Cheap Seats

Time to lighten up

With writers searching for fresh angles on the home run chase, Tracy Stallard, the former Boston Red Sox pitcher who served up No. 61 to Roger Maris in 1961, is getting calls.

Not that Stallard is returning any.

“He has talked to me about it,” Maris’ widow told Murray Chass of The New York Times, “but I don’t want to quote anything he has said.”

Boys will be boys

Rivals complain that Jeff Gordon’s Hendrick Motorsports team cheats to improve tire performance late in races, prompting NASCAR to examine two tires, mounted during a critical pit stop in a recent victory.

No irregularities were found, but there will be further tests of the tires’ chemical compound structure, “to squash any perception that there is any doctoring going on,” a NASCAR spokesman said.

“We did adjust the air pressure and I know there’s a car owner fuming out there, saying we put something in the tire,” says Gordon’s crew chief, Ray Evernham.

“Yeah, we did put something in the tire. We put in air.”

There’s plenty of hot air to go around.

Marketing guys dig hole

Hoping to drum up interest in the moribund Minnesota football program, the university’s athletic department has launched a TV and print advertising blitz touting the misunderstood modern “angry” gopher. There’s only one problem.

“They’re all prairie dogs (in the ads), every one of them,” Minnesota Zoo official Jim Streater told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, after viewing the ads.

And the final shot of the prairie dogs/ gophers, which shows them rearing up and roaring?

“That’s real. They do make a bark like that,” Streater said, “but it’s an alarm, though. They’re not very aggressive. It’s a warning to get down and hide out.”

Perfect.

All they need is motivation

Looking for a way to make his young swimmers, ages 7-20, go faster, Mark Davies of Darwin, Australia, came up with a novel idea for a coaching aid. A 10-foot crocodile.

“I had told them that to help them go faster, they should imagine that a crocodile was chasing them, so I thought, because our sponsor is Crocodylus Park, we might be able to actually get a real crocodile,” Davies said.

His plan was to have the beast’s jaws wired shut before putting him in the pool.

“I thought it would be a good start to the swimming season,” he said.

The sponsor, a reptile park, wasn’t so sure and the Darwin City Council thought the whole idea was a croc and banned it.

Elvis not in this house

Southern Cal’s football players were not the only ones having opening-game jitters a week ago against Purdue. Says first-year coach Paul Hackett, the former Kansas City offensive coordinator: “I called two plays right out of the Chiefs’ playbook.”

The last word …

“I’m going to enter the ladies event maybe next year. Maybe I’ll get lucky and win that.”

- Pete Sampras, when asked what it will take for him to break through on the clay courts at the French Open.