Brief Sports News

NEW YORK (AP) – Tom Brady’s lawyers asked a federal appeals court for a new hearing before an expanded panel of judges, telling them that it is not just a silly dispute over underinflated footballs – it’s the basic right to a fair process that is shared by all union workers.

Setting the stage for the ”Deflategate” scandal to stretch into its third season, and putting Brady’s four-game suspension back in the hands of the courts, the players’ union asked all 13 judges of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hear the case that a three-judge panel decided in the league’s favor.

In the appeal filed on Monday, Brady’s lawyers said that Commissioner Roger Goodell’s ”biased, agenda-driven, and self-approving `appeal’ ruling must be vacated.”

The 2-1 decision by the panel, they wrote, ”will fuel unpredictability in labor arbitrations everywhere and make labor arbitration increasingly capricious and undesirable for employers and employees alike.”

The NFL had no comment.

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) – National Football League officials improperly sought to influence a government study on the link between football and brain disease, according to a senior House Democrat in a report issued Monday.

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone says the league tried to strong-arm the National Institutes of Health into taking the project away from a researcher who the NFL feared was biased.

The NFL had agreed to donate $30 million to the NIH to fund brain research but backed out after the institutes went ahead with a $16 million grant to prominent Boston University researcher Robert Stern. He’s a leading expert on the link between football and brain diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Taxpayers are instead bearing the cost.

The NFL denied Pallone’s findings.

 

 

WEDDINGTON, N.C. (AP) – Carolina Panthers linebacker Shaq Thompson was cited for a head-on accident that injured former Duke quarterback Anthony Boone over the weekend, a North Carolina Highway Patrol trooper said.

Trooper John Burgin told The Associated Press that Thompson’s vehicle collided with one driven by Boone on Sunday morning near Weddington, located about 20 miles southeast of Charlotte. Burgin said Thompson told authorities in his statement that he reached down to pick up his dropped cellphone, leading to a citation for driving left of the center line.

Burgin said Boone broke his pelvis but his injuries weren’t life-threatening. Thompson wasn’t injured.

Thompson had alcohol in his system but wasn’t impaired and alcohol wasn’t considered a factor in the accident, Burgin said.

 

 

BASEBALL

SAN DIEGO (AP) – Tony Gwynn’s widow and two children filed a lawsuit seeking to hold the tobacco industry accountable for the Hall of Famer’s death.

The suit was filed in San Diego Superior Court by Alicia Gwynn and her children, Tony Jr. and Anisha Gwynn-Jones.

The suit says Gwynn started dipping as a 17-year-old freshman ballplayer at San Diego State. He died of cancer of the right parotid salivary gland on June 16, 2014, at 54.

The lawsuit said Gwynn dipped in his lower right cheek for more than 30 years.

The court filing lists eight defendants, including Altria Group Corp. and US Smokeless Tobacco Co. LLC., and two people the suit says ran an intramural softball team called ”Skoal Brothers” at San Diego State in the late 1970s. The ”Skoal Brothers” provided free samples of smokeless tobacco products, the lawsuit said.

Altria spokesman Brian May said in an email that the company had no comment.

 

 

BASKETBALL

NEW YORK (AP) – Draymond Green was fined $25,000 but not suspended by the NBA for kicking Oklahoma City center Steven Adams in the groin.

The league also upgraded the foul to a flagrant 2, which would have resulted in an automatic ejection had officials given it that ruling when it happened. That moved him closer to an automatic suspension for accumulation of flagrant foul points.

But Green will be on the court when the Warriors try to even the Western Conference finals at 2-2 on Tuesday at Oklahoma City.

Green was called for a flagrant 1 foul after he was fouled by Adams with 5:57 remaining in the second quarter and kicked his leg up into Adams’ groin. Though the Thunder felt it was intentional, Green and Warriors coach Steve Kerr said they believed the flagrant would actually be rescinded by the league.

 

 

FIFA

GENEVA (AP) – FIFA has fired its finance director of the past 13 years, removing another fixture of the Sepp Blatter presidential era in another round of revelations about irregular million-dollar payments.

Markus Kattner’s exit came after he spent several months in his highest profile role at the scandal-rocked world soccer body – as its interim top administrator promoting FIFA’s wish to change its tainted culture even as his links to other investigations added up.

FIFA said Kattner was fired after an internal investigation said he allegedly broke his legal responsibilities to the organization ”in connection with his employment contract.”

The 45-year-old German official was due payments worth millions of dollars over a six-year period from 2008-14 from additions to his contract, a person familiar with the FIFA investigation said.

The extra payments were known to then-President Blatter and then-secretary general Jerome Valcke, Kattner’s immediate boss in that period.