Moody, who was diagnosed after noticing a weakness in his shoulder while training in the gym, says the progression of his disease seems gradual.

“I’m good at the moment,” he said.

“The only sort of significant noticeable change is still in my hand. The shoulder strength is diminished, but not significantly reduced since diagnosis.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, the hardest thing is noticing little things every day. The other day I noticed a slight difference in my finger strength – whether it was opening a bottle top, holding a fork, cutting your food.

“Those little things mentally are a challenge when they present themselves, but I think within a day you can move past it and just focus on functional things I can do, rather than things that I’m less able to.”

Moody, who set up his own charitable foundation shortly after he retired and raised millions of pounds to fund research into brain tumours,, external says recruiting for June’s cycle and a new cause was straightforward.

Jonny Wilkinson, Mike Tindall, Martin Corry, Ben Kay, Phil Vickery and Andy Gomarsall – all fellow members of the squad that won England’s only Rugby World Cup – will take part in the ride, along with the ex-Leicester and Bath flanker’s former team-mates Tom Croft, Geordan Murphy, Leon Lloyd, Ben Youngs, Tom Youngs, Lee Mears, Danny Care, Dan Hipkiss and Louis Deacon.

Moody’s teenage sons Dylan and Ethan will also be part of the peloton.

“I have done a challenge every year since retiring, some years more than one,” said Moody.

“I really wanted to make sure that I got another one in. I don’t know how many I have got left to do so that was the reason for it being so soon, to make sure that physically I feel like I can contribute.

“I couldn’t be more grateful of my former colleagues. I chatted to Vicks [Vickery] the other day, he said ‘mate, I absolutely hate cycling, but I am 100% going to do this with you’.

“I’ve never seen Wilko [Wilkinson] on a bike. He’s probably hired a group of people to get him ready for the conditioning side of it. I dread to think how he’s going to turn up looking. He’s in unbelievable nick anyway.”

The college golf rankings are always in flux. But college golf course rankings? Not so much. With all due respect to fine layouts at Stanford, Williams, Ohio State, Oklahoma State and others, one campus course has long been consensus No. 1.

When it’s actually open, that is.

For Yale Golf Course, a celebrated Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor design, that’s been hit or miss in recent years. After shutting down at the end of the 2019 season, the course slumbered on through 2020, beset by maintenance problems that deepened during the pandemic. In late 2023, it shuttered again, this time for a full-scale renovation that rates among the most notable public-access redos in recent memory. That work consumed 2024 and 2025, but it’s now complete, and the scheduling could hardly be better-synced.

On April 28, just ahead of its centennial, Yale GC will be back in business, following a Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner-led renovation aimed at honoring Macdonald and Raynor’s original 1926 vision. Greens, tees, bunkers and fairways have been expanded to their historic dimensions. The iconic double punch bowl on No. 3 has been revived. The rare inverted bunkers on No. 6 are back. New championship tees push the layout past 7,000 yards, and every green has been rebuilt to USGA specs, a first in course history.

Yale once ranked as high as 71st on GOLF’s Top 100 Courses in the World list, but dropped off the last three editions, a rare — and glaring — shift in the college course hierarchy. It’s hard to imagine that the course won’t be in the mix next time ballots are submitted.

But never mind rankings. Let’s talk recreational play. Unlike many elite collegiate layouts, you don’t need a diploma — or an acceptance letter — to book a time at Yale. Green fees for non-affiliates run $350, which isn’t cheap but about what you’d expect for a course of this pedigree. Getting out on Yale, in other words, is much easier than getting in.

3 things I’m thinking

Philadelphia story: Another Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner project — the full restoration of Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia — is still roughly a year from completion. But an important phase crossed the finish line this week with the grand opening of Lincoln Financial Center at Cobbs Creek. A name like that makes the place sound like a baseball stadium. In fact, the center is a three-story building that houses a restaurant, pro shop and double-decker driving range with Toptracer technology, all good to go for the start of the 2026 season. As with other recent marquee muni revivals, including the Patch, the Park and Golden Gate Par 3, work at Cobbs Creek has been propelled by deep-pocketed private investment. And the benefits are already showing, though the big biggest payoff won’t come until 2027, when the updated Olde Course at Cobbs Creek (the original was designed by Hugh Wilson of nearby Merion fame) opens for play.

Whale of a change: The humpbacks will be back in Kapalua, but it’s hard to know what else might change now that the PGA Tour won’t be returning. You probably heard the news. The Tour has done away with its Hawaii Swing — both the Sony Open on Oahu, and The Sentry, the traditional season-opener at the Plantation Course in Kapalua on Maui. It’s no secret that Kapalua has been through the wringer in recent years, ravaged by drought and devastated by deadly wildfires in nearby Lahaina. Now comes the end of a 25-plus-year-old tournament that accounted for an estimated $50 million in annual economic activity for the island. Kapalua’s other course — the Bay Course — remains closed due to water issues. But the Plantation Course, which shuttered for three months last September, is up and running, which makes me wonder how it might be used in January, now that it won’t be hosting an tournament that it first staged in 1999. With the Tour pros absent, will that week revert to everyday resort play? Maybe. Maybe not. A well-placed source tells me that Kapalua is looking into welcoming another event during that same window, though what shape that might take is still TBD. 

