Apr 21, 2019 4 min read

Crawford retains title after fight stopped

Terence Crawford knocked Amir Khan down just a few punches into their fight.

The punch that finally ended it was below the belt.

Crawford retained his welterweight title by technical knockout Saturday night when Khan wasn’t able to continue after being hit with a low blow in the sixth round.

Crawford threw a left hand that hit Khan on his right hip and Khan retreated toward his corner in pain. After taking a couple minutes trying to shake off the pain, his corner told the referee that Khan couldn’t continue.

“I could tell I was breaking him down. It was just a matter of time,” Crawford said.

It was a strange, unsatisfying ending to Top Rank’s first ESPN pay-per-view card, drawing loud boos from the crowd of 14,091 at Madison Square Garden. The finish left Crawford and promoter Bob Arum with plenty of time to lobby for the fight they want next.

“The fight I want next is Errol Spence,” Crawford said. “Whenever he is ready, he can come and get it.”

Crawford (35-0, 26 KOs) had knocked Khan down in the first round, but the final couple rounds had been competitive, with both fighters throwing hard shots from close range.

Referee David Fields didn’t appear to see the final one that hit Khan (33-5) low. Khan could have taken five minutes trying to recover, but his trainer, Virgil Hunter, made the decision before then that Khan was finished.

“I didn’t want to send him back out there when he didn’t have his legs,” Hunter said.

Flyers remove statue of Kate Smith

The Philadelphia Flyers removed a statue of late singer Kate Smith outside NHL team’s arena Sunday, two days after covering it amid allegations of racism against the 1930s star with a popular recording of “God Bless America.”

“The NHL principle ‘Hockey is for Everyone’ is at the heart of everything the Flyers stand for,” Flyers President Paul Holmgren said in a statement. “As a result, we cannot stand idle while material from another era gets in the way of who we are today.”

On Friday, the Flyers said Smith’s “God Bless America” recording had been removed from their library, following baseball’s New York Yankees.

The Yankees suspended use of Smith’s recording during the seventh-inning stretch amid conflicting claims about several of her songs, including a 1939 song “That’s Why the Darkies Were Born.” The tune originated in the 1931 Broadway revue “George White’s Scandals,” and was considered satire at the time. Smith’s likeness also appears in a 1939 ad that heavily uses the mammy caricature, one of the most well-known racist depictions of black women.

Smith’s connection with the Flyers started in 1969 when a team executive ordered her version of “God Bless America” to be played instead of “The Star Spangled Banner.” That led to her performing the song several times before games in the 1970s. A year after her 1986 death, the team erected the statue.

Cal’s Means breaks school record

California University senior Jae’Len Means broke his own school record and won the 200-meter dash on Saturday while competing at the Duke Invitational.

Means improved his NCAA provisional mark and PSAC-leading time in the 200 meters by more than two-tenths of a second while in North Carolina. He won the race that featured nearly 80 entries by just one-hundredth of a second after crossing the finish line in 21.01 seconds, which eclipsed his previous school record set at the 2018 PSAC Outdoor Championships by two-hundredths of a second. Means also placed seventh overall in the 100-meter dash at Duke with a time of 10.60 seconds