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Lord Nelson, the only horse to be penalized in a college football game, died. Rutgers University said Lord Nelson was 42. One of his duties during his 37-year Rutgers career was carrying the university's Scarlet Knight mascot during football games. Against Army, in 1994, Lord Nelson was penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct after he broke free and raced down the sideline at Giants Stadium.
The former Minnesota Vikings tight end Stu Voigt was charged in a federal indictment with conspiracy and fraud in a reported Ponzi scheme. Voigt, 66, and Jeffrey Gardner, 61, are accused of using a real estate scheme to defraud investors. Voigt has denied wrongdoing.
SAN ANTONIO — Jordan Morris made a loud statement in his first start for the U.S. national team against his country's biggest and most bitter rival.
His reward? A game pennant given to him by veteran Michael Bradley to hang in his room at college.
The 20-year-old Stanford sophomore scored his first international goal early in the second half, Juan Agudelo added his first international goal in four years, and the Americans dispatched Mexico by their traditional 2-0 score in an exhibition game Wednesday night.
"I was nervous but I was excited," Morris said. "It's something I've dreamed of since I was a little kid, scoring a goal, especially in such a big game in front of so many fans."
Morris, thought to be the first collegian to start for the U.S. in at least two decades, scored in the 49th minute after Bradley brought the ball upfield and passed to Gyasi Zardes. The return pass ricocheted off defender Mario Osuna and was picked up by Morris at the top of the penalty area. He took a touch, broke in and slid the ball between the legs of goalkeeper Cirilo Saucedo from 10 yards.
"It just kind of popped out," Morris said. "I'm happy that when I got the chance, I got to the ball and put it away."
Agudelo replaced Morris in the 65th and scored seven minutes later. Bradley made a long pass from the midfield line and Agudelo controlled it just outside the penalty area. He cut inside with half a dozen touches and beat Saucedo to the near post with a low shot from 19 yards.
It was the third international goal for Agudelo and first since March 2011. Playing his second international match since November 2012 and his first since March last year, he dropped to his knees and was mobbed by a group of teammates.
Before a sellout crowd of 64,369, U.S. coach Jurgen Klinsmann improved to 3-0-3 against his team's regional rival.
The U.S. has defeated Mexico by "dos a cero" in four straight home World Cup qualifiers, all in Columbus, Ohio. The U.S. is 13-5-5 against Mexico since 2000, including a win in the second round of the 2002 World Cup.
With the game not on a FIFA international date, both teams were missing top players. And with the U.S. looking ahead to this summer's CONCACAF Gold Cup, Klinsmann mixed a roster of veterans and young players.
Morris, who trained with the national team last May and made his debut at Ireland in November, started because captain Clint Dempsey is sidelined by a hamstring injury and Jozy Altidore was serving a one-game suspension for a red card.
"You say, 'Why not give him a chance?'" Klinsmann said. "He trained very well. We see his improvement."
Klinsmann also saw some nerves in the youngster.
"When Jordan was doing his shooting before the game, he was pretty much missing everything. I told him, 'Just relax. It's OK,'" Klinsmann said. "To see a boy like Morris score his first international goal, you jump for joy."
Klinsmann also gave defender Ventura Alvarado his first start and started center back Omar Gonzalez for the first time since last summer's World Cup.
Kyle Beckerman, who was deep in a midfield diamond, limped off midway through the second half with a bruised left thigh.
Morris narrowly missed a chance in the first half when a cross barely sailed over his head for what would have been a point-blank chance at goal.
The Americans avoided their tendency to give up late goals. The U.S. had allowed 13 goals from the 80th minute on in their previous 13 games.
Mexico's best chance came late in the first half when Eduardo Herrera ran into the penalty area and poked a low cross past goalkeeper Nick Rimando into the side netting. El Tri had complained about the field conditions on Tuesday and by game time the grass was uneven, with large brown and dirt patches causing players to slip and stumble several times.
"I think they had better luck with the ball, but they weren't that much better," Mexico coach Miguel Herrera said. "Their opportunities were really mistakes on our part, slipping on the field because we didn't have the right cleats."
Late Wednesday night, Bojan Bogdanovic stood in the Nets' locker room in a white dress shirt with a purple sweater tied around his collar and small beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
Bogdanovic, a 25-year-old rookie guard, had just scored a career-high 28 points at Barclays Center to help carry the Nets to a 101-88 victory over the Orlando Magic on the last day of the regular season. It might have been a moment to savor, a moment of relief, but it would have to wait a couple of hours.
