McHale’s Ahead of Himself

Before the first playoff game between the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers, Boston’s Kevin McHale emerged from the dressing room as Cleveland broadcaster Casey Coleman was doing a feature on Boston Garden.

Coleman, according to the New York Times, spoke of the 60-year-old building having a nicotine odor, being held up by 85 coats of paint and containing dead spots in its parquet floor.

Interjected McHale: “Yeah, but also tell them there are 16 championship banners hanging here.”

Later, when McHale was told the Celtics had won only 15 titles, he said: “I already added in this year’s championship.”

The 8,741 fans who turned out in Phoenix to watch the crippled Suns against the Lakers Tuesday night were given mini-first aid kits.

Said the Washington Post: “They should have given them blindfolds and cigarettes instead.”

Said Pete Rose in Life magazine when asked why he named his second son Ty: “I already have a son named Pete.”

Add Rose: Of Ty Cobb he said, “The only thing you ever hear about Cobb is that he was a bad person.”

Not always. Rose might not know that the Cobb Memorial Hospital in Royston, Ga., was built with $100,000 donated by Cobb in 1948.

Also, through the Ty Cobb Educational Fund, which he established in 1953, more than $2.4 million in college scholarships have been awarded.

Said Merritt Hoga, a trustee of the fund: “This is a story known by few people. This one man, Mr. Cobb, has made it possible for almost 2,000 young people from the state of Georgia to go to college.

“That’s a tremendous monument to the man.”

From Rickey Henderson of the New York Yankees, saying he’s tired of being labeled a base-stealer: “People don’t understand a base-stealer. A base-stealer has got to know how to hit. If he don’t know how to hit, he’s not a base-stealer.”

St. Louis pitcher Joaquin Andujar, on the club’s power shortage: “We’ve got Jack Clark and seven leadoff hitters.”

Dept. of Irony: If New York Met announcer Ralph Kiner looked uncomfortable asking Nancy Lopez how she and Ray Knight were adjusting to marriage, it was understandable. Kiner went through it himself, having been married to tennis star Nancy Chaffee.

Note: Knight’s baseball career has floundered, due mainly to injuries, but his golf game is flourishing. Said Lopez: “When we got married, I used to give him 12 a side. Now, he gets two a side.”

Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post, on Masters champion Bernhard Langer: “He had one of the worst cases of early age yips on record. Once, in 1976, he rolled a 35-foot downhill putt off the other side of the green. Soon, he was double-hitting putts like an old man.”

Langer’s affliction was so obvious, so comic in its pathetic way, that an English neurologist, Dr. Wolfgang Schady, cited Langer in a paper on Neurological Syndromes in Sportsmen. He speculated on a “dysfunction of the basal ganglia. . . . “

Ralph Cindrich, agent for University of Pittsburgh tackle Bill Fralic, on the prospect of his client being drafted by the Minnesota Vikings, noted for their frugality: “If they have not changed from past negotiating practices, it is not a selection, it is a sentence.”

Quotebook

Cleveland Cavalier Coach George Karl, on the emergence of John Bagley after the guard spent two seasons in the doghouse of former coach Tom Nissalke: “The difference is that I yell at him and let him play, while Tom yelled at him and put him on the bench.”