Festive fundraiser? Possibly? More muni-related news, though it comes with a caveat. Registration is open for The Whole Hog, a daylong golf outing and barbecue fundraiser at East Potomac Golf Links in Washington D.C. It is scheduled for May 8 in support of National Links Trust — the same National Links Trust that was working to restore East Potomac when the federal government revoked its lease late last year. Though NLT still operates the course, that status is tenuous, a point underscored by the invitation to the event. The cost per player is $375, which includes 36 holes of golf, breakfast, lunch, dinner and tee prizes. But, the invitation notes, there’s “a chance that NLT will no longer be operating the course at the time of the event due to the actions of the Trump administration. If this occurs, we will refund the entry fee.”

Chelsea’s 3-0 defeat at the hands of Brighton on Tuesday proved the last straw.© AFP

FRISCO, Texas (AP) — The Dallas Cowboys are planning for George Pickens to play on the franchise tag this year and won’t negotiate with the star receiver or his agent on a long-term contract, executive vice president of personnel Stephen Jones said Wednesday.

Pickens hasn’t signed the one-year deal worth $27.3 million, which means the 25-year-old would face no financial penalties if he didn’t report to mandatory minicamp in June. The rest of the offseason program, which starts Monday, is voluntary.

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“We’ve made a decision that we’re going to have George play under the franchise tag, which won’t be a first for us,” Stephen Jones said. “So there won’t be negotiations on a long-term deal. But that’s certainly not a first for this organization and certainly won’t be a first in the league in terms of this decision as we move forward.”

Stephen Jones said he hasn’t talked to Pickens recently, but said owner Jerry Jones and coach Brian Schottenheimer met with him recently.

“It was good,” Schottenheimer said during the Cowboys’ news conference leading into the NFL draft, which starts Thursday night. “The thing that George knows about Jerry and myself is we’re very upfront and we’re honest. We had great conversation. We informed him. We think that’s important because that’s the way we handle all of our players and coaches.”

David Mulugheta, Pickens’ agent, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Pickens, acquired last offseason in a trade with Pittsburgh, had career highs in catches (93), yards receiving (1,429) and touchdowns (nine) for one of the best offenses in the NFL last season. Dallas had one of the worst defenses in the league and finished 7-9-1, missing the playoffs for the second year in a row.

The 2022 second-round pick out of Georgia thrived alongside CeeDee Lamb, who is going into the second year of a $136 million, four-year contract that currently ranks him third among NFL receivers with an average annual value of $34 million.

Lamb missed the entire offseason and training camp in 2024 holding out for the deal he signed about two weeks before the season opener.

The Cowboys couldn’t use the tag on Lamb because he was going into the fifth year of his rookie contract. The fifth year is a team option that goes with all deals for first-round picks. Second-rounders have four-year deals, and Pickens earned $6.8 million on his rookie contract.

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Pickens’ talent was on display during three seasons with the Steelers, but so were enough instances of petulant or indifferent behavior for then-coach Mike Tomlin to question his maturity.

Schottenheimer never took issue with Pickens publicly in his first season as a head coach after a quarter-century as an NFL assistant. But Pickens and Lamb were benched for the first series in Las Vegas after missing curfew following a casino visit the night before the game.

“There’s a lot of things that go into that,” Stephen Jones said of the decision not to go forward on a long-term deal this offseason. “Let’s start with the fact that it’s not easy having two receivers being paid top of the market. A quarterback that’s been here, being the highest-paid player in this league for many years now.”

“The other thing is the newness of George being here,” Stephen Jones said. “I think George has just done an amazing job. I mean he’s exceeded all expectations. And a lot of those things, they make their way toward a long-term deal, but that’s the biggest part of it — between the business and newness of it, I think that’s a big part of it.”

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Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you become a smarter, better golfer.

Hitting the ball long off the tee is not just fun, it’s also good for your score. The closer you can get the ball to the green, the closer you’ll be able to hit the ball to the hole (on average). And the closer your approach shots are hit, the more birdies you’ll make.

There are a variety of avenues you can pursue to add a few extra miles per hour to your clubhead and ball speeds, but for the sake of this column, we are going to cover it from an instruction angle. That way when you’re under the gun and need to fly a hazard on the course, you can lean on your technique.

For more on that, we turn to world long drive champ Kyle Berkshire.

A hack for more distance

The golf swing has many moving parts — and for maximum efficiency, all these components need to work in just the right manner. Berkshire likes to compare the golf swing to a symphony, with each part of the body representing a different instrument.

“When you get to the last part of the symphony, the wrist is what dictates how much of that power is released into the club,” Berkshire says.

