NCAA Cracks Down on Basketball at Georgia

The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. announced sanctions against the Georgia basketball program, including the prohibiting off-campus recruiting by the university’s basketball coaches for one year and revoking the eligibility of star player Cedric Henderson. The school said it believes Henderson’s eligibility will be restored.

The penalties are part of a one-year probation imposed on the Georgia basketball program by the NCAA, which investigated the school’s recruiting practices.

The NCAA, in an action announced Wednesday night, also ordered Georgia to return 90% of its profits from the Bulldogs’ participation in the NCAA tournament at the end of the 1984-85 season.

The probation does not prohibit television or postseason appearances and will not cut the number of scholarships used for basketball players.

The NCAA said one athlete had been declared ineligible to play at Georgia. The school issued a statement by Athletic Director Vince Dooley identifying the player as Henderson and saying the school would use “the routine process enabling us to apply for immediate restoration of his eligibility.”

United States Ski Team officials said they have withdrawn financial support from Olympic downhill champion Bill Johnson, who announced earlier this month that he is leaving the team to set up a professional downhill ski tour.

The team’s break with Johnson occurred during a men’s downhill training camp at Mt. Bachelor, near Bend, Ore. Alpine Director Harold Schoenhaar decided on the separation when Johnson reported to camp three days late.

“Bill told me that this was going to be his last training camp with the U.S. Ski Team,” Schoenhaar said. “He said he did not want to be part of the team any longer. If this is his intention, we can no longer pay for his training opportunities.”

Johnson, winner of the gold medal in the 1984 Olympic downhill at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, was allowed to participate in the Mt. Bachelor training camp but had to pay his own expenses.

National Football League owners, meeting in Lincolnshire, Ill., voted to reduce team rosters to 45 players for the 1985 season, down from the 49-man squad size the league had maintained since the strike-curtailed 1982 season.

In Washington, Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFL Players Assn., called the decision “a tragedy for the fans, bad for the players and something which will hurt the quality of the game.”

The vote to reduce the rosters was 19-8 with one abstention, according to a league spokesman. The league refused to disclose a breakdown of the vote, but sources reported that among those teams opposing the reduction were Dallas, Washington, Pittsburgh, the Raiders, San Francisco, Miami and Atlanta.

After more than two hours of debate and intense lobbying by Gov. Edwin Edwards, the Louisiana Senate approved, 21-17, a resolution endorsing a lease that would keep the New Orleans Saints in the Superdome for 21 years.

Approval of the bill allows the governor to sign a lease agreement with the $2.8 million in inducements asked by auto dealer Tom Benson as a condition for his purchase of the Saints from Houston entrepreneur John Mecom Jr.

After the Senate vote, Benson said that he probably would close the deal with Mecom next Monday, when the Legislature is expected to give final approval to a companion bill exempting Saint tickets from the state’s 4% sales tax.

The City of New Orleans already has agreed to exempt tickets from its 10% sales and amusement taxes.

The baseball commissioner’s office said it has completed a five-year agreement with the Chicago Cubs regarding national telecasts of the team’s games on WGN-TV.

The Cubs were the last of five so-called superstation teams, whose games are televised nationally via cable TV systems, to reach agreement with the commissioner’s office.

The Cubs agreed to make annual payments to baseball’s central fund, with the money to be shared equally by all major league teams. The amount was not made public.

College athletes’ use of alcohol and illegal drugs is similar to other students, but they take more pain-killers, a Michigan State University professor said.

“The athletes are no different, if not a little bit cleaner, than most college students,” said Bill Anderson, a medical education professor, who helped the NCAA conduct a nationwide study of drug use among college athletes.

Preliminary results from the survey of 2,000 athletes at 11 schools showed that alcohol is used most frequently, with 88% of the athletes saying they drank during the past year.

Caffeine is next, used by 67%, followed by minor pain medications, 57%, and vitamins and minerals, 53%, Anderson said. Marijuana was the most frequently used illegal drug, by 37% of athletes interviewed.

Names in the News

Mike Delves, chief mechanic on the March race car that Pancho Carter put on the pole for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, won the Master Mechanic Tools chief mechanic’s award for 1985.

Kevin McHale, the 6-10 forward-center of the Boston Celtics, was named the winner of the NBA’s Sixth Man Award for the second consecutive season.

Judas Prada, an assistant basketball coach at UC Santa Barbara the last two seasons, has moved to Loyola Marymount as an assistant to new Coach Jim Lynam.