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Published: July 23, 2008
ACC media name athletes of the year
North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough and Virginia Tech's Angela Tincher were named the 2007-08 ACC athletes of the year yesterday by the Atlantic Coast Sports Media Association.
Hansbrough, the consensus national player of the year in college basketball last season, won the Anthony J. McKevlin Award, named for a former sports editor of the News & Observer of Raleigh, and Tincher, a softball pitcher, won the Mary Garber Award, named for a former Winston-Salem Journal sportswriter.
Hansbrough received 28 of 67 votes to finish ahead of Virginia's Somdev Devvarman, the NCAA tennis champion, and catcher Buster Posey of Florida State, the national player of the year in baseball.
Tincher topped golfer Amanda Blumenhurst of Duke and field-hockey player Rachel Dawson of North Carolina in a close vote for the women's award.
Hansbrough, a rising senior, led the ACC in scoring (22.6) and rebounding (10.2) last season, led the nation in free throws made and attempted and tied an ACC record by scoring in double figures in all 39 games. He ranks second at UNC in career points (2,168) and seventh in career rebounds (943).
Tincher, USA Softball's national player of the year and the Honda Award winner, led Tech to its first Women's College World Series appearance and led the nation in strikeouts and earned-run average. Tincher graduated in the spring with a degree in finance.
Hockey
■ The Carolina Hurricanes will retire Glen Wesley's jersey number in February.
The Hurricanes announced yesterday that they will raise Wesley's No. 2 to the rafters of the RBC Center on Feb. 17, before their game against the Boston Bruins.
Wesley was the last of the original Hurricanes, the only player to play in each of the 10 seasons since the team moved to North Carolina. He retired last month, ending a 20-season NHL career that included 13 seasons with the Hurricanes franchise. The Bruins also are a fitting opponent -- they drafted Wesley in 1987.
College football
■ The Sun Belt Conference is taking steps to make sure that more than one of its teams can make it to a bowl game each season.
Sun Belt Conference Commissioner Wright Waters announced that he has signed agreements with three bowls that could put a team other than the conference champion in a bowl game beginning this December. The Sun Belt will fill the slots of the Papajohns.com Bowl, the St. Petersburg Bowl and the Petro Sun Independence Bowl if conferences that those bowls have partnerships with don't have a bowl-eligible team.
Waters said that the location of those bowls -- all located near Sun Belt Schools -- will make it easier for fans to attend those games, which will be against teams from major conferences.
The Sun Belt will send teams to the Papajohns.com Bowl (SEC No. 9 vs. Big East No. 5), the St. Petersburg Bowl (Big East No. 6 vs. C-USA No. 7) and the Petro Sun Independence Bowl (Big 12 No. 7 vs. SEC No. 8) as long as it has bowl eligible teams that can fill slots not taken by the primary partners.
■ The Iowa Board of Regents yesterday reopened its investigation of how the University of Iowa handled its inquiry into the alleged sexual assault of a woman by two football players.
The board took action after learning about letters sent by the mother of the woman who said she was raped on Oct. 14 at a campus dorm. The letters were sent last November and in May to school officials, including Iowa President Sally Mason, but were not disclosed to the regents until last week after they were provided to the Iowa City Press-Citizen newspaper.
The May letter has not been made public.
In the letters, the mother accuses the university of mishandling its response to her daughter's allegations. She said that officials encouraged her daughter, also an Iowa athlete, to pursue a resolution "informally" and within the athletics department. She said that the family was told that it would be faster than the "arduous" process of involving police.
Board of Regents President David Miles said that he was "dumbfounded" that the letters weren't made available, and called it "a serious breach of trust."
"This board owes Iowans a full accounting, and they will get it," he said.
Basketball
■ The San Antonio Spurs re-signed forward Kurt Thomas yesterday, keeping him after trading for him in February. Thomas averaged 4.5 points and 4.9 rebounds for the Spurs in 28 games and played in all 17 playoff games, averaging 4.1 points and 4.9 rebounds.
Thomas, who will begin his 14th season with his sixth team, was acquired in a deal that sent Brent Barry and Francisco Elson to the Seattle SuperSonics.
■ Sebastian Telfair's agent said that Telfair has agreed to terms on a multi-year contract with the Minnesota Timberwolves, who have only one other point guard on the roster in Randy Foye.
Foye was injured for much of last season, pushing Telfair into the starter's role after he was acquired from Boston in the trade for Kevin Garnett. He averaged 9.3 points and 5.9 assists.
■ The Golden State Warriors acquired Marcus Williams from the New Jersey Nets, filling their need for a backup point guard.
The Warriors, who lost Baron Davis to the Los Angeles Clippers in free agency, traded a conditional first-round draft pick to the Nets for Williams, a first-round pick in 2006.
Williams averaged 5.9 points and 2.6 assists in 53 games with the Nets last season after missing the first 23 games with a broken right foot. He made the NBA's all-rookie second team in 2007 after a three-year career at Connecticut.
