Baseball – MLB: Korean baseball to be televised in USA.
Football: Winning-est NFL Coach Shula dies. Dolphins have a plan for fans amid COVID. Big 10 suspends team activities through June 1.
Golf: McIlroy, Johnson, Fowler and Wolff to play televised skins game for charity.
Olympic Sports: Ultimate Garden Clash – PV Style. Mountain breaks deadlift record. Hockey Championships will not be rescheduled. USA Badminton is back. Caron’s skating masks.
Baseball:
- ESPN will televise the Korean Baseball Org games as the league opens on Tuesday. 6 regular season games will be televised per week! Think this is a hope for the US? South Korea has only 10 cases per day…
Football:
- Dolphins HoF and winningest coach of all time, Dan Shula, passed away at the age of 90. He took the Miami Dolphins to the only undefeated season in the NFL in 1972 and won a record 347 games including playoff games. The Dolphins won 3 Super Bowls under his coaching and that’s without 2 other losses in the title game. His impressive 33 season coaching career is truly inspiring; he spent 26 with the Dolphins.
- The Dolphins have released their plan to move forward with fans in their stadium for the 2020 NFL season. This plan unveiled things like certain arrival times to get into the stadium, ordering food from your seat and then going to pick it up once its ready, colored spacing on the ground and in rows and cutting the amount of fans from 65k to 15k to keep with social distancing protocols.
- The Big 10 has extended their suspension of all team activities through June 1.
Golf:
- 4 of the PGA’s players will be having a televised fundraiser for COVID relief and you might recognize the names… World #1 Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and PGA newbie Matt Wolff. The teams of McIlroy/Johnson (playing for the American Nurses Foundation) and Fowler/Wolff (playing for the CDC Foundation) will play in a team skins game and will be televised on NBC on May 17th from 3-7pm.
- This isn’t the only charity event of its kind. Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and some famous football names (*cough* Tom Brady and Peyton Manning) will play one on Memorial Day.
- The PGA Tour is set to return on June 11 with the Charles Schwab Cup.
Olympic Sports:
- The top 3 pole vaulters in the world found a way to compete with each other virtually. The “Ultimate Garden Clash” was between FRA Renaud Lavillenie, SWE Mondo Duplantis and USA Sam Kendericks and gave the athletes 30 minutes to clear a 4.9m bar as many times as they could. Both Lavillenie and Duplantis cleared the 16 foot bar 36xs each agreeing to share the gold and Kendericks won bronze clearing the bar 26xs.
- If you’re a GOT fan, the Mountain set a WR in the deadlift, lifting 1,104.52lbs on Saturday (501kg). Hafthor Bjornsson broke the record set by Eddie Hall in 2016 by 1kg. If you didn’t know him before GOT, Bjornsson won the World’s Strongest Man competition in 2018 and has finished top 3 every year since 2012… a man of many talents.
- The Men’s Hockey World Championship was set to start next week in Switzerland but with the delay of coronavirus, they will not host one in 2021, despite the rumors.
- Take a breath people – I know this is important. USA Badminton has been taken off probation after the USOPC placed it on them after they were in noncompliance to protect athletes from sex abuse. The USOPC now rules that progress has been made and they can continue to play. *Phew*
- If you were proud of your homemade mask, don’t look at these. Mathieu Caron has launched a line of masks modeled after the figure skaters he designs outfits for in the Olympics. They cost a pretty penny but 100% of the proceeds go toward the COVID19 Response Fund for the WHO.
What to watch this week
Baseball:
- Tues 5/5 – KBO: Samsung Lions vs NC Dinos @ 2pm on ESPN2
- Wed 5/6 – KBO: Doosan Bears vs LG Twins @ 1pm (replay – live is on at 4:30am)
- Thurs 5/7 – KBO: NC Dinos vs Samsung Lions @ 2pm
Basketball:
- Sun 5/8 – The Last Dance: Episodes 7 & 8 @ 8pm on ESPN
