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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City's annual air show took to the skies again Sunday, a day after spectators were sent home when a stunt pilot crashed to the ground while performing loops and spirals in his small plane.
Sunday's performance opened with a tribute to pilot Bryan Jensen, including a rendition of taps and planes flying in missing man formation. The day's show was dedicated to him.
The Minnesota native was killed Saturday afternoon when his biplane named "The Beast" failed to pull out of a dive and crashed into a fiery ball on the grass next to a runway at Wheeler Downtown Airport.
Thousands of spectators at the Kansas City Aviation Air Show fell into a hush after Jensen's plane hit the ground, and event organizers immediately shut performances down for the day.
Jeff Caddell said he met Jensen four years ago and considered him to be an extraordinary pilot who loved interacting with people as much as he did flying.
"Bryan was nothing but a class act kind of guy. He loved people so much and loved seeing them have a great time," said Caddell, who organizes the annual Wings Over Ashville air show in Alabama. "I would see Bryan take special time out with the public to answer questions, and he did it on a level that made you feel special - unlike how some public figures do."
Authorities have not released Jensen's age and hometown.
Caddell said Jensen often participated in air shows with his girlfriend, C.C. Gerner, who also is a stunt pilot. According to Gerner's website, she was scheduled to be at the Kansas City air show this weekend.
When The Associated Press reached Gerner by phone Sunday afternoon, she said she wasn't ready to talk about Jensen's crash.
Jensen announced on his website, www.beastairshows.com, in January that he had been promoted to captain with Delta Airlines. A spokeswoman with Delta told the AP on Sunday she knew about his crash but couldn't confirm he worked for the airline because there was no human resources staff available to verify it.
According to Jensen's website, he had more than 23,000 hours of commercial flight time and had been flying aerobatics for 15 years.
Caddell said his last memory of Jensen was after an air show when a little boy came up to talk to him.
"Bryan got on one knee to have a picture made with the boy and stayed kneeled down to talk with him for a bit," Caddell said. "That was Bryan.
"Someone would come up to him and ask a basic question that a lot of people would hesitate to ask. He would take the time to answer on a level that anyone would understand. A lot of times other guys would blow you off."
The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the crash, but show director Ed Novallis said there's nothing to indicate that weather or other outside factors contributed to the crash.
Officials said Saturday's fatal crash was the first ever recorded at the Kansas City air show. Sunday's show went off without any problems.

