Lemons Telling Tall Tales

The latest proposals to raise the baskets to 11 or 12 feet recall that Abe Lemons, to help the little man, proposed instead that the baskets be lowered.

“Or,” he said, “we could just cut a hole in the floor and recruit midgets. ‘Hi, little fella, want to drive a Cadillac?’ ”

Now-it-can-be-told Dept.: Billy Ray, a star high school quarterback in Atlanta last year, told the Chicago Tribune about a call he got from Lou Holtz, the coach at Notre Dame.

“It started out with, ‘People may say we won’t start a black quarterback at Notre Dame, but I had three at Minnesota,’ and so forth,” Ray said.

“Finally, I broke in and told him I was white.”

Ray enrolled at Alabama.

Trailing in the fourth quarter, 27-3, why wasn’t Green Bay throwing the ball against Pittsburgh last Sunday?

“I just wanted to see if we could make a first down running the football,” Packer Coach Forrest Gregg said. “And you know what I found out?”

What?

“We couldn’t.”

Trivia Time: In what way did the careers of Henry Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays, the top three home run hitters of all time, all come full circle with the same twist at the end? (Answer below.)

Attention, Howie Long: From Peter King of Newsday, picking Rulon Jones of Denver and Dexter Manley of Washington as the defensive ends on his midseason All-NFL team: “Howie Long is notably absent here, but he’s been neutralized and has not terrorized many backfields.”

His Kind of Town: Mike Ditka thought his name was Diles, but Steve Dils might become a household name in Chicago. The Bears have lost only 5 of their last 30 games at Soldier Field, and Dils has been the opposing quarterback in two of them.

He quarterbacked Minnesota to a 23-14 win in 1983 and the Rams to a 20-17 win Monday night.

Dallas running back Herschel Walker, on Chicago quarterback Doug Flutie, a former teammate on the New Jersey Generals: “He can play. One thing he’s got is competitiveness. That’s what you’ve got to have. And he wants to play. It’s not like he had to play.”

Just Asking: Wonder if those people who are conceding the Rose Bowl bid to Arizona State know that the Sun Devils were beaten by a 2-9 Cal team two years ago in Tempe and have lost to Arizona for four straight years, with two of the losses putting UCLA in the Rose Bowl?

Last year, when a tie would have put Arizona State in the Rose Bowl, the score was 13-13 against Arizona with less than two minutes left. Instead of trying to run out the clock, Arizona State quarterback Jeff Van Raaphorst went back to pass and fumbled on his 20. Arizona recovered and kicked a field goal to win, 16-13.

Add Cal: Joe Kapp, with a career record of 19-32-1 at Berkeley, is getting all kinds of heat, but he looks good compared to Marv Levy, new coach of the Buffalo Bills.

Levy, in four years at Cal, was 8-29-3.

How hot is the Breeders’ Cup? How much of a major event has it become?

Well, the Breeders’ Cup had a 4.9 TV rating in Los Angeles during the four-hour telecast. In a portion of the same time slot, noon to 1 p.m., a Three Stooges rerun on Channel 5 had a rating of 6.5.

Trivia Answer: All ended up in the same cities they started in, but with different teams--Aaron, Milwaukee Braves and Brewers; Ruth, Boston Red Sox and Braves, and Mays, New York Giants and Mets.

Quotebook

Tulane football Coach Mack Brown, on how his players have accepted drug tests: “They didn’t mind after they learned they didn’t have to study for them.”