Morning briefing

This is the stuff of legends

San Francisco forward Dior Lowhorn holds the rare distinction of having played for two coaches with 800 wins: Eddie Sutton and Bob Knight.

So, after Sutton got his 800th victory last Saturday, the 6-foot-7 sophomore transfer from Texas Tech was asked to compare the two.

“They’re very similar in the way they go about . . . “ was all Lowhorn could get out before Sutton interrupted.

“I don’t cuss as much,” Sutton said. “I want that on the record.”

“We’ll get to that,” Lowhorn said, before continuing.

“There’s a lot of similarities minus the cussing and hostility,” he said. “When you get amongst the elite coaches, you can’t distinguish one from the other.”

To which Sutton offered the following translation: “What he’s trying to tell you is that he can take a good chewing out.”

Trivia time

Knight retired this week with 902 career victories, an NCAA record. Whose record did he break last year with his 880th victory?

Mother knows best

Isiah Thomas was one of the country’s most prized recruits in high school basketball in 1979 and could have picked any number of colleges, so why did the free-wheeling point guard from big-city Chicago chose to play for a disciplinarian such as Knight in small-town Indiana?

“My mother chose Indiana,” Thomas told New York Newsday. “He was one of only a few coaches who didn’t come in and try to bribe my mom. My mom never took the money [offered elsewhere] and we kept telling her, ‘Mom, take the money.’ But she admired his honesty and his discipline.”

Soup-er bowl

The New England Patriots took a hit in Super Bowl XLII and New England clam chowder is taking a hit in New York’s Grand Central Oyster Bar.

The restaurant planned to change the name of the famous chowder to “Giants Clam Chowder” for a week in celebration of the Giants Super Bowl victory.

The restaurant’s owner, Mike Garvey, said in a statement that it is “an appropriate tribute.”

Card trick

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a self-professed, die-hard Yankees fan, will appear in a Topps baseball card celebrating with the Boston Red Sox after their 2007 World Series victory.

The thing is, he wasn’t really there.

The company used the magic of computer graphics manipulation to put Giuliani in the middle of the celebration as a joke because Giuliani said last year that he was rooting for the Red Sox in the World Series because he was “an American League fan.”

“We took that and thought it would make for a funny card, since the Red Sox won,” said Clay Luraschi, baseball brand manager for The Topps Co. “We thought, let’s put him in the championship dog pile.”

Head games

Thomas Dold and Suzanne Walsham repeated their titles in the Empire State Building Run-Up as the fastest man and woman to climb 88 flights of stairs to the top of the famed skyscraper.

Dold, 23, finished in 10 minutes, eight seconds and Walsham, 34, climbed the 1,576 steps in 12:44. Both are expected to defend their titles next year.

One contestant, however, said he wouldn’t be back.

Michael Siegell, a 42-year-old psychiatrist was asked what hurt most during the climb. He pointed to his head.

“It’s a dismal gray stairwell,” he said. “Mentally, its tough. I’ll probably never do it again.”

Trivia answer

Dean Smith, who had 879 victories with North Carolina from 1961 to 1997.

And finally

A teleconference with Green Bay Packers Coach Mike McCarthy was interrupted when a television reporter mistakenly piped in audio from an episode of the courtroom show “Judge Judy.”

The Green Bay Press Gazette reported that a woman’s voice, describing a road-rage incident, could be heard saying “he gave us the finger.”

McCarthy joked, “Hey, use all of her quotes -- they’re a lot better than mine.”

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peter.yoon@latimes.com