Rollie Massimino

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. >> Rollie Massimino, who led Villanova’s storied run to the 1985 NCAA championship and won more than 800 games in his coaching career, died today after a long battle with cancer. He was 82.

Massimino’s death was announced by Keiser University, where he was still the men’s basketball coach. He spent the final days of his life in hospice care.

Best known for that national title at Villanova, Massimino also coached at Stony Brook, UNLV and Cleveland State. He spent the last 11 years of his life at Keiser, where he started the program and turned it into an NAIA power.

“We are so truly honored to have shared this time with him and take some degree of comfort in knowing the positive impact he has had on college students for the last four decades remains immeasurable,” Keiser Chancellor Arthur Keiser said.

After one season at Penn, Massimino took over at Villanova. He spent 19 seasons there, best remembered by the 1985 NCAA title run that was anything but easy — for many reasons.

Villanova needed a last-second stop just to escape over Dayton (a game played at Dayton, no less) in the first round, went scoreless for the first eight minutes of the second half and somehow still beat top-seeded Michigan in the second round, and toppled Maryland in the regional semifinal — winning those three games by a combined nine points. And to get to the Final Four, Villanova erased a halftime deficit against North Carolina.

That game with the Tar Heels was the one where Massimino gave what those linked to that ‘85 team still call “the pasta speech” at halftime.

“He looked at all of us and threw his coat down,” Chuck Everson, who played on that team, said today. “He said, ‘If I knew it was going to come down to this, I’d rather have a bowl of pasta with clam sauce and a lot of cheese on it.’ Everybody was looking at him like, ‘What the heck does this have to do about playing?’ What he was saying was just go out and have some fun. Do something you like. Play. Everybody’s eyes exploded.”

Villanova dominated that second half. Pasta was had afterward.

The Wildcats downed Memphis State in the national semifinals. That left a Villanova vs. Georgetown showdown, an all-Big East final. The Hoyas won both regular-season matchups between the rivals, but Villanova shot a staggering 79 percent in the title game and pulled off a 66-64 upset when it mattered most.

“Even though his 1985 team beat us, I have always had nothing but great respect and admiration for him,” said Georgetown coach Patrick Ewing, who starred on the Hoyas’ 1985 team.

Villanova missed six shots from the field in the game, going 22 for 28.

“This is the greatest thing to ever happen to me,” Massimino said that night.

Michelle Wie to have appendix removed

OTTAWA, Ontario >> Michelle Wie was set to have surgery today to remove her appendix.

Wie withdrew before the final round of the Canadian Pacific Women’s Open and was taken to Ottawa Hospital for the surgery.


“Further details on her condition will be provided when available,” her agency, IMG, said in a statement.

The 27-year-old Wie was tied for 23rd, six strokes behind leaders Mo Martin and Nicole Broch Larsen after three rounds at Ottawa Hunt.

Wie was 1-2-0 last week in the United States’ Solheim Cup victory over Europe in Iowa. Ranked 30th in the world, she tied for third in the Women’s British Open and has seven top-10 finishes this season.

Mayweather vs. McGregor

[8/26/17] LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Floyd Mayweather Jr. put on a show in the last fight of his spectacular career.

Conor McGregor didn't do so badly, either.

Mayweather figured out a 50th opponent Saturday night, letting McGregor have the early rounds before stalking him late and leaving the mixed martial artist defenseless and exhausted on the ropes in the 10th round.

It was a smashing end to a career that earned Mayweather more money than any fighter before him -- including an estimated $200 million for his last bout.

"I think we gave the fans what they wanted to see," Mayweather said. "I owed them for the (Manny) Pacquiao fight."

Mayweather battered McGregor around the ring in the later rounds, finally stopping him at 1:05 of the 10th with a flurry of punches that forced referee Robert Byrd to stop the fight.

Before a pro-McGregor crowd that roared every time the UFC fighter landed a punch, Mayweather methodically broke him down after a slow start to score his first real stoppage in nearly a decade. He did it in what he said would be his final fight, against a man who had never been in a professional boxing match before.

McGregor boxed surprisingly well but after landing some shots in the early rounds, his punches seemed to lose their steam. Mayweather then went on the pursuit. McGregor backpedaled most of the way, stopping only to throw an occasional flurry as Mayweather wore him down.

"I turned him into a Mexican tonight," McGregor said. "He fought like a Mexican."

Though Byrd cautioned McGregor for hitting behind the head on two different occasions, there were no real fouls in the fight and McGregor never tried to revert to any MMA tactics.

McGregor had vowed to knock Mayweather out within two rounds, and he won the early rounds with movement and punches to the head. But the tide of the fight turned in the fourth round as Mayweather seemed to figure out what he had to do and began aggressively stalking McGregor.

