FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — New England Patriots running back James White said he forgot to keep the football that he scored the game-winning touchdown with in Super Bowl LI, but luckily for him, an equipment assistant scooped it up, according to a team spokesman.
The Patriots are now displaying the football at their Hall of Fame.
Now on display: The game winning ball from the #Patriots record breaking comeback to defeat the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI. pic.twitter.com/6EVXfXoyli
— The Hall (@TheHall) February 13, 2017
On ESPN Radio’s Mike & Mike show the day after Super Bowl LI, White said he forgot to keep the football. In a separate interview on “The Dan Patrick Show” the following day, White said he was hopeful that an equipment manager picked it up.
White’s remarks came in the wake of uncertainty over the whereabouts of quarterback Tom Brady’s game jersey, which led some to assume that perhaps the football was also missing.
“I wasn’t thinking in that moment,” White said. “I was too busy sprinting down the field.”
But a team spokesman explained that an equipment assistant retrieved the football at the time of the touchdown, as would be normal protocol.
The football could ultimately be given to White as a keepsake, but for now it is being shared with the team’s fans.
Brady’s jersey still has yet to be found.
“It’s very sad to me that someone would do something like this,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft told the Fox Business Network on Monday of Brady’s jersey. “It’s like taking a great Chagall or Picasso or something. You can never display it. And somehow, I feel there’ll be some news that’ll clear this up in the not-too-distant future.”
Madrid – Cristiano Ronaldo trained apart from the team on Monday just two days ahead of Real Madrid’s Champions League last-16 home leg against Napoli.
The Portuguese goal machine, with a record 96 Champions League strikes to his name, suffered a heavy tackle during a 3-1 win over Osasuna at the weekend.
And, as the rest of the Real Madrid squad trained on ball skills Monday, Real website reported that “Cristiano Ronaldo and Fabio Coentrao trained inside the facilities.”
Ronaldo suffered a knock to his right leg, according to press reports, adding that he was expected to shake off the injury in time to play Wednesday.
On a happier note for the 10-time European champions, Welsh forward Gareth Bale took full part in training Monday, looking fresh, sharp, and upbeat after three months out with a heel injury.
Bale will take no part in Wednesday’s game but could be back in the starting lineup for the Feb. 22 return leg in Naples.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — New San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan admitted at his introductory news conference that he will “go back through every play” of Super Bowl LI for the rest of his life. And though the ending of that Super Bowl and his tenure as Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator will undoubtedly be hard to shake, not everything from Shanahan’s Super Bowl experience will take on such a serious tone.
After last week’s news conference and making the rounds with various media outlets, Shanahan popped into the media room to chat with a group of writers in a more informal session. At the start of that sit-down, Shanahan recounted the case of his missing backpack, which included his iPad playbook, from early in Super Bowl week.
It was a particularly amusing story for Bay Area media considering the accidental thief of the backpack was Art Spander of the San Francisco Examiner. Spander is a local legend in San Francisco sports writing, earning the McCann Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1999.
Here’s Shanahan’s recollection of what happened in his own words:
“It was a very panicked feeling,” Shanahan said.
But Shanahan wasn’t panicked because of the presence of his game plan, which would still have needed a password to access.
“[But] that had all my Super Bowl tickets in it for all my friends and family, so it’s basically a $30,000 bag of cash that was missing,” Shanahan said. “So that was my panic.”
It was a panic that held Shanahan for a long time as he tried to figure out where the backpack went.
“I was just looking for my backpack,” Shanahan said. “I didn’t know who took it. But I couldn’t get more than five feet without someone stopping me. And I was getting insecure because people were trying to talk to me and I can’t even look them in the eye. [I was thinking] ‘I’ve got to find my backpack!’ And they’re [thinking] ‘this guy’s weird.’
“So finally I went back to my seat where I was and there was this one backpack sitting there. And so I just went and started looking in that backpack and finally I found Art’s name on it. I was asking some reporters around and someone had his cellphone, so they called him.”
But recovering the backpack wasn’t that easy.
“They talked to Art,” Shanahan said. “And I was like, ‘Does he have it?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know.’ I’m like ‘you just talked to him for 30 seconds, what do you mean you don’t know?’ [He said] ‘I don’t know. He’s coming down here, though.'”
So Shanahan sat down and waited 30 minutes for Spander to return with his backpack. He missed the team bus while waiting.
“Finally he came, he was wearing the backpack,” Shanahan said. “But he still didn’t know it was mine. I tried to grab it from him and he shook me off. And then eventually he realized it and then he was awesome. Just a mistaken backpack.”
Shanahan said the backpacks were placed in a dark area so it was understandable that his black backpack could be mistaken for Spander’s blue one. He also acknowledged that he has a knack for misplacing things.
“The worst part about it is I am a forgetful person, besides football,” Shanahan said. “My wallet, I lose regularly. All the quarterbacks, my wife, every friend I’ve ever had, they’re like, ‘Of course, you lost the gameplan.’ I’m like, ‘No I didn’t! Someone jacked me, I promise.’
“No one believed me.”
Eventually, the backpack was returned with everything intact. Shanahan looks back at it and laughs now.
“I messed with Art on that,” Shanahan said, chuckling. “‘What, do you work for [Patriots coach Bill] Belichick or something?’ He didn’t get my joke, though.”
Spander was unable to attend Shanahan’s first news conference. He was tending to his other sporting passion: covering the AT&T pro-am golf tournament at Pebble Beach but they will be reunited soon enough.
“I was waiting to see him,” Shanahan said. “We have a bond now.”
Marc Ingla, a former Barcelona director who now occupies a similar role at Ligue 1’s Lille, believes there was a “little friction” between Lionel Messi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic in Catalonia, hence the latter lasting just a year at Camp Nou.
The gangly Swede fashioned 16 goals over 29 appearances en route to top spot in La Liga, but his relative lack of mobility – when compared to the rest of Pep Guardiola’s breathless ranks – was widely deemed detrimental to the side’s work.
In that campaign, Barca was eliminated from the last 16 of the Copa del Rey by Sevilla, and lost 3-2 on aggregate to Inter Milan in their Champions League semi-final.
“Why did Zlatan not get on at Barcelona?” Ingla told Telefoot, with translation from ESPN FC’s Samuel Marsden. “He’s a beast, a machine. But he was next to another machine, a smaller one (laughs).
“He was too static and Messi perhaps needed more space. Zlatan occupied too much. There was a little friction, I think.”
Ibrahimovic was shipped on loan to AC Milan in 2011, and made a permanent switch to the Italian powerhouse a year later. Since he was deemed surplus to requirements by Guardiola, the 35-year-old has been less than complimentary about the trophy-laden Spanish manager.
“Guardiola is a fantastic coach. But as a human? He is a coward. He is no man,” Ibrahimovic told Der Spiegel in 2013, as reported by ESPN FC.
“I told him that if I don’t fit here, you have to please tell me that. But all I got was sweet talk: ‘Ibra you are a super player, you do everything right.’ But I still ended up on the bench.”
The veteran striker has nabbed 15 strikes and four assists in 24 Premier League outings for Manchester United this term.