"There's a lot more important things for us," Bogdanovic said with a wry smile. "We have to wait for another game."
The Nets started the day one game behind the Indiana Pacers for the final playoff berth in the Eastern Conference, and the victory moved them up half a game in the standings. When the game finished, the Pacers were about halfway through theirs against the Memphis Grizzlies. If Indiana lost, the Pacers and the Nets would be tied, and because the Nets held the tiebreaker, having won the season series, they would snatch the berth.
So for the good part of the two hours after the final buzzer in Brooklyn, the Nets players watched the game in Memphis on television, or followed it on their phones, or did not follow at all and simply waited to hear the result secondhand. Just before midnight, the Grizzlies won, 95-83.
The Nets will open a series against the top-seeded Atlanta Hawks on Sunday.
"The playoffs is a whole other monster," Jarrett Jack said. "Things could totally be different in that landscape."
It will have to be different if the Nets do not want to be embarrassed. They possessed the highest payroll in the N.B.A. this year and are only sneaking into the postseason. The desperate situation was one they made themselves. Having finally found their form and strung together six consecutive wins, the Nets ascended to seventh place on April 3. But then they went just 2-4, with margins of 23 and 27 points in their two losses heading into Wednesday's game.
And the game was no sure thing, with the final score failing to reflect the back-and-forth action. The Magic controlled play for much of the night, leading at one point by 12. The Nets came to life only in the fourth quarter. Just over three minutes into the final period, Joe Johnson sank a running shot to give the Nets an 83-82 lead that they would not relinquish.
Johnson, who finished with 16 points, shook his head after the game when asked to describe the feeling of waiting. He noted that the players had control of their destiny and then "we kind of shot ourselves in the foot." He let out a long sigh, as if to say the Nets were not entitled to anything.
Photo The Nets' Thaddeus Young, left, and Deron Williams defending against the Magic's Victor Oladipo in the second half. Credit Kathy Willens/Associated Press"It was a rough year this year," Johnson said, "simple as that."
Nets Coach Lionel Hollins had looked serene before the game. Reporters asked him whether the stakes made this game feel different, whether he was worried the Grizzlies would rest their key players, whether he would have one eye on the other game. He said he would try to keep a narrow focus on what could be controlled.
Hollins was just hoping that his players would be loose, that they would not be afraid to take chances.
"Sometimes, in these type of games, teams play not to lose instead of playing to win," he said. "So we have to go out there and play to win."
After the game, Hollins said that his players took a while to adopt that mind-set. The Magic made eight of their first 12 shots and jumped ahead, 18-10, forcing Hollins to take a timeout. With just over three minutes left in the first quarter, Victor Oladipo ghosted to the basket unattended for a two-handed dunk, rousing audible murmurs from the otherwise placid stands.
The Nets, meanwhile, could not find their flow. They were whistled for two traveling violations. They threw passes straight to defenders. The Nets staggered to the locker room at halftime trailing, 52-48.
And still, they emerged as winners and playoff contenders. Afterward, Hollins smiled when asked if he had allowed himself to think about the worst-case scenario, if he ever felt desperate or despondent while the Nets were trailing.
"This is kind of morbid, but it's kind of like somebody about to be in a crash," he said. "You're not thinking, 'I'm going to die.' You're just thinking, 'What can I do to avoid this crash?' And then the crash happens, and you have to deal with it."
The Nets have skidded all season. But somehow, they are still rolling along.
Aaron Hernandez grew up in the flagging factory city of Bristol, Conn., where during his youth a declining downtown was prowled by petty criminals who dreamed of making bigger scores in New England's prosperous hubs.
Mr. Hernandez's circle of friends included small-time crooks, but he was largely shielded from the serious wrongdoing because he was one of the few who had a golden ticket out of central Connecticut. At 17 years old, after he was allowed to graduate high school early, he left home as a prized football recruit of the University of Florida, relocating so he could get an early start on becoming a big-time college football player.
Within a few years, he was a star for the N.F.L.'s New England Patriots, signing a $40 million contract extension and moving into a huge home in suburban Massachusetts.
He had left behind his Bristol neighborhood and an unruly, sometimes violent household. But he had never truly escaped.
On Wednesday, Mr. Hernandez was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole for the killing of an acquaintance, Odin Lloyd.
Continue reading the main story Video
A jury in Fall River, Mass., found the former N.F.L. player Aaron Hernandez guilty of murder in the first degree and firearms charges.