Roanoke College won’t be jumping to conclusions about Colorado College, the first school from west of the Mississippi River to play in the Division III men’s lacrosse tournament in the past seven years.
Nobody knows better than the Maroons that lacrosse talent can come from anywhere — not just the traditional hotbeds of Maryland and Long Island.
Maroons’ senior midfielder Justin Tuma, who last week was named Old Dominion Athletic Conference player of the year, is a senior from Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
Tuma is one of four players from Michigan on Roanoke’s roster — “and we’ve got three Texas guys coming in next year,” coach Bill Pilat said Tuesday.
Lacrosse is going big-time in Michigan, where the University of Michigan has been the talk of the national club ranks and recently upgraded to Division I status, but it wasn’t always that way.
Tuma went to Lahser High School, which didn’t have enough lacrosse players to form its own team and joined forces with another school to play in a club league.
That was opposed to ice hockey. Tuma played right wing on a Lahser team that won the state championship when he was a freshman in high school.
“When I was growing up, everybody played hockey,” said Tuma, who shares an ice hockey background with the leading scorer for the Roanoke women’s team, Gina Valles. “I played hockey every year of my life.”
Tuma (5 feet 10 inches tall, 185 pounds) said it was his goal to play ice hockey in college — and he did, after a fashion. He was on a club ice hockey team in Roanoke up through his junior year in 2009-10.
“It wasn’t till late in my junior year [in high school] that I decided that lacrosse was for me,” Tuma said. “Hockey, in college, is a lot different from any other sport. You have to play juniors first, and that requires you to leave state and live with a host family in North Dakota, or some place like that.
“Believe it or not, I talked to the Michigan [lacrosse] coach quite a bit. I got accepted into the school. But, I wanted to get away from Michigan. They were a club team, one of the best, but I wanted to play D-III lacrosse. I wanted to play a varsity sport.”
Tuma’s calling card at Roanoke has been faceoffs, although he did not take faceoffs in ice hockey and took two faceoffs in his freshman year at Roanoke.
He recently broke a Roanoke record for career ground balls that had stood for 27 years. His faceoff wingmen had something to do with that, but often he’s away with the ball before the outside players get involved.
At one point Sunday in a 12-10 victory over Lynchburg College, Roanoke scored goals four seconds apart, not the easiest feat to accomplish when the ball is placed in the middle of the field after each goal.
The second of those goals Sunday came on a Tuma pass to Jeff Keating, but Tuma also has 54 goals over the past two seasons.
Pilat’s first look at Tuma came on a video that showed highlights from ice hockey, lacrosse and golf. Tuma won his conference golf championship in a driving rainstorm.
“In lacrosse, it showed him winning faceoffs and going down and scoring, without a lot of passing,” Pilat said. “We felt he would be a specialty-type kid. We didn’t realize he could do all these other things.”
On top of everything else, Tuma is a 3.6 student who recently was named the ODAC scholar-athlete of the year for men’s lacrosse. He graduated last weekend with a major in business and a minor in economics.
Tuma occasionally missed the first part of practice on Tuesdays because he was involved in a student team that manages an investment fund.
“I think it’s a half-million dollars of real money,” Pilat said “I don’t know all the details, but my understanding is that it’s part of the college’s endowment.”
Tuma said he has applied for a graduate assistant’s position in Great Britain, but he has some unfinished business, starting at 7 tonight, when Roanoke (14-3) entertains Colorado College (15-0).
“You never know what to expect from the picks,” Tuma said, “but, when I saw Colorado College, I thought, ‘That’s sweet.’ It’s cool to be playing somebody from the west side of the country. I almost wish we could go out there.”
The teams have none of the same opponents, not that Tuma would be looking for comparisons.
“I relate it to March Madness and the [Division I] NCAA basketball tournament,” he said. “You never want to look too far ahead.”
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To see more of The Roanoke Times, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.roanoke.com/.
Copyright (c) 2011, The Roanoke Times, Va.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

The Dallas Stars may be closer to having a new owner, the (Toronto) Globe and Mail reports.
Tom Gaglardi, a Vancouver businessman, has agreed to a price — believed to be about $250 million — and most of the terms for buying the team and a stake in American Airlines Center, according to the newspaper. Gaglardi, a source tells the Globe and Mail, will buy the franchise after it is placed in bankruptcy, a move designed to free Gaglardi from claims made against former owner Tom Hicks. Bankers seized the franchise in 2009 after Hicks defaulted on hundreds of millions of dollars in loans.Forbes estimates the franchise’s value at $228 million, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Gaglardi, 43, will soon enter an exclusive negotiating period of about 30 days to complete the purchase, a source tells the newspaper. The Globe and Mail reports that it is hoped a deal can be completed by late May; the Dallas Morning News reports that July 1 is the target date for an agreement.
The Globe and Mail reports that the NHL opposes bankruptcy for the Stars, but others consider the move necessary because of the number of creditors. It is also possible that in bankruptcy court, that bidders who lost out to Gaglardi could resurface, according to the Globe and Mail. The Dallas Morning News reports two local groups are interested in the franchise.
Gaglardi told the Globe and Mail he was “not at liberty” to discuss the matter. He also declined to comment to the Dallas Morning News. NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told the Globe and Mail that its source’s information was “partially true and partially inaccurate.”
“Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to specify which is which,” Daly wrote in an email.
This is not Gaglardi’s first attempt at becoming a NHL owner. He lost a court fight in 2008 for control of the Vancouver Canucks, and the Dallas Morning News reports he was linked to a group that was interested in buying the Atlanta Thrashers in 2009. He owns the Western Hockey League’s Kamloops Blazers with NHL players Shane Doan, Jarome Iginla and Mark Recchi.
The Morning News reports Gaglardi’s mother is from the Dallas area and that Gaglardi himself is a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Malcolm Jenkins is the only safety under contract for the New Orleans Saints so it’s safe to say that the team will be looking at the 2011 NFL Draft as a potential solution. Surely the Saints will focus on their incumbent players, such as Roman Harper, but won’t be able to do so until the NFL labor dispute is resolved.
When the Saints do look at draft prospects for their next safety, Bucky Brooks of NFL.com suggests they look at college corners.Brooks points to New Orleans free agent Darren Sharper as a prime example of a college corner that blossomed after a transition to safety in the NFL.
The role of a safety has changed in the past few seasons. While always a key part of pass defense, safeties used to have a greater role in run defense. But offenses have changed, with slot receivers a part of base formations, tight ends primarily used as pass catchers instead of run blockers and no-huddle offenses escalating passing numbers.
Having a player with the ball skills and coverage experience of a corner at safety helps offset those changes. Jimmy Smith is one corner prospect that is already being spoken of as a safety at the next level.

