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Mark Pavelich, the famed “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey player charged with assaulting his North Shore neighbor last fall, has been found competent to stand trial.

Cook County District Judge Michael Cuzzo found this month that based on a recent examination, Pavelich “presently has sufficient ability to rationally consult with counsel, understand the proceedings and participate in his defense,” allowing the criminal case to proceed months after Pavelich was civilly committed.

Pavelich, 62, is facing two felony assault charges and two felony weapons charges after allegedly striking a neighbor with a long metal pole and sending him to the hospital with serious injuries after returning to Pavelich’s Lutsen-area home following a day of fishing together in August.

Pavelich had accused his neighbor of “spiking his beer,” and the victim suffered cracked ribs, a bruised kidney and was “in and out of shock” when he was found, charges state.

Pavelic was found incompetent to stand trial on the charges in October.

In December Pavelich was committed to the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter after being found “mentally ill and dangerous.” The doctor who recommended his commitment said Pavelich may suffer from an “unspecified neurocognitive” affliction. His family has said they suspect CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which may have resulted from repeated blows to the head while playing hockey, including 355 games in the NHL.

“Mark is the most kind and gentle person you’d ever know,” his sister, Jean Gevik, previously told the Star Tribune. “This is a totally different guy.”

CTE — which can only be discovered through an autopsy — often manifests in erratic behavior and has been suspected in the deaths of a number of professional athletes.

After initially refusing treatment, in March Pavelich began to take medication and was following doctors’ orders, according to court filings.

Earlier this week his defense attorney, Chris Stocke, filed a motion to dismiss the two felony weapons charges — possessing a short-barreled shotgun and possessing a firearm with a missing serial number — saying they were found in an illegal search.

“The fruits of the illegal search warrant must be suppressed, which results in the state lacking probable cause to move forward” with the charges.

Stocke did not return a call seeking comment. Pavelich’s next hearing is June 22, and no trial has been scheduled.

For Pavelich, the best outcome may be a plea deal that avoids a trial — and prison time — said David Schultz, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who has been following the “fascinating and tragic” case. The defense will most likely focus on Pavelich’s mental state at the time of the incident that “could perhaps exculpate responsibility,” he said.

“You don’t want somebody to walk away without being held responsible, but on the other hand he’s likely not responsible for what he did,” Schultz said. “It’s not clear what justice actually is.”

Pavelich attended Eveleth High School and the University of Minnesota Duluth and was a member of the 1980 U.S. hockey team that upset the Soviet Union and went on to beat Finland to win the gold medal. He played the bulk of his NHL career with the New York Rangers and after retirement in 1992 became a land developer and shied away from the spotlight.

Staff reporter Paul Walsh contributed to this report.

Local traffic police have commented on reports that a prominent soccer player was arrested on charges of reckless driving and breaking lockdown regulations.

On Sunday, Gauteng traffic tweeted that a 32-year-old prominent player was arrested on the N1 in Johannesburg Sunday morning, after clocking a speed of 213/kmh in a 120 zone.

It has been widely reported in local media that the player in question is SuperSport United striker Thamsanqa Gabuza.

The former Orlando Pirates striker as well as his passengers, who are believed to be in the entertainment industry, were detained at the Sandton Police station where they spent the night.

Read: Official: Highlands Park Offload R1.2M Star

Gabuza along with his passengers were released on bail being charged with breaking lockdown regulations with reckless and negligent driving.

Chief provincial inspector Obed Sibasa who is the spokesperson for Gauteng Traffic Police confirmed to the Siya crew that an arrest was made.

“On behalf of the Gauteng Traffic Police Community Safety, one can confirm that our high speed unit arrested a prominent soccer player on the N1 in Sandton on Sunday May 24 at about 7am.

“The player was charged with negligent and reckless driving alternative for exceeding the prescribed speed limit. He was released on R1000 bail at Police station B,” Sibasa said

He would not confirm or deny if Gabuza was the player in question.

“In terms of the department’s communication protocols one cannot divulge anyone’s name before appearing in court and not at liberty to disclose the name of any suspect up until he/ she appears in court, but we can confirm a prominent soccer player was arrested by our high speed unit,” Sibasa added.

The player will appear for the first time in the Randburg Magistrate’s court in July 2020, Sibasa told the Siya crew.

