| | | | | | | Welcome to The Sports Moment, your guide to the buzziest stories in sports. This week, we try our hand at both offense and defense. Did someone forward this to you? Click here to sign up. | | What's happening this week? | | | Travis Hunter in a rare moment of standing still. (Thomas Simonetti/The Washington Post) | | The most interesting man in the NFL draft has a smile you can see from space and a charge for Roger Goodell. When the Commissioner announces Travis Hunter’s name Thursday, he’d like Goodell to refer to him as both wide receiver and defensive back, thank you very much. Making demands of your boss before you’ve technically been hired is audacious, but that’s kind of Hunter’s whole thing. The 21-year-old from Florida is expected to be the No. 2 overall pick going to the Cleveland Browns, and he is adamant that he wants to play on both sides of the ball. That’s not unheard of in college, where Hunter won the Heisman Trophy playing an absurd number of snaps at both wide receiver and cornerback for Coach Deion Sanders at Colorado — but it’s never been done in the modern NFL. To be a full-time member of both the offense and defense would put an incredible demand on any player’s time. As my colleague Adam Kilgore wrote this week, the vast majority of an NFL player’s workday is spent in meetings — first a big meeting with the entire offense or defense, then a smaller meeting with a player’s specific position group, and so on. Those meetings, you can imagine, are often taking place simultaneously. Even if Hunter can work out the schedule, he would be trying to learn a staggering amount of information as a rookie. Still, I’d love to watch him try. The passion that drives Hunter’s desire to become an NFL unicorn feels so pure; the dude just loves his sport. Watch December’s Heisman Trophy presentation again, you’ll find Hunter gushing about football and explaining how natural it felt for him to be on the field as much as he was despite what must have been a draining physical task for a rangy guy who measured 6-feet, 188 pounds at the NFL draft combine. “I’m used to it. It’s normal for me,” Hunter said. “I’ve got a little ADHD when I’m off the field.” Call me sappy, but it’s been cool to learn about a guy who refuses to scale down his ambition. This is someone who listened when his grandmother encouraged him to try football at 4 despite his small stature, chose to play for Sanders at Football Championship Subdivision school Jackson State out of high school over Auburn, Georgia and Florida State and became just the second full-time defender to win the Heisman Trophy. You’re going to tell him now he can’t achieve exactly what he wants? Audacious seems to be Hunter’s default. That’s perfectly fitting for an athlete who came through today’s college system, where the lesson increasingly seems to be, “bet on yourself.” We know, thanks to the positions he plays and the awards he’s racked up, that Hunter can run. I can’t wait to see how far he goes. |  | | Get Hunter and Simone Biles in a toothpaste commercial together, stat! (Dustin Bradford/Getty Images/ONIT) | |  | You've gotta see this | It was a big week for breaking playoff droughts. The Detroit Pistons won their first playoff game since 2008 when they beat the New York Knicks, 100-94, to even the first-round series 1-1 Monday in Madison Square Garden, and another long-suffering team from a cold-weather city, the Toronto Maple Leafs, are up 2-0 on the Ottawa Senators in the Battle of Ontario. This sweet overtime goal from Max Domi put the Leafs up 2-0 for the first time since 2002 — which happens to be when Domi’s father, Tie, played for Toronto. Listen to the roof come off that place when Domi scores. Man it would be fun to go to a playoff game in Toronto. | | | Sharon Lokedi was awarded $150,000 for winning the race plus a $50,000 bonus for setting a new course record. Should more sports be incorporating crowns? (CJ Gunter/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) | | The 129th running of the Boston Marathon started with perfect weather Monday and ended with two historic finishes as well as some crazy fast times. In the women’s division, Sharon Lokedi of Kenya avenged last year’s second-place finish by torching the course record by more than 2½ minutes. She finished in 2:17:22 — and all three podium finishers were faster than the previous course record. In the men’s field, John Korir of Kenya won in 2:04:45, posting the second-fastest winning time in race history despite falling at the start. Korir followed in the footsteps of his older brother Wesley, who won in 2012, making them the first pair of relatives to win the prestigious event. That’s more of a gene superhighway than a pool, really. In the wheelchair division, Switzerland’s Marcel Hug claimed his eighth victory and the United States’ Susannah Scaroni won the women’s title. The race also celebrated a special 50th anniversary this year. In 1975, Boston became the first major marathon to do what? A: Award prize money to winners
B: Allow women to compete
C: Create a wheelchair division
D: Adopt the 26.2 mile distance Find the answer at the finish line bottom of this newsletter. | |  | Catch up on ... | | Column Kevin B. Blackistone | | | | | | And here I thought Oklahoma was a softball school. (Tony Gutierrez/AP) | | Seven. The Oklahoma’s women’s gymnastics team won it’s seventh national title a year after a stunning collapse in the semifinals kept them from competing for a championship. The Sooners have now won three of the past four NCAA titles; all seven of their championships have come since 2014. That there’s a dynasty. They beat UCLA, Missouri and Utah in Saturday’s four-team final, and unlike the Bruins, who have Jordan Chiles on the roster, and Utah, Oklahoma doesn’t have any athletes who’ve performed at the Olympics or world championships. I asked my colleague Emily Giambalvo, who covers gymnastics, how rare that is. “Olympian doesn’t equal college success. In some ways, it might complicate it,” she said, explaining Olympians might need long stretches away from their college team to train with their national teams or be more frequently injured. At Oklahoma, their athletes pride themselves on pristine technique and enviable consistency. Seems to be working out for them. |  | | Redemption! (Jerome Miron/Imagn Images) | | What should I watch this week? | ⛳️ Golf: World No. 1 Nelly Korda looks for her first victory in six starts this year at the season’s first major, the Chevron Championships, in Houston (Thursday-Friday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 6-8 p.m., Golf Channel; Saturday-Sunday, 3-6 p.m. NBC). Rory McIlroy plays for the first time since winning the Masters and teams with bestie Shane Lowry to defend their championship at the only team event on the PGA Tour, the Zurich Classic of New Orleans (Thursday-Friday, 3-6 p.m., Golf Channel; Saturday-Sunday, 1-3 p.m., Golf Channel, 3-6 p.m., CBS).
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