Davis Pulls Hidden-Coach Trick

Iowa basketball Coach Tom Davis, who coached last season at Stanford, told Paul Daugherty of Newsday that the thought of leaving there never occurred to him until the University of Houston sought him out as a successor to the retiring Guy Lewis.

Daugherty: “Davis now says that he nearly took the Houston job. At the Final Four in Dallas last year, he was so pestered by reporters that he checked into his hotel under an assumed name.

“Shortly after the Final Four, ‘Lou Lantino’ became the coach at Iowa.”

Add Iowa: Brad Lohaus, 7-foot center, said he gets 8 to 10 fan letters a day. One Hawkeye fan offered his daughter in marriage. Lohaus: “I knew something was wrong when he didn’t send a picture.”

From Cincinnati Red Manager Pete Rose, who more and more is sounding like the next Casey Stengel: “If the season started tomorrow, Nick Esasky would be the first baseman, but it’s too damn cold to start the season tomorrow, so we don’t know.”

Trivia Time: What college teammates went on to coach teams to NBA championships? (Answer below.)

Wait a Minute: Wrote Skip Bayless of the Dallas Times Herald, after Mark Aguirre of the Mavericks was ejected from a game for two technicals: “Larry Bird bitches about nearly every call. So does Magic Johnson. Bird treats refs as if they’re wet spots on the parquet floor. Bird, Magic, Isiah, Jordan, you name ‘em--they don’t get the second tech Aguirre got.”

On Nov. 12, Bird was ejected from the Boston-Milwaukee game for two technicals. He had scored two points. The game was at Boston Garden.

Would-you-believe-it dept.: Glantz and Culver, syndicated oddsmakers, already have put out a line on the 1988 Super Bowl.

The New York Giants are 4-1, followed by the Chicago Bears and San Francisco 49ers at 5-1. The Raiders and Rams both are 12-1.

Ouch: Wrote Frank Luksa of the Dallas Times Herald, predicting Mike Ditka won’t return as coach of the Bears: “Reason? There’s an endless supply of bedpan IQs who own or operate NFL teams. Ditka’s misfortune is that through a quirk of mortality and heredity, he works for one of them. Michael B. McCaskey by name.”

John McKay, you’d guess, is delighted to have it all behind him after the trauma of Tampa Bay, but when Tom Zucco of the St. Petersburg Times asked him if he missed coaching, he said: “Show me a coach who doesn’t miss it and I’ll show you a liar.”

John Barnitt, mastman on the Stars & Stripes, on growing up in Minnesota before moving to Hawaii when he was 18: “The winters were starting to get to me. You know, I don’t think I ever had to get a haircut in the winter there.

“I used to kind of brush the front of my hair up. When it got too long, I’d wet it, and then break it off after it froze.”

Trivia Answer: Bill Russell and K.C. Jones of San Francisco, and Alex Hannum and Bill Sharman of USC. Russell and Jones have coached the Boston Celtics to championships. Hannum won titles at St. Louis in 1957-58 and Philadelphia in 1996-67; Sharman won with the Lakers in 1971-72.

Quotebook

From Coach Walt Hazzard, who had this reaction to the story about the UCLA inside game that appeared in Tuesday’s Times: “That’s tomorrow’s trash. As a matter of fact, it’s today’s trash.”