If things had worked out a bit differently, Charlie Valencia might still be fighting in Canada this month. Only, he’d be doing it with skates on his feet and a hockey stick in his hands rather than in the cage as a mixed martial artist.Valencia, 36, will meet Ivan Menjivar in a three-round bantamweight bout on the preliminary card of UFC 129 at the Rogers Centre in Toronto on April 30. He’s a diehard LA Kings fan and said he’d love to wear a Kings jersey to the cage in the heart of hockey country, but laughed and said “I’m afraid they’ll throw bottles at me.”So, Valencia is considering an alternative. He is also a big fan of former Toronto Maple Leafs captain Wendel Clark and is thinking of wearing Clark’s jersey on his way to the cage.“Wendel is the man,” said Valencia, who said Stevie Yzerman, Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky have been his favorite players. “Maybe I’ll get some love if come out with Wendel’s jersey.”Valencia was born and raised in Rosemead, Calif., a small city of about 50,000 east of Los Angeles. It’s one of the last places one would expect to find a hockey diehard, but there was something about the game that always fascinated him.When he was a kid, there wasn’t a lot of hockey equipment around and even less ice surface, so Valencia and his friends adapted. They used plumbing pipes they’d find to make their own hockey sticks and crushed cans to use as pucks.He played roller hockey and ice hockey and became an unusual sight as a 5-foot-2 enforcer. Valencia, who played ice hockey throughout high school and said he received interest from college programs, was a good skater and hard forechecker who, not surprisingly, relished the physical aspects of the game.He got as much of a kick out of dropping the gloves and fighting as he did scoring a goal.“I got into fights all the time, in roller hockey and in ice hockey,” said Valencia, who is 12-6 in his MMA career. “In ice hockey one time, it got so bad we ended up clearing the benches. Family members came on the ice. I remember my teammate grabbed one guy and I tore his helmet off and started punching it. It was great times. We had a really good time.”Valencia loved the sport so much that he wanted to take it as far as he could, but he also realized by the time he was 18, the pros weren’t too interested in guys his size. He turned to mixed martial arts and has fashioned a standout professional career.Of his six losses, four have come to men who have held or currently hold World Extreme Cagefighting or Ultimate Fighting Championship titles: Urijah Faber, reigning UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz, Brian Bowles and Miguel Torres.He’s coming off a one-sided loss to Torres and is just 3-3 in his last six fights. He’s spoken frequently of retirement the last few years, but also faces the specter of getting cut. The UFC roster is so deep that it is a rare fighter who keeps his job after back-to-back losses.That would put extra premium on the Menjivar fight, but the affable Valencia shrugs off the pressure. The last thing he’s worried about is being cut.“I’ve got enough to worry about thinking about Menjivar, because he’s an all-around great fighter and I have watched him for a long, long time,” Valencia said. “I’ve been looking at things for a while now like I’m on a one-fight contract each time. I’m used to it and it’s better that way, because you know you have to perform every fight.“You have to go in and fight your fight and that’s what I’m going to do. I want to be exciting and I’m not expecting there to be any lulls in the action. I think the way we match up, we could have people talking and pretty excited after this fight.”Valencia said it never ceases to amaze him the way the crowd gets into the fights at NHL games and roars its approval when the home team slugger skates to the penalty box.He wouldn’t mind bringing a little bit of his hockey experience with him and bring the house down with a rousing performance in hockey country.“This is a huge show and if you asked, I think pretty much all of the guys would want to be on it,” Valencia said. “Given that I got this spot, I want to take advantage of it and give everyone a fight to remember.”In other words, he wants to put on a fight that even Wendel Clark would have enjoyed.