By AP on Publish Date April 15, 2015. Photo by Dominick Reuter/Reuters.Mr. Lloyd, a semiprofessional football player from Boston, had apparently angered Mr. Hernandez.
With Mr. Hernandez at the time of the killing, prosecutors said, were two men with Bristol roots. A jury of seven women and five men convicted Mr. Hernandez of pulling the trigger of the gun that killed Mr. Lloyd, including sending two shots to Mr. Lloyd's chest as he squirmed in pain inside a dusty industrial park less than a mile from Mr. Hernandez's palatial home.
It was the latest discomfiting episode for the N.F.L., which has grappled in recent seasons with the consequences of the violent behavior off the field by many of its players.
Mr. Hernandez also awaits trial, charged with the murder of two men during a drive-by shooting in Boston in 2012. Mr. Hernandez has pleaded not guilty. That shooting, prosecutors say, was a chance encounter after an altercation in a bar in which one of the victims spilled Mr. Hernandez's drink.
In Bristol in the 1990s, he was known as the football-playing son of Dennis Hernandez, a local sports hero who had been a decorated athlete at the University of Connecticut. He was a custodian in Bristol, but around the city he was known as the King.
Friends and teammates of Mr. Hernandez said that his father was uncomfortable about some of his son's rough-and-tumble associates in Bristol and kept him on a tight leash, especially as Mr. Hernandez became a pass-catching star at Bristol Central High School.
But in 2006, Dennis Hernandez died from complications of hernia surgery. In interviews with newspapers at the time, Aaron's mother, Terri, said that she worried that Aaron would lose the direction in his life that his father had provided.
By then he was smashing state high school records and attracting the attention of college football recruiters nationwide. To most everyone in town, it was also obvious he began running with a rougher crowd, people he kept in touch with even as he moved on to Florida and, later, the Patriots.
In his freshman year at Florida, while still 17, Mr. Hernandez got into a fight with a bouncer at a bar. He received deferred prosecution after being charged as a juvenile. In the fall of that year, The Orlando Sentinel reported that Mr. Hernandez was questioned by the police about a shooting that injured two men. Friends from Connecticut were with Mr. Hernandez that night, The Sentinel reported.
As a sophomore, he was suspended for the season-opening game. Mr. Hernandez later acknowledged that he had tested positive for marijuana. But by Mr. Hernandez's junior year, Florida Coach Urban Meyer was saying that his player had been rehabilitated. Mr. Meyer had led him in daily Bible study sessions.
N.F.L. teams were not swayed. Once considered a top pick, Mr. Hernandez, then 20, fell to the Patriots in the fourth round, and his selection was viewed as a risky move. There were reports that he had failed multiple drug tests.
Photo Hernandez was drafted by the New England Patriots out of the University of Florida. He became an elite tight end and earned a large contract. Credit Elise Amendola/Associated PressBack home in Bristol, his mother had remarried, but the union did not last long. One day, his stepfather knifed his mother and went to jail for the crime.
During the same year, The Hartford Courant contacted Mr. Hernandez's high school football coach, Doug Pina, who said of his former player: "Personally, I've always had concerns. He's still finding himself. With the right people around, if he keeps his head straight, he'll do very well."
With the Patriots, Mr. Hernandez was often portrayed as a loner on a high-profile team of stars. He was frequently in the company of buddies from Bristol, which was less than a two-hour drive from the team's stadium and practice complex.
But Mr. Hernandez was an uncommon combination of size and speed, and the Patriots' owner, Robert K. Kraft, who testified at Mr. Hernandez's trial, lavished him with a plentiful contract extension. When Mr. Hernandez in return donated $50,000 to a charity of Mr. Kraft's, the team owner called the gesture "a touching moment."
Mr. Hernandez told reporters at the announcement of his contract extension that he had tears in his eyes and had been nurtured by "the Patriot way."
Not long afterward, in separate romances, Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Lloyd began dating two sisters from Bristol. Mr. Hernandez and one of the sisters, Shayanna Jenkins, were high school sweethearts. Mr. Lloyd began dating Ms. Jenkins's sister, Shaneah.
At family gatherings, the two men became acquainted. Over time, the men spent time together away from the Jenkins sisters, although they were an odd fit. Mr. Lloyd lived in a hardscrabble section of Boston where Mr. Hernandez's pricey cars stood out.
Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Lloyd often went clubbing in the Boston area, and on one late-night outing in June 2013, prosecutors say, Mr. Hernandez became angry with some of the people Mr. Lloyd was talking with. Investigators indicated that Mr. Hernandez might have suspected that Mr. Lloyd had overheard talk about the Boston double murder and whether Mr. Hernandez had been involved in it.
