The football field was Tony Sparano's element
Anthony Castonzo Jersey , just like the coaching peers he left behind.
Walking in the freshly cut, bright green grass on Wednesday while directing the Minnesota Vikings through their first practice of training camp was, naturally, the best place for Mike Zimmer to be.
"It takes a little bit of the sting away," Zimmer said, pausing to recover from a **** in his voice, "of losing a great friend, a great coach, a good man."
The Vikings and the rest of the NFL were stunned on Sunday when Sparano, their tough-loving offensive line coach, died suddenly at age 56 of heart disease .
"It'll be a hard few days, but we'll get through it and we'll get back to work and do the things that we do," Zimmer said, "and that's what he'd want us to do."
After two days of workouts for rookies and others selected for early duty either due to relative inexperience or a recent injury, the Vikings will take a break Friday to attend Sparano's funeral in the Twin Cities area. Then the entire team will convene for the first full practice on Saturday.
"The most important thing is when you're a family, the family is what helps you get through it," said general manager Rick Spielman, who like Zimmer had to stop for composure several times during an interview session with reporters.
As evidenced by and during the run last season to the NFC championship game, the Vikings from the top down have forged an environment as tightly knit as any point in their history. This is an organization that has seen plenty of dysfunction over 57 years. The solidarity comes in handy at a tragic time like the unexpected loss of life
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"We had quite a relationship," said Zimmer, who was on the same staff as Sparano for the last four of his 13 seasons with the Dallas Cowboys. "His wife, Jeanette, I told her the other day, she reminds me a lot of my wife. She's the sweetest lady."
Zimmer's wife, Vikki, passed away in 2009. His father, Bill, died in 2015. So he's had unfortunate experience in straddling the fine line between proper mourning and pressing on. What's clear to the Vikings, at least, is that Sparano would pick the latter.
"If Tony knew we were having this talk about him, I could just hear him in his very endearing way what his opinion on this would be," Spielman said.
With darkened sunglasses he wore since a teenage accident with hot oil from a deep fryer while working at a restaurant, Sparano had an intimidating presence. A significant portion of the screaming audible during a typical Vikings practice came from Sparano, who as a fellow understudy of former Cowboys head coach and Pro Football Hall of Fame member Bill Parcells came from the same hard-nosed mold as Zimmer.
"He was a lot like me, probably the only person in the building who was grumpier than I was," Zimmer said. "But he really cared about his players. I've sat in with him in offensive line rooms a lot, and he had a way of poking the stick at the guys and then putting his arms around him."
Sparano's daughter was married in Texas just 2陆 weeks ago. He told Zimmer last month he felt his health was the best it'd been. Since Zimmer hired Sparano in 2016 to help instill a tougher mentality in the offensive linemen
Todd Gurley II Jersey , the two early-to-arrive-and-late-to-leave coaches spoke often, and not just about football. As a former NFL head coach, Sparano served as a sounding board for Zimmer, as was their shared mentor, Parcells, the source of many of Sparano's customary colloquialisms.
"Instead of saying, 'It's one or the other,'" Zimmer recalled, "he'd say, 'It's a horse apiece.'"
That could've been applied, for example, to an assessment of a couple of potential draftees. Spielman fondly remembered Sparano's thoroughness, taking the time to study video of a tackle prospect when he played guard in a years-old game.
"I've never been around a coach who put in so much time and energy into everything he did," Spielman said.
There was a soft side to Sparano, too, when it came to his family, whether immediate or football. Zimmer smiled as he recounted playing in Spielman's charity golf tournament on the course where Sparano's house was, not far from the team's old headquarters.
"We get to whatever hole he was on, and he'd have a big cooler out there with beer and wine
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PITTSBURGH — The rearview mirror was a popular item, at least figuratively, for the Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers on their day between playoff games Thursday.
The Penguins, defending Stanley Cup champions, downplayed their 7-0 series-opening win in which they dominated in pretty much every area and vowed to concentrate on Game 2 on Friday night at PPG Paints Arena.
The Flyers, conversely, were hoping to move past the painful loss and even the first-round series before it moves to Philadelphia.
“It’s one game. Whether it’s 7-0 or 1-0 in double overtime, it’s one game,” said Pittsburgh captain Sidney Crosby, who had a hat trick in Game 1. “A big part in the playoffs is to get better every game and adjust. That’s the way you have to look at it.”
The Penguins expect the Flyers to do the same, and to charge back Friday.
“We know it’s going to be a tough challenge; they’re a good hockey team,” Pittsburgh coach Mike Sullivan said. “We would expect that they would respond appropriately.”
Philadelphia has not been able to do that so far. Pittsburgh swept four games between the teams during the regular season, scoring five goals in each of those games, before trouncing their cross-state and Metropolitan Division rivals Wednesday in their postseason opener.
Flyers coach Dave Hakstol said the game looked just as lopsided when he reviewed it on video.
“They did an outstanding job,” Hakstol said of the Penguins. “They were the better team. There was very little time, space. They were the quicker team, and they executed in all the little areas of the game better than we did.
“You can’t go out in practice and work on everything. It doesn’t work that way … so we just picked a couple of things that we wanted to try to brush up on. The other things, we’ll have to do through a little bit of video, a little bit of discussion
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Flyers captain Claude Giroux, who had 102 points during the regular season, was highly disappointed after Game 1, when he was minus-4 for the first time this season.
“It’s one of the worst games I’ve been a part of,” Giroux said. “I was terrible. I made a lot of bad plays.”
Still, he was confident enough about the Flyers bouncing back that he was willing to predict a win in Game 2.
“We’ve got to play better and play with a little bit more attitude,” Giroux said. “We’ve got a day here to think about it. We’re going to get out of this together, win the next game and go back home 1-1.”
While Pittsburgh goaltender Matt Murray is coming off a 24-save shutout and has a franchise-record 206:26 shutout streak dating to last year’s Stanley Cup Final, it remains to be seen whether Philadelphia will come back with Brian Elliott, who gave up five goals on 16 shots in Game 1, or switch to Petr Mrazek, who allowed two goals on 14 shots in relief.
After Wednesday’s game, Hakstol said his inclination was to stick with Elliott, but he declined to confirm that after practice Thursday.
“I’m not ready to say anything about lineups,” Hakstol said. “I fully stand by what I said (Wednesday) night. That was how I felt. I’m not going to move away for sure from that, but I’m not making any lineup decisions or announcing any lineup decisions (Thursday).”
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