Former Cincinnati Bengals and Tampa Bay Buccaneers Coach Sam Wyche is "doing great" after undergoing heart transplant surgery, according to Darin Gantt of NBC's Pro Football Talk.
Wyche went into surgery Tuesday morning and the procedure took around 4½ hours. His family posted on Facebook that he was doing well in recovery.
His children told WLWT-TV in Cincinnati that Wyche had just been told by doctors he was about a week away from being sent home with hospice care, before the donor match was found.
"I pretty much thought most of the day was, he was going to end up passing away and then found out he was hopefully going to get a new heart, which it turned out he did," Kerry Wyche said. "I told my kids last night when they were saying prayers to say an extra prayer for the donor family. Even though we're celebrating, they're preparing for a funeral. And so I pray for them as well."
Wyche's son Zak, who is an assistant coach at a Cincinnati high school, said his team had just prayed for his father as the news came in.
"[The] football team prayed for my father yesterday at the end of practice, and he said it's about the same time when the doctor came in and they'd found a heart for him," Zak Wyche said.
Wyche is recovering in a Charlotte, N.C., hospital, where he was in the same room as Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson when he got a heart transplant in 2009.
Harambe's back
Fans who want to customize their favorite teams' jerseys with "Harambe" on the back can do so again as of Thursday, after the name mistakenly appeared on a retailer's list of banned words.
ESPN's Darren Rovell reported an official with a Major League Baseball team contacted Fanatics, concerned that fans were customizing their jerseys with the name of the gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo that became an Internet phenomenon. Fanatics runs online retail for the four major North American leagues. Fanatics spokesman Meier Raivich said a company employee proactively added Harambe to a frequently updated list that instantly rejects the word when a fan tries to customize it on the nameplate on the back of a jersey.
Harambe was subsequently added to the banned list for the other leagues, including the NFL, which received the majority of the blame on social media Wednesday even though league officials had nothing to do with the decision.
As word began to circulate of the banning, Fanatics officials decided that Harambe didn't belong on the list, which includes thousands of words, made up mostly of profane and slang words. On Thursday morning, Harambe was removed from the list.
Harambe the gorilla was killed by a zoo worker May 28 after a 3-year-old boy climbed into the habitat and was dragged by the animal. The incident was captured on video and quickly went viral.
Sports on 09/16/2016