Lakers, Pistons: Ratings Record

The championship battle between the Lakers and the Detroit Pistons Tuesday night attracted the highest TV ratings of any National Basketball Assn. game in history, with an estimated 18.8 million homes watching nationally, CBS reported Wednesday. The game--which the Lakers won 108-105, and in so doing repeated as world champions--garnered a 21.2 in the A.C. Nielsen ratings.

The tally was not as high as some popular TV series get during the regular season, but it was better than the previous NBA record of 19.3, posted for Game 7 of the NBA championships in 1984 between the Lakers and the Boston Celtics. In Los Angeles, about 60% of the homes watching TV between 6 and 8:45 p.m. were tuned to the game.

An admitted television addict in Redding, Conn., pulled a George Washington and chopped down a neighbor’s 50-foot oak tree because it was interfering with his television reception of the Disney Channel. Arthur Anderson, a 59-year-old construction worker, has been charged with second-degree criminal mischief and third-degree criminal trespassing in the incident, according to Redding Police Officer Brian T. Jones.

Anderson claimed that the tree felling was a mistake: “I didn’t know whose property I was on.”

From our “Don’t take his club, please!” file: Henny Youngman, czar of the one-liner, was miffed Tuesday when attorney Gloria Allred showed up at the Friar’s Club in New York for lunch. Despite the recent Supreme Court decision outlawing such discrimination, the Gotham chapter of the club is all-male (the Friar’s Club here is coed, and Allred is a member), and Youngman apparently resented Allred’s presence.

“Why are you here. Go start your own club. I don’t think they (women) ought to butt into our business,” Youngman reportedly said to Allred, adding that the all red dress she was wearing made her look like an “overdressed blood test.”

Add bagpipes to the list of personal pleasures that are harmful to your health. According to two researchers, playing the bagpipes may damage hearing, and soon Scottish musicians will be sporting earplugs as well as kilts.

Neurologist and tyro piper Stephen Brittain discovered that the loudness of a piper’s ear hits as high as 115 decibels--almost as loud as a jet takeoff. Thus, the pipes have a “potential for acoustic trauma and permanent ear damage that is often ignored,” Brittain said.

K. Ramsey, manager of importer Scottish Products Inc. disagreed with the warning and expressed suspicions about Brittain’s motive.

“Maybe he’s saying that because he doesn’t play too well and it him gives an excuse,” she said. “Nobody picks on a piccolo.”

Lori Savitch, sister of late NBC anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, on Gwenda Blair, author of a new biography on Jessica: “This woman is making a buck off my sister’s corpse. . . . My sister was not a drug abuser. She (Blair) got hold of some rumors, dug up some bones and carried them in her teeth to the bank.”

Citing a knee injury, Mikhail Baryshnikov has canceled his entire summer tour, organizers said Wednesday. Baryshnikov was to open his summer American tour July 1 at an amusement park outside of Dallas, but the dancer’s tour manager said Baryshnikov had aggravated a knee injury and will undergo surgery.