Lonnie Smith Is Traded to Royals

Outfielder Lonnie Smith, the catalyst of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 1982 championship team, was traded to the Kansas City Royals for minor league outfielder John Morris Friday.

Smith, who has an $850,000 contract, was deemed available because of the emergence of rookie outfielder Vince Coleman, the major leagues’ leading base-stealer.

In the Cardinals’ championship season, Smith batted .302 and was a top candidate for the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award. However, Smith, 29, slumped to .231 in 1983 after admitting to a drug problem. He hit only .250 last season and was batting .260 through 32 games this season. Veteran linebacker Jack (Hacksaw) Reynolds has been asked to retire by Bill Walsh, coach of the Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers.

Reynolds, who played 10 years with the Rams before joining the 49ers in 1980, was informed of Walsh’s decision in a letter mailed to his home on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas. He does not have a telephone there.

Sources said Walsh’s decision was based on Reynolds’ age--he will be 38 in November--and on the impending NFL roster reduction from 49 players to 45.

David Fishof, Reynolds’ agent, said Walsh offered his client a job as an assistant coach with the team, but Fishof said Reynolds “still feels he has another good year as a player.”

The 49ers also have signed six free agents, including Texas A&M; quarterback John Mazur, a former USC quarterback; Steve Jordan, a kicker from USC, and Theo Windham, a wide receiver also from USC. The United States Football League agreed to put aside its day-old lawsuit against ABC-TV in favor of what USFL Commissioner Harry Usher called “a speedy, expedited arbitration” over the $7 million that the league says the network is withholding from it.

ABC, which has televised USFL games for the three years of the league’s existence, has been seeking a reduction of its $14-million payment for this season. The network had based its decision on a provision of its 1982 contract that requires the USFL to play in eight of the country’s top 10 TV markets, including the top three. This season, the league is without teams in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit, all of which had original USFL franchises. USC’s 1985-86 basketball season opener at Tennessee was canceled due to delays in completing the Volunteers’ new 25,000-seat arena. USC officials confirmed that its Nov. 29 game with Tennessee was postponed for a year, until Dec. 27, 1986.

Tennessee’s return match with the Trojans in Los Angeles was rescheduled for Dec. 12, 1987. USC has filled the opening on next season’s schedule with a game at Syracuse. Cal State Fullerton was awarded the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn.’s 1984 football championship, vacated by Nevada Las Vegas earlier this year. UNLV forfeited 10 victories in 1984 because of the use of seven academically ineligible players.

By virtue of picking up its forfeit from Las Vegas, Fullerton’s adjusted record for the season became 7-0 in conference play and 12-0 overall. UNLV had beaten Fullerton, 26-20, to hand the Titans their only loss. Manute Bol, a 7-6 basketball player from the Sudan, will play for the Rhode Island Gulls when the team opens its season next week in the new United States Basketball League.

Bol played one year at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and was a Division II All-American. He quit school to enter the June 18 National Basketball Assn. draft.

Names in the News

Judy LeWinter, former head women’s basketball coach at the University of Arizona, was named assistant women’s basketball coach at UCLA. LeWinter played four years at UCLA before serving as a graduate assistant in 1977. Bob Hinson, the injured pitcher who less than a month ago was fighting for his life, has been released from a hospital in Salinas, Calif. Hinson, who plays for the Class-A Salinas Spurs in the Seattle Mariners’ farm system, was hit in the head with a line drive April 22 and developed a blood clot on the brain that required emergency surgery. Dr. Hank Krieger, who led the Claremont Mudd-Scripps men’s tennis team to its 10th consecutive NCAA Division III championship, was named 1985 NCAA Division III coach of the year.