Page 26 - Florida Sentinel 4-16-21

Sports
Ex-UConn Coach
Former Tennessee Titans Star Eddie George Named Tennessee State Tigers Coach
EDDIE GEORGE
Tennessee State is naming Eddie George its new head football coach.
George will replace Ron Reed, who had been with the Tigers since 2010 and com- piled a 60-69 record.
Reed's departure is ex- pected to be announced Mon- day, with George scheduled to be introduced Tuesday.
George starred at running back for the Tennessee Titans from 1996 to 2003, and the Tigers hope he will bring a much-needed spark to the program. The school is taking a path similar to the one taken by Jackson State, which hired NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders to take over its pro- gram in September. Jackson State is 4-3 in Sanders' first season as coach.
Timberwolves Honor
Kevin Ollie Returning
Karl-Anthony Towns' Late
To Coaching In Paid
Mom, Jacqueline, With
Youth League
Special Seat At Target Center
Kevin Ollie will be coaching basketball again.
Ollie will serve as head coach and director of player development for the Over- time Elite program, a group of about 30 top players ages 16-18 who will compete in a league and also play against international competition. The league is slated to begin in September and run until May, and is in the process of reaching out to top high school-aged players around the world.
“I’m ready to get back to whatIwasborntodo—em- powering and encouraging and supporting young peo- ple, and helping them grow,” Ollie said in a press release. “There’s no better place for me to do that than OTE, an extraordinary league for ex- traordinary young men. I consider it my mission to help these elite athletes real- ize their dreams.”
Ollie coached UConn for six seasons, leading UConn to
KEVIN OLLIE
20 wins in his first season at the helm despite a postsea- son ban, and winning the program’s fourth national championship in his second season in 2014. However, he’s been out of the coaching game since being fired by the program on March 10, 2018, after a second straight losing season and amidst allega- tions of NCAA violations. Ollie has been in a con- tentious legal battle with UConn ever since in an effort to recoup the nearly $11 mil- lion left on his contract at the time of his dismissal.
The Minnesota Timber- wolves left a special seat re- served at the Target Center on Sunday night to honor Jacqueline Towns, Karl- Anthony Towns’ late mother.
Jacqueline died from COVID-19 in April 2020, one of seven family members that Towns lost to the disease over the past year.
“Last Sunday night, we re- served a seat for Jacqueline Towns. Her light made the world a brighter and better place.”
Towns Family Hit Hard By COVID-19
Jacqueline, a nurse, died last April due to complications from the coronavirus after she was placed in a medically in-
KARL-ANTHONY TOWNS AND HIS MOTHER, JACQUELINE TOWNS
duced coma. Towns’ uncle and grandma, along with four others, also died.
Towns announced in Jan- uary that he had also con- tracted the coronavirus, and then dropped the news that he had been hit by a drunk driver in Los Angeles and briefly hos- pitalized.
The loss of his mom, un- derstandably, hit him hard.
Floyd Mayweather Says He’s 'Working On A Huge Deal' With UFC’s Dana White And Rizin
NOBUYUKI SAKAKIBARA, DANA WHITE AND FLOYD MAYWEATHER
With the likes of Mike Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya starting to cash nice checks by exploiting the nos- talgia of aging fans yearning for their youth, it’s pretty much inevitable that 44-year- old Floyd Mayweather will be coming up with something to do.
Mayweather, who hasn’t had a real fight since 2017’s win over Conor McGregor, was ahead of the highly- pushed exhibition trend,
doing a New Year’s Eve “fight” with Tenshin Nasukawa in Japan at the end of 2018. More recently, he’d an- nounced an exhibition with Logan Paul, which wound up fizzling out and not hap- pening for whatever reason.
But Floyd appears to have something in the works, post- ing a photo with UFC’s Dana White and RIZIN CEO Nobuyuki Sakakibara, saying, “We’re working on a huge deal!”
PAGE 14-B FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY FRIDAY, APRIL 16, 2021