The injury-depleted New York Knicks came within 13 seconds of recording their first National Basketball Association postseason win in 10 years as the Boston Celtics won 96-93 to lead the series by two games to none.
The Knicks played the second half at TD Garden in Boston last night without leading scorer Amar’e Stoudemire, who left the game with back spasms 3 minutes, 21 seconds before halftime. New York was also without point guard Chauncey Billups, who has a strained left knee. Carmelo Anthony led the Knicks with 42 points and 17 rebounds.
“I’ve probably never been more proud of a team and how they battled, the circumstances, and how hard they played and how tough they played,” Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni said.
Also last night, the Orlando Magic beat the Atlanta Hawks 88-82 to tie their Eastern Conference first-round playoff series at one game each and the Dallas Mavericks defeated the Portland Trail Blazers 101-89 to take a 2-0 advantage in their Western Conference series.
Billups, 34, will have a scan today on the knee that he injured with less than a minute remaining in Boston’s 87-85 win three days ago in the first game in the best-of-seven series.
D’Antoni said before last night’s game that he didn’t know if Billups will be ready for Game 3 on April 22 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Stoudemire, who had four points on 2-for- 9 shooting in 18 minutes of action last night, should be fit.
Garnett Score, Steal
The Knicks led the record 17-time NBA champion Celtics 93- 92 with 19 seconds to play last night. Kevin Garnett scored with 13 seconds left to make it 94-93 to Boston and then stole a pass before Delonte West completed the scoring with two free throws.
“I’m happy we won,” Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. “But I just know my team is better than that.”
Tonight, the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers will try to tie their series against the New Orleans Hornets after they lost the opening game. The San Antonio Spurs will also seek to rebound from an opening-game loss, to the Memphis Grizzlies, and the Oklahoma City Thunder will look to open a 2-0 series lead against the Denver Nuggets.
The Mavericks visit Portland for Game 3 in their series tomorrow, while the Hawks host Orlando in Atlanta on April 22.

BBVA Compass said today it has signed another major sports sponsorship deal, the third in the past 12 months, this one with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. Birmingham-based BBVA Compass has 110 branches in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and is the fourth-largest bank there, based on deposit share. Financial details of the sponsorship weren’t released.
The Dallas Mavericks have made the National Basketball Association playoffs for 11 straight seasons, and are owned by billionaire businessman Mark Cuban. In the past year, BBVA Compass has also signed on as the official bank of the NBA and as the title sponsor of the BBVA Compass Bowl, the post-season college football game played in Birmingham.
“We are very pleased to be partnering with the Dallas Mavericks, an organization that epitomizes innovation, provides its fans with a customer-friendly experience and is committed to improving the local communities around the Metroplex,” said BBVA Compass Chief Executive Manolo Sanchez.
BBVA Compass operates 716 U.S. branches and employs about 3,000 people in Birmingham.

Rory Sabbatini: A more mellow Sabbatini, humbled by real-life issues off the course, has the opportunity to be a legitimate force on the tour as we witnessed at PGA National, especially when he gets hot with the putter. He’s now recorded six career wins, and could wind up in double digits by the time he’s done.Y.E. Yang: Yang is suddenly on fire, with his second-place finish at the Honda coming after an impressive performance at the Match Play in Arizona. Maybe Yang, the 2009 PGA champion, is not a one-hit wonder in the majors, after all.
Ricky Barnes: For the first time in 2011, Barnes showed signs of life and finished fourth on a very difficult track. He has yet to win on tour, and with a game that can unravel in an instant, victory is no guarantee. But, with his swashbuckling style, he sure is fun to watch.
Graeme McDowell: A powerful argument can be made that, regardless of the official rankings, McDowell is truly the No. 1 player in the world. He won the U.S. Open. He was the star of the Ryder Cup. And, though it was a silly-season event, he rallied from four strokes down in December to defeat Tiger Woods at the Chevron Challenge. His 64 on Sunday proves he’s ready to keep it going.
Luke Donald: Fresh from his takedown of Martin Kaymer in the Match Play, Donald would have received a pass no matter how he performed at PGA National. But posting a top-10 finish indicates he won’t be satisfied with one victory this year and may finally break through at the majors.
Nick Price: And the Oscar for “old fogey of the week” goes to … Nick Price. Price, who was basically using the Honda Classic as a tune-up for the upcoming Champions Tour schedule, shot a solid 70 in the opening round and finished in a tie for 55th. We often forget that he was once the best player in the world.

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