Page 25 - Florida Sentinel 4-9-21

Sports
ESPN Fires Paul Pierce After Racy, Wild Video Goes Viral
PAUL PIERCE
Stanford Beat Arizona For The N.C.A.A. Women’s Basketball Championship
The Cardinal beat the Wildcats to win their first championship since 1992.
Tara VanDerveer
hugged each of her Stanford players as they climbed the ladder to cut down the nets, capping a taxing whirlwind journey and ending an ex- haustive championship drought for the Cardinal.
It took 29 years, that in- cluded 10 weeks on the road this season because of the coronavirus, for Van- Derveer and the Cardinal to be crowned NCAA women's basketball champions again.
“We had some special karma going for us,” Van- Derveer said. “Had the comeback against Louisville, dodge a bullet against South Carolina, dodge bullet against Arizona. Sometimes you have to be lucky. I’ll admit it, we were very fortunate to win.”
Haley Jones scored 17 points and Stanford beat Ari- zona 54-53, giving the Cardi- nal and their Hall of Fame coach their first national championship since 1992 on Sunday night.
“Getting through all the things we got through, we’re excited to win the COVID championship," Van- Derveer said. ”The other one was not quite as close, the last one. But we’re really excited. No one knows the score, no one knows who scored, it’s a national championship."
It wasn’t a masterpiece by any stretch with both teams struggling to score and miss- ing easy layups and shots, but Stanford did just enough to pull off the win — it's second straight by a point.
Stanford (31-2) built a nine-point lead in the fourth quarter before Arizona (21-6) cut it to 51-50 on star guard Aari McDonald's 3-pointer.
MLB Moving All-Star Game
ESPN has fired NBA ana- lyst Paul Pierce.
The decision was made after Pierce published racy Instagram videos on Friday, showing him smoking what appeared to be marijuana and with scantily clad women who may have been strippers.
Pierce, 43, has been on a bit of a downward trajectory at ESPN but had hung on enough where he was a regu- lar contributor to its top stu- dio shows, “NBA Countdown” and “The Jump.” During a re- cent show, he went on the air and said the wrong team won.
He was quickly corrected. According to sources, ESPN was particularly miffed that Pierce chose to put the videos out of his own accord. If he had been filmed doing the same activities and they had been made public by someone else, he might have
kept his job.
When the news became
public Monday, Pierce went on Twitter and posted a four- second video that said, “Smile” and the message, “Big Things coming soon stay tuned make sure u smile #Truthshallsetufree.”
Atlanta lost Major League Baseball’s summer All-Star Game on Friday over the league’s objections to sweep- ing changes to Georgia voting laws that critics — including the CEOs of Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola — have condemned as being too restrictive.
The decision to pull the July 13 game from Atlanta’s Truist Park amounts to the first economic backlash against Georgia for the voting law that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp quickly signed into law March 25.
Kemp has insisted the law’s critics have mischarac- terized what it does, yet GOP lawmakers adopted the changes largely in response to false claims of fraud in the 2020 elections by former President Donald Trump and his supporters. The law includes new restrictions on voting by mail and greater leg- islative control over how elec- tions are run.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred made the decision to move the All-Star events and the amateur draft from Atlanta after discussions with individual players and the Players Alliance, an organiza-
tion of Black players formed after the death of George Floyd last year, the commis- sioner said in a statement. A new ballpark for the events wasn’t immediately revealed.
Manfred said he also spoke with the Major League Baseball Players Association, which at the time of the com- missioner’s decision said it had still not taken a stance.
“I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocat- ing this year’s All-Star Game and MLB draft,” Manfred said. “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports vot- ing rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
Kemp called it a “knee- jerk decision” that means “cancel culture and woke po- litical activists are coming for every aspect of your life, sports included. If the left doesn’t agree with you, facts and the truth do not matter.
Deion Sanders: ‘I Gotta
Do Better’ After Jackson
State’s Big Loss At Home
Jackson State coach Deion Sanders drew five circles around the most damning stats on the final stat sheet in the Tigers’ 34-14 loss to Southern University on Saturday night.
He was mad. And embar- rassed. And he didn’t mind letting everyone know.
“We got our butts kicked in every phase of the game. Glaring things. Fifty-nine rushes for 294 yards. We had 25 rushes for 66 yards. Glar- ing things. Forty-two min- utes time of possession to our 17:11. Glaring things,” he said. “Third-down conver- sions 14-of-20, we’re 1-of-8. Glaring things. Another blocked punt. Glaring things.
“We came out flat from the top, and I don’t think we ever recovered. Glaring things. We played with no passion. I don’t feel like this
DEION SANDERS
is who we are. I take full re- sponsibility for every darn thing that transpired out there today.
“I gotta do better. We gotta prepare them better. We had two darn weeks and we still didn’t look like we were prepared. We looked like we just didn’t have it. They played with passion. They played with intensity. We just didn’t have it, and that’s on me.”
From Atlanta In Response
To New Georgia Voting Laws
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