Sports

Connected media - Connected media Everyone seems to have a slightly different estimate of how many people were outside the stadium on that strange November afternoon, but the consensus is that it was a lot. As the bus crept through the crowd, the Brazilian footballers on board stared out of the windows. Locals — tens of thousands of them, on some accounts — flooded the streets. Most greeted the bus with diffident waves. A few ran alongside, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone they would not have recognised anyway. An hour later, those same footballers walked through a long underground tunnel, up a flight of stairs and out onto the pitch. They lined up in front of the dugout and sang Brazil’s national anthem. The match that began moments thereafter took place in 2009, but you would n...

Related media - Associated media As an old ballplayer, when the back pain attacked, he figured he would just play through it. “I took four Advil, drank a huge cocktail and usually I’d polish that off with a bottle of wine to kill the pain,” he said of his nightly regimen. But one afternoon he fell asleep, hard, on the deck, waking up only because it was dinner time for his dog, Buddy. Stubborn as his master, Buddy nudged and licked Flannery until he came to. If not for that, Flannery said, he thinks he would have died right there. Instead, the two somehow drove to his San Diego-area home, where Tim collapsed and was taken away by paramedics. As he was recovering in early 2021, Susan Walker phoned one day. Her husband, Jerry Jeff, had died from cancer in October, and she invited Flann...

Related media - Linked media Memory, Now and Five Years Ago Chris Nilan is a quintessential Bostonian of a certain time and demographic, the kind they make movies about: A tough, working-class hockey player of Irish descent, hundreds, if not thousands, of local kids yearned to be just like him. He was born on Feb. 9, 1958, at the Faulkner Hospital in West Roxbury, Mass., the son of Henry and Leslie Nilan, a hard-working, blue collar couple who raised their four children in a strict household. Chris still found his way into scraps as a kid, and soon discovered he was a capable and fearless fighter. Often, he said, it was in defense of others. Later, he mixed it up with groups of kids and young adults on the streets and in the bars of Boston. He met Karen Stanley at Northeastern Univer...

Associated media - Linked media SAN FRANCISCO — The motivational message, courtesy of the great Larry Bird, came at the perfect time. Klay Thompson was just a few days removed from the unwelcome start of his sixth-man life in Utah, where the 34-year-old Warriors legend had been asked to come off the bench after the previous 12 years as a starter. Even with Thompson’s spectacular debut in this new reserve role, a 35-point showing on Feb. 15 that helped lift Golden State over the Jazz heading into the All-Star break, this was the kind of career-changing decision that would take much more time to truly accept. The emotions were still raw. This was already a sensitive situation too, what with Thompson and the Warriors having been unable to come to terms on an extension in recent months a...

Related media - Associated media The name’s Powers. Chad Powers. And he’s coming (back) to a screen near you. Hulu ordered Eli Manning’s character “Chad Powers” to be made into its own comedy series, according to a company press release. Manning created and transformed into Powers for an episode of his docuseries “Eli’s Places” after Manning’s curiosity about the college football walk-on process led him to try out at Penn State under the pseudonym and disguise. With help from a special effects artist and Matthew McConaughey-like persona, Manning successfully tried out to be a Nittany Lion. He almost made it too, as Penn State assistants took a natural liking to the two-time Super Bowl champion before head coach James Franklin, the only person seemingly in the know about Manning’s tru...

Associated media - Linked media Ohtani, though, is beating the Americans on their own terms. “He can hit a home run 500 feet and throw a ball 100 miles per hour, and he’s bigger and stronger than most Americans,” said Robert Whiting, who has written several books on baseball in Japan, including “You Gotta Have Wa.” Ohtani’s Ruthian contract might never have been signed if Nomo, Hideki Irabu and Alfonso Soriano hadn’t challenged Japanese restrictions on the movement of players in the 1990s. Nomo, for instance, retired from Japanese baseball so he could sign with the Dodgers, while Irabu pushed back when his old team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, cut a deal to send him to the San Diego Padres. Irabu was later sent to the Yankees, his preferred destination. A couple of years later...