Text messages from press row ...

Second baseman Chase Utley of the Philadelphia Phillies, a former UCLA and Long Beach Poly High star, is stalking a baseball immortal.

Utley, listed as the 4-1 favorite by bodoglife.com, could become the first former UCLA player to win the National League most valuable player award since 1949, when Jackie Robinson won it with the Brooklyn Dodgers. ...

Fred Lynn, MVP and rookie of the year with the Boston Red Sox in 1975, is the only former USC player to win baseball’s highest regular-season honor. ...

Yankee Stadium is well deserving of the accolades being heaped upon it in its final year, but to call its historical significance unrivaled among U.S. sporting venues is to deny the existence of the Coliseum. ...

The Coliseum has been home to two Olympics, two Super Bowls and a World Series, not to mention countless classic football games involving the Rams, Raiders, USC and UCLA, landmark appearances by John F. Kennedy, Billy Graham, Charles Lindbergh, Dwight Eisenhower, Gen. George S. Patton, Nelson Mandela, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Harlem Globetrotters, plus concerts featuring the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, the Who and U2. ...

Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News, noting that the Denver Nuggets were “fleeced, swindled and hustled” in the Marcus Camby trade: “The Clippers have their own history of dunderheadedness and might still be leading the Nuggets in that department, but this time the clown nose is on the other face.” ...

Former Clippers and UCLA coach Larry Brown tells the Sacramento Bee that he was ready to take over at Stanford this year before changing his mind and signing on with Michael Jordan and the Charlotte Bobcats. ...

Imagine that: Larry Brown changing his mind. ...

Speaking of flip-floppers, Brett Favre is showing a side of himself that, in terms of his everyman legacy, might have been better left unseen. ...

Ashley Harkleroad, scheduled to play in the WTA Tour’s East West Bank Classic starting Monday at the Home Depot Center, will appear in an eight-page nude pictorial in the August issue of Playboy, which hits newsstands today. ...

In an interview that aired Tuesday on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” Donald Trump referred to Trump National in Rancho Palos Verdes as “the No. 1-rated golf course in the state of California, better than Pebble Beach.” ...

Not according to Golf Magazine, which included 12 California courses in its 2007 list of the nation’s top 100 but made no mention of Trump National. ...

Pebble Beach came in at No. 4 on the list behind Pine Valley in New Jersey, Cypress Point and Augusta National. ...

David Cisneros of Whittier, USC Class of 1997, e-mails to say that he was the USC fan wearing the Rey Maualuga jersey Tuesday at the All-Star game. ...

Says Cisneros, noting that several fans greeted him with “fight on!” and Covina-born Michael Young of the Texas Rangers shot him a victory sign during batting practice, “I represent wherever I go.

Former Dodger Bill Buckner and posthumous honorees Emmett Ashford and Buck O’Neil will be inducted into the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Pasadena Central Library.

Also being honored: John Adams, a fan who has pounded a drum from the last row of the left-field stands at virtually every Cleveland Indians home game for nearly 35 years; and David W. Smith, founder of the nonprofit Retrosheet, which has collected and digitized box scores from more than 100,000 major league games and posted them at retrosheet.org. Admission to the event, open to the public, is free.

Kelly Slater, who once took a two-year break from the Assn. of Surfing Professionals World Tour because he was so dominant, has won four of five events this year at age 36 and holds a commanding lead in pursuit of his ninth world championship after winning Thursday at Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. ...

The 11-event tour comes to Trestles in September. ...

The U.S. Olympic baseball team, which begins its gold-medal quest in China on Aug. 13 against Korea, left a spot open on its 24-man roster this week, and, in an unrelated story, Barry Bonds’ agent said this month that the idled home run king would need only about 10 days to get ready to play. ...

You don’t think? ...

Get real.

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jerome.crowe@latimes.com