Read: Slimkat Leads List Of 10 Oldest Players Currently In The PSL

Remembering Ted Dimitru

BREAKING NEWS: England star Kieran Trippier is charged with breaching the same FA gambling rules that saw Daniel Sturridge hit with four-month ban over bets placed related to his £20m move to Atletico Madrid from Tottenham

• Kieran Trippier faces a ban from football after allegedly breaching betting rules
• The FA have charged him over bets placed related to his move to Atletico Madrid
• Trippier said: ‘I have at no stage placed football related bets during my career’
• He has been charged with breaching the same betting rules as Daniel Sturridge
• Sturridge received a four-month suspension and was hit with a £150,000 fine 

By Sami Mokbel for the Daily Mail

Published: 11:01 EDT, 1 May 2020 | Updated: 17:32 EDT, 1 May 2020

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In November 2016, according to court documents unsealed this week in New York, one of the nation’s top high school basketball players and his mother signed a series of forms so the player could accept an athletic scholarship from Kansas.

In the forms — similar to those signed by more than 460,000 athletes at NCAA schools each year — both the player and his mother asserted they had no knowledge of any violations of NCAA rules regarding amateurism. Over the years, the NCAA has interpreted amateurism rules to prohibit a long list of benefits for players and families, ranging from duffel bags full of cash and luxury cars to more modest perks, such as gas money and free meals.

When the player’s mom signed those forms, she was lying, according to federal prosecutors, who did not identify her or her son in court documents. Just days before, prosecutors allege, the mother had met with an Adidas consultant in a hotel in New York and accepted $30,000 cash — routed through one of Adidas’ grassroots teams — meant to ensure her son enrolled at Kansas, one of Adidas’ premier endorsed college programs, and if he made it to the NBA, signed an endorsement deal with the apparel company.

In college basketball circles, this allegation, contained in an indictment charging an Adidas executive with wire fraud for arranging the payment, was the latest sign that the ongoing Justice Department probe of the basketball black market is far from over.

To economists and lawyers familiar with both federal law enforcement and college sports, however, this week’s charges brought into sharper focus an aspect of the investigation that has puzzled them for months: The FBI and federal prosecutors in New York are trying to put people in prison for paying college athletes and their families.

“I still can’t figure out why the FBI is involved with this,” said Dan Rascher, a California economist who has consulted for college athletes on lawsuits challenging NCAA rules. “There’s literally no problem at all with people being paid for their skills to provide value to an educational institution. Except if the people we’re talking about are college athletes.”

[New indictment ties Kansas, N.C. State into FBI’s college basketball probe]

By making money from her son’s talent, and lying about it, prosecutors allege, the mother conspired with Adidas officials to defraud Kansas, which could have been exposed to fines and other sanctions if the NCAA learned of the payments. This theory of fraud, which casts schools as victims because players or their parents have secretly taken money, is rare but has been deployed at least twice before by federal prosecutors: in a 1980s case involving a sports agent with ties to the mafia, and a 2000s case involving a convicted cocaine dealer making it rich as an AAU coach.

Six months after the first arrests, however, the FBI and prosecutors in New York have yet to make public any allegations involving mob ties or drug dealers, or even tax evasion, which some legal experts expected would eventually emerge, offering justification for the public money spent.

A spokesman for prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who are overseeing the investigation, declined to comment.

Colleges as victims?

In the scenario involving the Kansas recruit, according to prosecutors, the fraud occurred when the mother signed that form despite knowing she’d taken money for her son’s talents, in violation of NCAA rules. The mother, according to court documents, is an unindicted co-conspirator of the Adidas executive.

The victim of this fraud conspiracy, according to prosecutors? Kansas, a school with one of the wealthiest basketball programs in the country, whose coach makes $5 million annually to oversee an amateur basketball team that is regularly one of the star attractions in the Big 12 Conference, which has packaged basketball and football television rights to help generate $371 million in annual revenue, and in the NCAA tournament, which generates more than $850 million for the NCAA and member schools each year.

The mother was not charged with a crime but, according to experts familiar with federal investigations, likely will be threatened with the prospect of arrest by prosecutors, if she hasn’t already, as they seek her testimony against the Adidas officials.

[Instead of paying players to go to Miami and Louisville, he kept the money. The FBI let him go.]

The latest charges, which also involve a recruit whose father allegedly took $40,000 from Adidas to secure his son’s commitment to North Carolina State, rest entirely upon the very same NCAA rules that are the subject of a federal antitrust lawsuit in California. Lawyers representing athletes in that case, set for trial in December, are portraying the NCAA and schools as a cartel that colludes to cap the earnings of college athletes at the value of a scholarship, sending hundreds of millions of dollars in excess revenue, collectively, into school coffers and paychecks for coaches and administrators.

The NCAA, on its website, defends amateurism as a “bedrock principle of college athletics.” Amateurism rules, the NCAA states, “ensure the students’ priority remains on obtaining a quality educational experience and that all of student-athletes are competing equitably.”

