Sports

John Goodman, who has made a retirement hobby of trading vintage baseball cards, explains the mystery of the legendary Honus Wagner card, and a lot more.

The weekend past was the first in which tennis clubs have been open for play, having been moved up by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo from the fourth to the first phase in a planned step-by-step reopening of the state in the wake of a total shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic two months ago.

No, she had not been sitting at home, Linda Silich said, when asked this week what she’d been doing during the coronavirus shutdown. The demands of her two businesses — a highly rated TRX-based fitness studio in East Hampton Village and Groundworks Landscaping in East Hampton, on the way to Amagansett — had been taking up much of her time.

“Most of our clientele is older and somewhat frail, and some of them have chosen not to come in,” but then one day “an 80-plus-year-old lady did. She said her balance training was more important to her than coronavirus worries . . . that if she fell and broke her leg things could be even worse.”

"It's been a very rough couple of months -- but at least now there's a sliver of light," said Claude Okin, who owns the Sportime club in Amagansett and numerous other tennis clubs in the metro area.

Fitness studios here have been offering online personal and group training sessions since the early days of the Covid-19 shutdown, and given the uncertainty of the coming months, they’re likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.   

This was the third winter that Heather Caputo, Spencer Schneider, Mike Bottini, and Jeremy Grosvenor have been swimming three or four times a week at various spots in the ocean and in the bay.

The state-owned Montauk Downs golf course, which had been open, closed, open, then closed again, reopened for play on Monday, having been so directed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Bobby Hopson, the Bridgehampton High School basketball team's career scoring leader and a Wagner College standout, died on Tuesday. The cause was diabetes-related.

The world’s top-ranked female triathlete, Katie Zaferes, an Olympic silver-medalist cyclist, Mari Holden, and Ally Friedman, a Ross School senior who in February was cited by the United States Tennis Association as its junior volunteer of the year, mentored Theresa Roden’s I-Tri girls on Saturday.

Nassau and Suffolk Counties’ Athletic Councils pulled the plug on high school springs sports, a “heartbreaking decision,” in the words of Section VIII’s executive director, Pat Pizzarelli, but one that was not surprising given the coronavirus pandemic.

Private golf clubs, while still deemed nonessential, have been allowed to reopen to their members, the governor said, with restrictions.