Sports briefs
No football before campuses open
The commissioners of the nation’s major college football conferences held a 30-minute conference call Wednesday with Vice President Mike Pence and stressed that college sports cannot return from the coronavirus shutdown until campuses have reopened.
The 10 commissioners, along with the athletic director of Notre Dame, comprise the College Football Playoff management committee.
“We were able to talk about the differences between us and professional sports,” American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said. “We talked about how academics and college athletics were inseparable.”
Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said Pence asked good questions and was “hopeful and optimistic” about the fight against the coronavirus. The pandemic has shut down all major sporting events since mid-March.
The college football season is scheduled to begin Labor Day weekend. The sport is the lifeblood for many athletic departments.
Hall of Fame lineman Davis dies at 85
Willie Davis, a Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive lineman who helped the Green Bay Packers win each of the first two Super Bowls, has died. He was 85.
The Packers confirmed Davis’ death to the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Wednesday.
Davis died in a Santa Monica, California hospital. His wife, Carol, told the Packers her husband had been hospitalized for about a month with kidney failure.
A 15th-round draft pick from Grambling, Davis began his NFL career by playing both offense and defense for the Cleveland Browns in 1958 and ’59. He had his greatest success after getting traded to the Packers.
He remained with the Packers until finishing his NFL career in 1969 as a five-time All-Pro.
He was voted to the NFL’s all-decade team for the 1960s and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1981.
Report: Halladay did stunts prior to crash
Baseball Hall of Famer Roy Halladay had high-levels of amphetamines in his system and was doing extreme acrobatics when he lost control of his small plane and nosedived into Tampa Bay in 2017, killing him, a National Transportation Safety Board report issued Wednesday said.
Halladay had amphetamine levels about 10 times therapeutic levels in his blood along with a high level of morphine and an anti-depressant that can impair judgement as he performed high-pitch climbs and steep turns, sometimes within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of the water, the report says about the Nov. 7, 2017, crash.
The maneuvers put loads of nearly two-times gravity on the plane, an Icon A5 Halladay had purchased a month earlier. On the last maneuver, Halladay entered a steep climb and his speed fell to about 85 miles per hour (135 kph) . The propeller-driven plane went into a nosedive and smashed into the water. The report says Halladay, 40, died of blunt force trauma and drowning.
About a week before the crash, the former Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies star had flown the plane under Tampa Bay’s iconic Skyway Bridge, posting on social media, “flying the Icon A5 over the water is like flying a fighter jet!”
Halladay, an eight-time All-Star, pitched a perfect game and a playoff no-hitter in 2010. He played for the Blue Jays from 1998 to 2009 and for the Phillies from 2009-13, going 203-105 with a 3.38 ERA. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame posthumously last year.