If the NCAA permitted college athletes to sign endorsement deals with shoe companies, as Olympic organizations do with their athletes, legal experts noted, prosecutors would have been unable to file the wire fraud charges announced this week against Jim Gatto, an Adidas global marketing executive who also faces charges for similar allegations of arranging payments to steer recruits to Miami and Louisville.

“There are no true victims here. It’s a derivative crime based on alleged violations of a private, nonprofit entity’s internal bylaws,” said Don Jackson, an Alabama attorney who has represented athletes in NCAA rules compliance cases. “This would be like someone lying on an application to the 4-H club and getting charged with wire fraud.”

Blurred lines

Jackson is among many who note even the NCAA has struggled to determine when shoe company money flowing into a youth team is against its rules.

Among those who run grassroots basketball teams, the key to procuring shoe company money has long been clear: Get the top high school players. Such as star often can bring his team a shoe company sponsorship, which can run as much as $100,000 or $150,000 per year, to engender the kind of loyalty that will lead the player to choose to play for one of the colleges whose basketball programs are sponsored by the same company and, ultimately, to sign an endorsement deal with the company if he makes it to the NBA. Nike, Adidas and Under Armour are the three dominant spenders in the grassroots market.

In 2009, Jackson represented Renardo Sidney, a Mississippi State player who drew the NCAA’s attention because Reebok had sponsored his grassroots team and hired his father to a consultant’s position. The NCAA ultimately suspended Sidney for a season, ruling, among other violations, that Sidney’s father couldn’t properly account for money that had flowed into a nonprofit foundation he’d created, connected to the Reebok-sponsored team.

This year, however, the NCAA approved Duke freshman star Marvin Bagley III as eligible, even though the circumstances surrounding his father’s relationship with Nike raised eyebrows around grassroots and college basketball. As reported by the Oregonian last month, Bagley’s family was struggling financially a few years ago, shortly before Nike agreed to sponsor Phoenix Phamily, the grassroots team featuring Bagley III as a player and his father, Marvin Bagley Jr., as coach and team director.

[The FBI also probed payments to college athletes in the ’80s. It didn’t end well.]

In a 2016 interview with Sports Illustrated, Bagley Jr. — the father, who did not return a request to comment — said the family was relying on the Nike sponsorship and a fledgling apparel company he had created to “make ends meet.”

Bagley III attended Duke, one of Nike’s premier endorsed college teams, and after one year with the Blue Devils, he declared for the NBA draft, and is expected to be among the first players selected. Bagley III has not yet made his shoe endorsement plans public, but he is widely expected to sign with Nike.

Duke basketball officials declined to comment when asked about Bagley’s eligibility. The NCAA also declined to comment.

There are significant differences between the details publicly known about Nike’s dealings with the Bagleys and the specifics alleged in court documents of Adidas’s dealings with representatives of recruits. Nike signed Bagley’s team to a publicly announced sponsorship. Adidas executive Gatto is accused of arranging cash handoffs to families of recruits through an Adidas consultant who oversaw several grassroots teams, and at N.C State, through an assistant coach who has not been identified.

The economic realities displayed by these deals are basically the same though, economists note. Top high school recruits have more financial value — to shoe companies, agents and financial advisers — than NCAA rules currently allow them to earn.

After the first round of arrests last September, the NCAA created a commission, led by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, to propose rules changes to college basketball. Unless the commission recommends Olympic-style rules permitting athletes to sign endorsement deals, economists and legal experts doubt it will have a significant impact in reducing these secret dealings that prosecutors in New York believe are defrauding major colleges.

“When you have a system that generates billions of dollars in revenue, and you have an unpaid labor force, you’re going to breed a black market,” Jackson said. “That’s just a fact.”

An Aberdeen FC director has been fined by the Scottish FA for breaching football rules by placing bets on matches.

Duncan Skinner was charged by the governing body with placing 589 bets on almost 1500 matches over the course of four seasons, including one wager backing Celtic to beat Aberdeen in February of this year.

The governing body brought four charges against Skinner, one for each season in which he was believed to have placed bets. The claims against the non-executive director, who is also chairman of the Aberdeen FC Community Trust, were not linked to match-fixing.

Skinner was summoned to a disciplinary hearing in January but waived the normal preparation period to ask for an earlier date. An independent panel considered the case on Thursday and ruled that he was guilty of the first two charges and he was fined £1000 in total, to be paid within 30 days.

The remaining two charges have been deferred until March 29, 2018 to allow time to consider a report from Mr Skinner. In the interim, Aberdeen are to conduct a full internal review and remind office holders of their obligations under the Scottish FA’s rules.

The Scottish FA’s disciplinary rules state: “No club, official, team official or other member of team staff, player, match official or other person under the jurisdiction of the Scottish FA shall gamble in any way on a football match.”