■ Coach Ron Hunter of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who went barefoot for a game last season, won't be able to deliver shoes to the poor in Nigeria this month because the U.S. State Department said that it wouldn't be safe to go.
Instead, Hunter said that his group will travel to Lima, Peru, on Thursday to deliver about 15,000 pairs of shoes.
Originally, a group of about 40 people from IUPUI and Samaritan's Feet, a charitable organization based in Charlotte, planned to deliver shoes and visit orphanages, schools and hospitals in Nigeria. Hunter and some of his players also planned to hold basketball clinics.
The shoes made it across the Atlantic Ocean, but the group won't. Samaritan's Feet spokesman Todd Melloh said that the State Department contacted the charity to say that the trip might be a bad idea.
The State Department Web site has a travel warning against going to Nigeria, saying that unusually high levels of violence and crimes are committed there by police, militias and ordinary citizens.
Golf
■ Robin Walton, who was the 2008 National Golf Coaches Association assistant coach of the year, has joined the Wake Forest women's golf staff after an eight-year stint at Florida.
Walton, a University of Washington graduate, played for 21 years on the LPGA Tour and served on the LPGA Board of Directors from 1989 through 1991.
"She brings a huge amount of playing experience and she also has great teaching experience," Coach Dianne Dailey of the Deacons said. "She knows about college athletics. The teams she was a part of at Florida were very successful."
■ Michelle Wie has decided to tee it up against the men, again.
Wie will play next week in the Legends Reno-Tahoe Open, the first time she'll play on the PGA Tour this year.
It will be her eighth time playing on the PGA Tour, and she has yet to make a cut. The only time that Wie has made money playing against the men was on the Korean Tour, in 2006, at the SK Telcom Open.
"It's not every day that a woman is given the opportunity to play on the greatest tour in the world," Wie said in a statement. "This is a tremendous opportunity for me to learn from these great players and take those lessons into the future to becoming the best player I can be on any tour. This is another step in the process of making me a better player."
Wie, who is 18 and attends Stanford part time, has no status on any tour. She has only one sponsor's exemption left this year. She will be playing her seventh and final LPGA Tour tournament of this year at the CN Canadian Women's Open in August.
Miscellaneous
■ American soccer star Freddy Adu will move from Portugal's Benfica to play with Monaco next season in the French league. Benfica said late Monday that Adu, 19, will join Monaco on a season-long loan and that Monaco will then have the option of signing him to a permanent contract.
Adu joined Benfica in July last year but started only two matches, scoring five goals in 21 appearances as the team finished fifth in the Portuguese league. He will play with the U.S. team at the Beijing Olympics next month.
■ Italian police in Rome arrested seven people yesterday in a crackdown on an organized-crime group that police have alleged tried to buy the Lazio soccer team with laundered money.
Three people were still at large in an investigation that targeted nine Italians and a Hungarian, police said. They tried to acquire the club through money coming from illicit activities of the Casalesi clan, a group of the Naples-based Camorra crime syndicate, police added.
Among those still being sought was Giorgio Chinaglia, a former Italy and Cosmos star who is living in the United States, police official Gianluca Campana said. Two years ago, authorities first ordered his arrest on charges of extortion and insider trading at Lazio, he added.
■ Doug Logan, the new CEO of USA Track and Field, sent a letter to President Bush asking him to deny Marion Jones' request to commute her six-month prison sentence for lying to federal agents about her use of performance-enhancing drugs and a check-fraud scam.
"With her cheating and lying, Marion Jones did everything she could to violate the principles of track and field and Olympic competition," Logan wrote in an open letter to the president that was delivered yesterday. "When she came under scrutiny for doping, she taunted any who doubted her purity, talent and work ethic. Just as she had succeeded in duping us with her performances, she duped many people into giving her the benefit of the doubt.
"To reduce Ms. Jones' sentence or pardon her would send a horrible message to young people who idolized her, reinforcing the notion that you can cheat and be entitled to get away with it…."
■ Serena Williams' injured left knee has knocked her out of another tournament less than three weeks before the Beijing Olympics.
After practicing yesterday morning, Williams said she knew she couldn't play in the East West Bank Classic. She was scheduled to open Wednesday against Petra Kvitova of the Czech Republic.
"I've been getting intensive therapy and doing everything in my power to get my knee in shape for this week, waiting until the last possible moment to see if I could play," Williams said in a statement.
■ A fueler for De Ferran Motorsports was transferred to a burn center yesterday and his condition was upgraded from critical to serious.
Keith Jones was injured in a pit fire during the American Le Mans Series race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course on Saturday, just the second race for the newly formed team headed by former Indianapolis 500 winner Gil de Ferran.
De Ferran, who came out of a two-year retirement, won the pole and started the race, but teammate Simon Pagenaud was at the wheel when the team's Acura ARX-01B pulled away from the pit with the hose still attached to the car, igniting the fuel.
Safety workers quickly put out the fire, but Jones, wearing a helmet and fire-retardant clothing, was briefly caught in the flames. He was taken by helicopter to The Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus with unspecified burns.
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