Cheap Seats

The Canadian Amateur Boxing Association rule dictates a fighter must be clean-shaven, other than a mustache. The rule is intended to make it easier to clean and stitch cuts and to guard against infection.

Guess he’ll have to become a promoter, so he can wear his hair any way he wants.

Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?

The NBA holds an orientation session for rookies to inform them about investments and warn them about media and sleazy elements around the game, sometimes mistaking one for another. But what the league should do is get players jobs.

Cleveland’s Bobby Phills and Terrell Brandon worked as waiters at a charity event last week, and afterward Phills said: “It’s easier to remember plays than to remember orders. I kept taking food to the wrong tables and everything.”

Added Brandon: “I have a lot of respect for the people who do that job. It seems like people always needed something, a knife, a spoon, a napkin, water.”

Question is, did these guys need their agents to total up the tabs?

Age before … beauty?

Now that Luc Longley has sidelined himself with a shoulder injury sustained while body surfing, Dennis Rodman is probably the Bulls’ best defensive center. But this supposed warrior wants no part of the job.

“I can’t play these 7-foot, 300-pound guys every night,” Rodman said. “There’s no way in hell. That takes a toll on me. We have to find a center out there. Robert Parish can’t carry us. He’s too damned old.”

He’s not the only thing getting old.

A milestone, not a millstone

Clippers coach Bill Fitch is on a roll. After suffering his 1,000th NBA loss, Fitch said he thanked his players for not losing in overtime.

“If you’re going to lose, I’d just as soon not get second-guessed about the way we lost,” he said.

And now? “On to the next 1,000,” Fitch said cheerily.

Don’t come in here with that weak stuff

Maybe you saw that the suit filed by former University of Washington football players charging the Pac-10 with antitrust violations was rejected by a federal appeals court.

Well, it wasn’t just rejected. It was hurled back in their faces. Judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall wrote that the players “do not offer even the thinnest reed of support for (their) proposition” that the league imposed inappropriate penalties.

And another jurist was irate that the court declined to decide whether a player could ever challenge a conference penalty on antitrust grounds. Stephen Trott said the court should prevent “the next group of distant plaintiffs denied a free vacation from filing equally frivolous lawsuits.”

The last word …

“It’s great to see the fall collection of Bruno Magli hunting boots.”

- WGN radio analyst Dan Hampton, on the fashion sense of Packers fans

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: KEYWORD = HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW A 16-YEAR-OLD SIKH BOXER HAS QUIT THE SPORT RATHER THAN SUBMIT TO A RULE THAT BANS BEARDED COMPETITORS. “I WANTED TO KEEP BOXING,” SAID SUKHVIR DHALIWAL OF PRINCE GEORGE, BRITISH COLUMBIA. “I LOVE BOXING, BUT IT’S A RELIGIOUS THING. YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO CUT YOUR HAIR BECAUSE IT’S A GOD-GIVEN THING.”