The release of the wrists may not seem like a huge power driver, but in reality, these small muscles are crucial. The wrists are the last part of the body that moves energy out toward the clubhead, so releasing them in the correct way is essential for generating power.

“If you have wrists that don’t really rotate, you’re really going to be losing a tremendous amount of power,” Berkshire says. “It’s your last point of multiplication of the force.”

Berkshire explains that when he is swinging the driver, he likes to feel like his wrists are very “soft.” And if you want to add power to your swing, you should strive to feel that softness, too.

“I like to have very loose and relaxed wrists,” Berkshire says. “I feel like that’s a good visual to have.”

So, next time you want to add a little power to your drives, remember to keep your wrists soft. It’s a feel that the one of the longest drivers in the world uses — and it’ll work for you, too.

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Lucknow Super Giants: Aiden Markram, Mitchell Marsh, Rishabh Pant(w/c), Nicholas Pooran, Ayush Badoni, Mukul Choudhary, Mohammed Shami, Avesh Khan, Prince Yadav, Manimaran Siddharth, Mohsin Khan, Abdul Samad, Digvesh Singh Rathi, Matthew Breetzke, Mayank Yadav, Himmat Singh, George Linde, Josh Inglis, Anrich Nortje, Arjun Tendulkar, Shahbaz Ahmed, Akash Maharaj Singh, Akshat Raghuwanshi, Arshin Kulkarni, Naman Tiwari.

Rajasthan Royals: Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Dhruv Jurel(w), Riyan Parag(c), Shimron Hetmyer, Donovan Ferreira, Ravindra Jadeja, Jofra Archer, Nandre Burger, Brijesh Sharma, Ravi Bishnoi, Sandeep Sharma, Shubham Dubey, Lhuan-dre Pretorius, Ravi Singh, Yash Raj Punja, Adam Milne, Dasun Shanaka, Tushar Deshpande, Kuldeep Sen, Sushant Mishra, Yudhvir Singh Charak, Kwena Maphaka, Vignesh Puthur, Aman Rao Perala.

Former MLB outfielder Garret Anderson died of “acute necrotizing pancreatitis,” local reports citing the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner’s Office said.

The Los Angeles Angels announced the former star outfielder died late last week at the age of 53.

“Acute necrotizing pancreatitis” is a condition in which part of the pancreas dies, according to Cedars-Sinai. The California Post reported his death was ruled natural.

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Los Angeles Angels outfielder Garret Anderson swings at a pitch during a game against the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California, on April 8, 2007. (Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports)

A three-time All-Star, Anderson is in the conversation for the greatest Angel in franchise history, nearing the top of the leaderboard in many stats.

“Garret will forever hold a special place in the hearts of Angels fans for his professionalism, class, and loyalty throughout his career and beyond,” the team said in a social media post. “We extend our heartfelt condolences to the entire Anderson family.”

A call was made for “medical aid” to Anderson’s home in the early afternoon of April 16 after Anderson suffered a medical emergency. The Angels announced his death the next day.

Anaheim Angels Garret Anderson hits a three-run double against the San Francisco Giants in the third inning of Game Seven of the World Series in Anaheim, California, on Oct. 27, 2002. (Jeff Haynes/AFP)

MAMDANI TAKES ‘CURSE OF THE MAMBINO’ ON THE CHIN AS METS’ 11-GAME SKID SETS FRANCHISE RECORD

Anderson made his MLB debut with the California Angels in 1994 before becoming a true threat in the early 2000s. From 2002 to 2005, Anderson was named to all three of his All-Star Games, leading the majors with 56 doubles in 2002 and the American League in that same category with 49 the following season.

He is the franchise leader in hits, RBIs, doubles, and games played. His .296 average with the team is also the third-highest behind Vladimir Guerrero and Rod Carew, and he is second in runs with 1,024, behind only Mike Trout.

Perhaps the biggest hit of his career was his three-run double in Game 7 of that World Series, which made the score 4-1 Angels in the bottom of the third inning. That score would be the final.

Former Los Angeles Angels player Garret Anderson acknowledges spectators before his induction into the Angels Hall of Fame at Angel Stadium of Anaheim on Aug. 20, 2016. (Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports)

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Anderson was twice named a Silver Slugger and was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame in 2016.

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The England and Wales Cricket Board has appointed former national selector Ed Smith to its board as a non-executive director.

Smith, who played for Middlesex and Kent and earned three Test caps, will join the ECB on 1 October when his one-year term as MCC President ends.

He served as England men’s selector from 2018 to 2021, during which they won the World Cup on home soil in 2019.

The ECB said that Smith’s role “will provide scrutiny and challenge, looking at the long-term strategy and governance of the whole game, including performance cricket”.

Smith’s appointment comes after England’s miserable Ashes tour, where their preparation, attitude and professionalism came under intense scrutiny after the 4-1 thrashing.

He will replace replace Baroness Zahida Manzoor, who has completed her three-year term.

England’s international summer begins with the women’s white-ball series against New Zealand on 10 May before the men face the same opponents in the first Test on 4 June.