This week’s roundup also features Magnus Carlsen’s memory and some disc golf brilliance1) Colin Bell, who died this week at the age of 74, was almost certainly the best Manchester City player of the 20th century. Hard running and highly skilful, he danced across the heavy pitches of the 1960s and 1970s. Here, he scores a 1972 Manchester derby hat-trick. Bell won every domestic honour for City, including the 1969 FA Cup. He also played 48 times for England, scoring nine goals. His career was cruelly cut short by a knee injury sustained in this November 1975 derby, after a tackle by United’s Martin Buchan. Bell would return two years later but was never the same player despite his vigorous...
This week’s roundup also features snooker deciders, somersault throw-ins and the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers1) RIP Paolo Rossi. The Italian football great’s death was announced on Thursday. Judging by this Fifa short film from 2018, he was also a wise man to boot. He is best remembered for leading Italy to World Cup glory in 1982, nabbing the Golden Boot and the Golden Ball (for best player) – here are his six goals from that tournament, including the hat-trick against Brazil. “Coming second is the same as coming 20th,” he says in this interview from last year at his home in Tuscany. At club level he was most associated with Juventus and Milan but was the top scorer – Capocannoniere...
Daniel Dubois broke The Code but so did some of the hardest men ever, including Roberto Duran and Mike Tyson When Daniel Dubois quit in the 10th round against Joe Joyce, the young heavyweight with the kind face and a good heart was hurled into a pit of shame alongside some of the hardest men in the history of boxing, Roberto Duran and Mike Tyson among them.The public court of social media – the modern equivalent of Robespierre’s revolutionary tribunal – pronounced that Dubois had committed the fight game’s unforgivable sin. The panel, surprisingly to some, included members of his own tribe: Dillian Whyte, David Haye, Johnny Nelson, Carl Frampton and others familiar with the reality of the ring. He...
Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr – both in their 50s – meet in Los Angeles in an unsanctioned exhibition boutNobody in the history of paid fighting has used the language of violence with as much undiluted enthusiasm as Mike Tyson. Iron Mike gave credible voice to the expression “bad intentions” and, from 1985 until 2005, he scared the pants off 50 lesser mortals until he began to rust and they started beating him up.Yet, on his return to the ring at 54 in the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Saturday night, the man who once threatened to ram an opponent’s nose bone into his brain and said he would eat Lennox Lewis’s babies (he didn’t), is being asked...
First black golfer to play in the Masters will be an honorary starter next year but Lee Elder’s achievement deserved to be recognised soonerUntil Lee Elder played the Masters in 1975, most of the black people at Augusta National were there working as caddies, cooks, and waiters. When Elder came up the 18th fairway at the end of his first round, those staff came out of the clubhouse to clap him home.“The other patrons cleared the way for them to come to the front, and they were instantly recognisable by their uniforms,” Elder told Golf Digest years later. “This moved me very deeply. I couldn’t hold back the tears. One club employee shouted in this booming voice that rose above...