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Bob Huggins will keep his job as the head men’s basketball coach at West Virginia, the university said Wednesday, but will be suspended for three games and receive a pay cut after he used an anti-gay slur twice and derisively mocked Catholics during an interview with a Cincinnati radio station this week.
Mauer, who was raised Catholic and attended church on Sundays, was aware of the Pope’s position but had a “difficult time accepting the Pope’s stance in promoting this vaccine.” In fact, Mauer’s opposition led him to “attend different denominations from week to week,” eventually landing with him joining the Baptist Evangelical Eagle Brook megachurch community. Mauer sought an exemption from the NBA on two grounds. First, he said the vaccines “utilize aborted fetal issue,” which conflicts with his “belief that life begins at conception.” Second, Mauer said the vaccines are “unnatural and will pollute my body forever with synthetic mRNA,” which conflicts with his belief that “God’s name is on every human chromosome.”
The first in-person Sioux City Bishop’s Dinner for Catholic Schools since 2019 tipped off the Saturday evening festivities at the South Sioux City Marriott Riverfront with an appearance from a Carroll, Iowa native and professional play-caller. Nick Nurse, head coach of the NBA's Toronto Raptors, was the keynote speaker for the event which helps raise money to help to cover tuition costs for Catholic school kids in Northwest Iowa.
But as much as Olshey loved Malone’s basketball mind, and his leadership qualities, there was a catch: Malone was a firecracker, unafraid of confrontation or of speaking his mind. Just like Olshey. “I loved Michael,” Olshey once said. “But there was no way two hot-headed Irish Catholics from New York like us could work together. We would kill each other.”
Tom Konchalski, the rail-thin 6-foot-6 patron saint of basketball, a lifelong native of Queens, New York and a devout Catholic who attended mass daily, is regarded as the most respected evaluator of high school basketball talent in history. He nurtured countless New York City ball-players and helped change countless lives through basketball. My dad, Ernie, was one of the first New York City kids Tom discovered. He was like family to us. He looked after me as a young player just like he had looked after my dad.
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Enes Kanter: Devastated to hear about the violence in #Nice 🇫🇷 My thoughts and prayers are with the Catholic community, families and friends of all impacted by this senseless act of violence 🙏🏽 TERRORISM HAS NO PLACE IN OUR WORLD!!!
“We cannot go past the history,” Dragić said. “It means some bad things going on in the war and everything. But it’s over now, and we need to look to the future. I have a lot of friends in Croatia. I’m Serbian. I’m half-Serbian, half-Slovenian, and my grandparents, they were living in Bosnia. So I lived with a lot of different cultures — Christian-Orthodox, Muslims, Catholics. For me, it makes no difference. “At the end of the day, we were the same country. We have a lot of the same stuff. What happened in the past, it happened. I was young. I was three years old when the war was going on. So I don’t have anything to do with it, you know? All those guys are awesome to me.”
Scouts and analysts are split on Cole Anthony, North Carolina’s stud freshman point guard, who has yet to announce his intentions to return to school or go pro. Some forecast that Anthony will fall into the low teens in the NBA draft, if he does forego his final three years of college eligibility. Others believe the son of former NBA point guard Greg Anthony, who will turn 20 on May 15, will be a top-five pick or possibly will fall to his hometown Knicks at No. 6. Projections are across the board for the Upper West Side native who has been in the public eye since starting as a freshman at Catholic school Archbishop Molloy in Queens. “I’ve gotten the complete spectrum,” former NBA point guard and ACC Network analyst Cory Alexander, who coached Anthony for one year as an assistant at powerhouse Oak Hill Academy, said in a phone interview. “Some people love him, and some people would not want him on their team for whatever reason.”
“This case does not involve intensely private individuals who are dragged into the spotlight,” the AP argued, “but well-known mega-institutions that collect millions of dollars from local residents to support their activities.” Ties between local church leaders and the Saints include a close friendship between New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond and Gayle Benson, who inherited the Saints and the New Orleans Pelicans basketball team when her husband, Tom Benson, died in 2018. The archbishop was at Gayle Benson’s side as she walked in the funeral procession. Gayle Benson has given millions of dollars to Catholic institutions in the New Orleans area, and the archbishop is a regular guest of hers at games and charitable events for the church.
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“I thought, ‘I’ve got to be doing something more with my life than blowing whistles against basketball players,’ " he said. At a St. Andrew’s event, a visiting speaker mentioned the Catholic diaconate. The possibility of becoming a deacon hung constantly around his neck like the whistles he wore as a referee. “It’s a calling,” he said. “It’s nothing I aspired to. I knew I was getting near the end of my career because my knees were failing. That realization makes you think about what you’re going to do afterwards.”
McKillop had a chance to go home to Queens in 1998, back to where his mentor, Lou Carnesecca, had become a legend. He interviewed for an opening at St. John's but didn't get the job. He got Steph instead. "Is Steph your legacy?" I ask him. He is one of the most respected coaches in the game, on the NCAA's competition committee. He coached both of his sons at Davidson and is coaching with his son Matt now. He never worked again as a schoolteacher after leaving Holy Trinity, but I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd told me that his legacy consisted of teaching Sports and American Society the rest of his life. "Absolutely," he says. "In Roman Catholic terms, he's my imprimatur."
A native of New York, Abdul-Jabbar was raised Roman Catholic but converted to Islam in 1968. That was the year he boycotted the summer Olympics by forgoing a chance to try out for the men’s national basketball team. His reason, he said, was the racial violence occurring in the country, including the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “It didn’t make sense to me that we would go to Olympics,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling very patriotic.”
Jay Wright will stay longer at another Catholic institution — he’ll start his 18th season at Villanova after rebuffing requests from NBA teams to talk to him about coaching vacancies. The 56-year-old Wright has long been one of the hottest names attached to marquee-program or NBA openings but has never really considered leaving the Wildcats. “Depending on who the guy is, I’ll say, ‘I’m honored, I’m humbled, I’d love to work with you, but I love my job,'” Wright said. “It’s always that simple.”
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