500 and suspended him for a week without pay.“I am a mild-mannered man,” Shue said afterward, “but sometimes you have to stand up and assert yourself.”Shue spent nearly six years in his second stint with the Bullets after they moved to Washington. He finished his coaching career with the Clippers in Los Angeles in 1989 after a season and half of losing basketball.His teams won 784 games and lost 861 over all.Shue stressed defense as a coach.He “taught the right defensive theories — overplaying your man, helping out, double-teaming the ball,” the Bullets’ forward Gus Johnson told Pete Axthelm in “The City Game” (1970).Shue’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Massey, his survivors include his daughters, Susan and Linda Shue, and a grandson. His son, known as Greg, died in 2021.Shue returned again to Philadelphia in July 1990 as general manager of the 76ers.“There’s no such thing as nine lives,” he told The Philadelphia Daily News. “I spent 20 years in coaching, and so much can happen when you do that job. You can get fired, you can leave, but it doesn’t reflect on your abilities.”The 76ers’ owner at the time, Harold Katz, said, “Some guys survive. There are people like that, who continuously show up.”Shue remained in the post until May 1992, when he was reassigned as director of player personnel.He was still at it into his 80s — this time searching for the next N.B.A. phenom as a 76er scout. More