Mayweather was credited with landing more than half his punches, as he solved McGregor's defense after a few rounds. Ringside stats showed him landing 170 of 320 punches to 111 of 430 for McGregor.

In a fight so intriguing that it cost $10,000 for ringside seats, McGregor turned in a respectable performance for someone in his first fight. He switched from southpaw to conventional at times and used his jab well, but Mayweather's experience and his ring savvy paid off as he executed his game plan to perfection.

[8/12/17] McGregor says Mayweather will be unconscious in less than four rounds.

Alexandra Buchanan is the real deal

McKinley didn’t get the win it was searching for on Saturday night, but the Tigers might have found their quarterback.

Oh, and it just happens to be a girl.

Alexandria Buchanan, summoned from the JV team, made her first varsity appearance and was 7-for-16 with 135 yards, one touchdown and three interceptions. However, the Tigers fell 27-26 to Kalaheo at Skippa Diaz Stadium and are still looking for their first win since 2013.

“I just joined the varsity team this Tuesday. They moved me up after some consideration,” Buchanan said after the game. “It means a lot. This is my team; they’re like my second family, so it feels great to be able to play with them.”

The McKinley-partisan crowd was rocking on Saturday night in Kalihi, and the Tigers roster seemed to double that of Kalaheo, which had forfeited its matchup against Waipahu the previous week.  Mustangs coach Darrell Poole was inspired by the iron man performance of his team. Almost every Mustang played on both sides of the ball.

In addition to the team’s size, he knew facing Buchanan would be a challenge after previously watching her play on the JV team.

“She’s the real deal. You give her more time and she can throw with the best of them,” Poole said. “To me, it was awesome. I told my boys she’s gonna complete some passes against us. Hat’s off to her.”

*** [9/7/17]

She’s a 4.0 student, class president, assistant editor of the school newspaper and plays center on the girls basketball team.

“It’s kind of hard managing all those different activities, but they’re things I’m really interested in,” says Alexandria Buchanan, a 15-year-old sophomore at McKinley High School.

She also has a passing interest in football.

That’s not “passing” as in a casual curiosity about the game, that’s “passing” in the sense of throwing the ball. In addition to all of the above, Buchanan happens to be the varsity football team’s starting quarterback.

*** [9/16/17]

McKinley defeats Waialua to break four-year losing streak

*** [9/17/17]

Buchanan did her part

Bolt defeated in farewell race

LONDON (AP) -- One final time, Usain Bolt peered down the last 50 meters of his lane and saw sprinter upon sprinter running footsteps ahead of him.

One final time, the world-record holder furiously pumped the arms and legs on his gangly 6-foot-5 frame, desperately trying to reel in all those would-be winners as the finish line fast approached.

This time, the afterburners kicked in but not hard enough. Not one, but two overlooked and underappreciated Americans -- Justin Gatlin and Christian Coleman -- held off what was once Bolt's undeniable late charge.

This time, Bolt finished third in the 100-meter dash at world championships. That's right: A bronze-medal finish Saturday night in the going-away party for one of the planet's most entertaining icons and track and field's lone shining star.

"No regrets," Bolt insisted, long after a result that stunned a pumped-up crowd into near silence. "It was always going to end, no matter what happened -- win, lose or draw. It doesn't change anything in my career."

Gatlin, who actually trailed Bolt at the halfway point, heard boos cascade loudly across the stadium when his winning time, 9.92 seconds, popped up on the scoreboard. The 35-year-old, who has served two doping bans and been widely cast as a villain to Bolt's hero, went sprawling to the ground with a huge smile. Later, he bowed down to the man he finally defeated.

"I wanted to pay homage to him," Gatlin said. "This night is still a magical night for track and field and Usain Bolt. I'm just happy to be one of his biggest competitors."

Coleman, a 21-year-old in the first major race of his life, was in shock, too: "To beat someone I looked up to when I was growing up. I was just happy to be on the line with him," he conceded.

Bolt, who finished third in a time of 9.95, accepted with class both the result, and the fact that, at 30, he probably is picking the perfect time to retire.

"I did it for the fans," he said after collecting a bronze to go with his three world golds at 100 meters. "They wanted me to go for one more season. I came out and did the best I could."

*** [8/12/17]

LONDON -- Usain Bolt was ramping into warp speed when suddenly, stunningly, the sprint turned into a somersault.

Fifteen steps into the final homestretch of his final race, something gave in Bolt's left hamstring. The World's Fastest Man skittered to a stop, hopping, skipping, jumping and finally dropping to the ground and tumbling forward before coming to a rest.