At 2:29 a.m. on June 17, according to prosecutors, Mr. Hernandez picked up Mr. Lloyd at his home in the Dorchester section of Boston. Less than an hour later, apparently worried about Mr. Hernandez's intentions, Mr. Lloyd texted his sister at home. "Did you see who I was with?" Mr. Lloyd texted.
"Who," she answered.
"NFL," Mr. Lloyd texted back, adding, "Just so you know."
Later that night, a surveillance camera captured an image of Mr. Hernandez in his home carrying a handgun. With him were two friends from Bristol, Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz.
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Two errors by pitcher Blake Treinen allowed the Boston Red Sox to erase a seventh-inning deficit, and they won, 8-7, on Tuesday night as the visiting Washington Nationals struggled in the field for the second straight game.
Boston went ahead with three unearned runs without a hit in the inning, which included three errors.
Hanley Ramirez reached first base on a fielding error by shortstop Ian Desmond before Shane Victorino was hit by a pitch from the left-hander Matt Thornton. After Mike Napoli's flyout sent Ramirez to third, Treinen replaced Thornton and hit Allen Craig with a pitch, loading the bases.
Treinen fielded Ryan Hanigan's bouncer in front of the plate, dropped the ball as Ramirez scored, then threw it past catcher Wilson Ramos as Victorino came home with the tying run. Craig scored the go-ahead run on Brock Holt's groundout.
RAYS 3, BLUE JAYS 2 Desmond Jennings hit a tiebreaking sacrifice fly in the eighth inning, and visiting Tampa Bay edged Toronto for its fourth straight win.
Steven Souza homered in the first inning and, with the score tied at 2, reached on a bunt single off Miguel Castro leading off the eighth. One out later, Souza stole second, then advanced to third on catcher Russell Martin's throwing error. Evan Longoria was intentionally walked, and Jennings drove an 0-2 pitch to center, scoring Souza.
REDS 3, CUBS 2 Anthony DeSclafani threw seven scoreless innings, Joey Votto had two hits and drove in a run, and Cincinnati held on to top host Chicago.
DeSclafani gave up two hits while striking out five for the Reds. Acquired in the off-season as part of the trade that sent the former ace Mat Latos to the Marlins, DeSclafani earned his first victory with Cincinnati.
ATHLETICS 4, ASTROS 0 The rookie Kendall Graveman pitched into the sixth inning, and four relievers combined to finish it, as visiting Oakland blanked Houston.
Graveman yielded four hits in five and a third innings for his first major league win. Eric O'Flaherty allowed one hit in one and two-thirds innings, Dan Otero gave up two hits in two-thirds of an inning and Fernando Abad retired one batter before Tyler Clippard finished it off in the ninth.
RANGERS 8, ANGELS 2 Robinson Chirinos had a career-high five R.B.I. with a home run and double, backing Nick Martinez and leading host Texas in a rout of Los Angeles.
Chirinos hit a two-run double in the second. He then made it 4-0 when he scored on a double by Rougned Odor on a liner to center.
TIGERS 2, PIRATES 0 Shane Greene pitched eight strong innings, and visiting Detroit bounced back from its first loss of the season by defeating Pittsburgh.
Greene, a 26-year-old right-hander, allowed just three singles, and two of them never left the infield. He had three strikeouts and no walks after the Tigers' six-game winning streak ended Monday with a 5-4 loss.
WHITE SOX 4, INDIANS 1 Cleveland pitcher Carlos Carrasco was struck in the face by a line drive in the first inning, and Chicago's Jose Quintana pitched six strong innings to help the visiting White Sox to a win.
Carrasco was taken off the field on a cart after Melky Cabrera — the second batter — hit a shot up the middle that struck the right side of Carrasco's face. The Indians said X-rays of Carrasco, the club's No. 2 starter, showed no serious injury, and he was treated at a hospital for a bruised jaw.
MARLINS 8, BRAVES 2 Giancarlo Stanton broke out of a slump with three hits and four R.B.I., Dee Gordon and Ichiro Suzuki each scored two runs, and visiting Miami trounced Atlanta.
Stanton, who signed a record 13-year, $325 million contract in November, began the game hitting just .130 with three R.B.I. in 23 at-bats. But he was dialed in against the Braves.
ROYAL BREAKS HAND Kansas City right fielder Alex Rios is out indefinitely after breaking a bone in his left hand when he was hit by a pitch in Minnesota.
