Tose Receives High Praise From Mauch

Leonard Tose gambled away a fortune in Atlantic City, and it contributed to his losing the ownership of the Philadelphia Eagles, but don’t knock him in front of Gene Mauch.

“He’s a hell of a man,” the manager of the Angels told Frank Dolson of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “When Leonard Tose is your friend, you’ve got a real friend. The only guy I’ve ever heard of Leonard Tose hurting is Leonard Tose.”

When Mauch was fired by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1968, Tose did what he could to ease the pain by inviting Mauch and his wife on a luxury cruise.

“The three most lavish trips I took in my life were with Leonard,” Mauch said. “I mean lavish. In ‘68, we went on a cruise through New England--Nantucket, Cape Cod, all around up there--for seven or eight days.

“Another time, in the early ‘70s, we went to this resort just south of Acapulco. Leonard was a member. He invited Tom Landry and Roman Gabriel and myself.

“We were all there, two years in a row, and we had a hell of a time. Big villas for everybody. Guys standing at attention outside the patio all night long in case you had a whim that wanted to be fulfilled. The ocean was 50 yards that way and the golf course 20 yards the other way. Leonard’s a fun guy.”

Add Mauch: Warning critics not to write off the Angels because of their age, he said: “I remember Warren Spahn when he must have been about 38. Everybody started saying, ‘He’s too old, he’s too old.’ And, sure enough, by the time he was 44 or so, they were right.”

Asked to pick between Michael Jordan and Akeem Olajuwon as the NBA rookie of the year, Larry Bird put it this way: “If I had to pick one of the two to be on my team, it would be Olajuwon. But Jordan just may be the best player in the league.”

No team has repeated as NBA champions since the 1968-69 Boston Celtics, but Dennis Johnson likes the chances of the current Celtics.

“I think the biggest thing that keeps us going is that everyone knows their roles,” said Johnson who won a ring with the Seattle SuperSonics in 1978-79. “That time in Seattle, we came back the next year and everyone wanted to score a little more, shoot a little more, including me. Here, the guys come in knowing we have the same roles, and we need a little more hustle to get what we had last year. And that’s what we’ve been doing.”

For What It’s Worth: Jerome (Pooh) Richardson, 6-1 guard for Franklin High School in Philadelphia, has won the prestigious Markward Award as the city’s top high school basketball player. Richardson has signed with UCLA.

Past winners of the award include Wilt Chamberlain, UCLA Coach Walt Hazzard and UCLA assistant coach Andre McCarter.

Quotebook

Catcher Bob Kearney of the Seattle Mariners, to Bruce Jenkins of the San Francisco Chronicle: “I know some people think I’m stupid, but my parents didn’t raise no dummies. Hey, there are different kinds of intelligence. Albert Einstein was bad in English. Of course, Einstein was German.”