While the winning team from Britain crossed the finish line, Bolt was writhing on the track, where he wound up chest down with his face pressed into Lane 5. He was certainly every bit as stunned as any of the 60,000-plus who packed the stadium Saturday or the millions watching one of the world's most entertaining showmen make his final curtain call in the 4x100-meter relay at world championships.

There was no celebration -- no gold, no silver, not even a consolation bronze, which Bolt received a week earlier in his final 100-meter race.

Jamaica closed the night with "DNF" by its name: Did Not Finish. Bolt was helped into a wheelchair but eventually got to his feet and, assisted by his teammates, limped gingerly across the finish line. He gave a few waves to the crowd, then left for the trainer's room and, with that, presumably left track and field forever.

Ara Parseghian

Ara Parseghian, a Presbyterian of Armenian descent who might have seemed an unlikely savior of Notre Dame football but became just that, coaching the Fighting Irish out of the wilderness and back to greatness in the 1960s and ’70s, died early Wednesday morning at his home in Granger, Ind. He was 94.

Parseghian ranks with Knute Rockne and Frank Leahy in the pantheon of Notre Dame football coaches. In his 11 seasons (1964 through 1974), his teams won 95 games, lost 17 and tied four, for a .836 winning percentage. His 1966 and 1973 teams were voted national champions.

When Parseghian arrived at Notre Dame, the university’s football program had been in decline for years. The collapse started in 1956, when Notre Dame won only two games and lost eight. Though there were some victories, Notre Dame never won more than five games in a season from 1959 to 1963. Twice it won only two games.

Meanwhile, Parseghian was gaining a reputation. After five highly successful seasons at his alma mater, Miami of Ohio, where he was a protégé of Woody Hayes, he moved to Northwestern for the 1956 season. He barely broke even in his eight years there, but he was credited with doing a lot at an academically rigorous institution with no trace of a football factory image.

By the early 1960s, Notre Dame’s administrators were all too familiar with Parseghian; his Northwestern teams had beaten Notre Dame four years in a row.

At the time, Notre Dame had an interim coach, Hugh Devore, and Parseghian’s relationship with the Northwestern athletic director, Stu Holcomb, had become strained. Parseghian contacted the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, Notre Dame’s vice president and its chairman of athletics, and soon it was announced that he was headed to Notre Dame.

In the spring of 1964, student servers in Notre Dame’s main dining hall noticed that football players were forsaking gravy and ice cream. The new coach had told them that they were going to be leaner and faster.

“He told us we were good; he’d give each of us a chance to show what we could do in practice,” Jack Snow, who was switched from running back to wide receiver, told The New York Times in 1964. “And he’d be in there with us, doing exercises, snapping the ball from center, showing us how to block and run. He made us believe in ourselves.”

Parseghian had a keen eye for talent that had been misused or overlooked. Besides shifting the sure-handed Snow to receiver in 1964, he converted three big but rather slow running backs (“the elephant backfield,” he later called them) into linemen, where they thrived. Most important, Parseghian decided his starting quarterback would be the senior John Huarte, who had spent far more time on the bench than on the field his sophomore and junior years.

Snow was Huarte’s favorite receiver as the Fighting Irish won nine straight games in 1964, with many of the same players from the squad that had lost seven games the year before. Southern California spoiled a perfect season with a 20-17 victory in Los Angeles, but Huarte, who had not even won a varsity letter until 1964, was awarded the Heisman Trophy. Parseghian was acclaimed coach of the year.

But for all his success, Parseghian was saddled for a time with the reputation of a coach who “couldn’t win the big ones.” That image was reinforced on Nov. 19, 1966, when unbeaten Notre Dame met unbeaten Michigan State at East Lansing in the most eagerly awaited college game in 20 years.

Notre Dame fell behind, 10-0, then rallied to tie the score. But late in the game and in its own end of the field, Notre Dame played conservatively rather than risk a turnover, and the game ended in a 10-10 tie. Although Notre Dame was voted the national champion by the wire services, there were many who thought the game had taken some luster from the team’s image.

Parseghian’s year of total redemption was 1973. The team won all 10 regular-season games, then defeated Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, 24-23. The clincher was a daring pass from the Irish end zone for a first down that enabled Notre Dame to run out the clock and silenced those who said the coach lacked nerve when it really counted.

Parseghian announced in December 1974 that he was retiring, saying that a quarter-century in coaching had left him “physically exhausted and emotionally drained.” Another New Year’s victory over Alabama, this time in the Orange Bowl, enabled him to go out a winner.

Parseghian was only 51 when he left Notre Dame. Initially, there were rumors that he was weighing offers to coach in the N.F.L., but they remained rumors. As for the possibility that he might one day coach college football again, he would say, “After Notre Dame, what is there?”