Connecticut’s Hamilton Will Reportedly Opt for NBA Draft

Richard Hamilton, who led Connecticut to its first national championship in March, reportedly will skip his senior year to enter the NBA draft.

ESPN reported Monday that Hamilton will announce at a news conference today that he will leave the school. A school spokesman would not confirm the report, but said a news conference has been scheduled.

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Konstantinos Charissis, a 6-foot-11 center from Athens, Greece, has signed a letter of intent to play for the USC men’s basketball team next season. The club player joins a squad that had no one taller than 6-9 last season.

Tennis

Michael Chang squandered two match points and lost to Sjeng Schalken of the Netherlands, 6-7 (7-3), 6-1, 7-6 (7-5), in the German Open at Hamburg.

“All I had to do was make that backhand volley,” Chang said. “I had those match points, I was serving for the match. But I just couldn’t close it. It’s been that kind of year.”

A former top 10 player who won the French Open in 1989, Chang has been struggling with his game and is sinking rapidly in the rankings. He is ranked No. 42. Schalken is No. 53.

Anna Kournikova battled her troubled serve and inconsistent ground strokes before advancing to the second round of the Italian Open at Rome when her injured opponent, Italy’s Rita Grande, quit during the third set. It was 6-7 (7-4), 6-3, 2-0 when Grande ended the match because of a leg injury.

Auto Racing

The track outside Charlotte, N.C., where three fans were killed Saturday night by flying debris is offering counseling for spectators who witnessed the tragedy, and has set up a trust fund for the families of those who were injured and killed.

Lowe’s Motor Speedway officials also said that they probably would increase the height of the safety fences surrounding the 1 1/2-mile superspeedway in response to the crash during the VisionAire 500.

Prior to Saturday night, no spectators had died at the track, which opened in 1960.

In the rain-delayed NHRA Pennzoil Nationals at Dinwiddie, Va., John Force continued his domination of the Funny Car division by winning beating teammate Rony Pedregon in the final with a speed of 303.30 mph and an elapsed time of 4.940 seconds. It was Force’s fourth victory in six events this season.

Soccer

Kevin Payne, president and general manager of the D.C. United, was fined $15,000 by MLS for remarks he made after his team’s 3-2 loss to the Chicago Fire on Saturday. There were 11 yellow-card cautions and three red-card ejections given out by referee Stuard Dougal, a Scottish official who was working the game as part of an MLS exchange program.

“What we witnessed tonight was an absolute travesty,” Payne said. “In all the years I’ve been around soccer, I’ve never seen anything like that performance. I don’t think we need to go 4,000 miles to get a referee that poor. If he did this in Scotland, he’d never referee again.”

Dougal, rated the No. 3 referee in Scotland, has given out 26 cards in three games.

Jurisprudence

Six years after Boston Celtic star Reggie Lewis died while shooting baskets, a malpractice suit went to trial in Boston in an attempt by his widow to restore his reputation and collect the millions he could have made.

Donna Harris-Lewis contends her husband’s doctors, some of the city’s most respected physicians, misdiagnosed and mistreated the basketball player’s fatal heart rhythm disturbance.

The doctors say Lewis used cocaine and lied about it, making an accurate diagnosis impossible.

Miscellany

Brian Smolinski scored two goals to lead the United States to a 5-2 victory over winless Austria in the World Hockey Championships at Oslo, Norway. The U.S. (2-0) advanced to the quarterfinals and will face the Czech Republic Wednesday in the Group C final game.

In a Group A game, Scott Thornton and Rob Blake each scored second-period goals to give Canada (2-0) a 4-2 victory over Norway.

Irish swimmer Michelle Smith-De Bruin, who won three gold medals at the 1996 Summer Olympics, began her appeal of a four-year drug ban by trying to cast doubt on the testing procedures used by swimming’s governing body.

“I don’t have to prove my innocence here,” Smith-De Bruin told the International Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, when asked whether she had tampered with a urine sample. Her lawyer, Peter Lennon, said the decision last August by a FINA drug panel was “patently unsound.”

Names in the News

Jeff Diamond, 45, senior vice president of football operations for the Minnesota Vikings, has resigned. Diamond had told owner Red McCombs he sought to become the team’s general manager. McCombs said Diamond will serve as a consultant through Jan. 31.

Less than three days after he was formally announced as the Mid-American Conference’s new commissioner, Tom McElroy, the senior associate commissioner in the Big East, backed out of the job because he said he “didn’t realize what the sacrifices were.”