The Golden State Warriors’ dream season ends in a LeBron James nightmare; legends leave the game; the basketball world mourns Pat SummittYou can be forgiven for thinking that the Cleveland Cavaliers were finished. After all, no team in NBA history had ever come back from a 3-1 NBA Finals lead and they were playing a Golden State Warriors team that wasn’t just good but historically unprecedented. Having gone 73-9 in the regular season, the 2015-16 Warriors were arguably a single win away from being in the “best NBA team ever” conversation. Continue reading...
When the first HBCU to win a Division I championship was stripped of their title, Howard University’s multi-national barrier-breakers made history all over againThe way coach Lincoln ‘Tiger’ Phillips recalls it, there was not much point in playing one period of overtime to decide the 1974 NCAA men’s soccer championship, let alone four – though, that’s what it eventually took for his Howard University Bison to defeat Saint Louis University Billikens, 2-1, and claim the national championship for the only time in the school’s history. Why? Because fate, Phillips recently told the Guardian, had already decided the outcome of the match long before a ball was even kicked on that freezing cold December day 42 years ago this week, when...
Haskell, once the nation’s most prominent Native American college team, used to beat the likes of Michigan State. But now the program is no moreState Route 10 in Kansas ambles from the western suburbs of Kansas City into Lawrence, a college town of 90,000 with the 28,000-student University of Kansas and the 1,000-student Haskell Indian Nations University, founded in 1884 for Native Americans. Route 10 tightens from a four-lane highway and becomes 23rd Street in Lawrence, and off the street loom two 5,500-seat concrete grandstands and a noble stone archway. This is Haskell Memorial Stadium, which was dedicated on 30 October, 1926, 90 years ago this month. Haskell’s male students provided much of the labor to keep the cost to...