Sometimes, Too Many Cooks Spoil Anything

Would-be stand-up comic Norman Chad, currently making ends meet as a Washington Post sports television columnist, has done the world a (dis)service by collecting one-liners delivered by ESPN football commentator Beano Cook.

Herewith, a sampling:

--”Twenty years from now, this place (ESPN) is gonna be a rats’ nest. And I’ll be dead, but unlike Brent Musburger, I won’t be expected back in five days.”

--”I worry about these people whose biggest thing in life is following high school prospects. They indeed lead a life of quiet desperation.”

--”You only have to bat a thousand in two things--flying and heart transplants. Everything else, you can go four for five.”

Trivia time: The Calgary Flames’ Lanny McDonald this week became the 23rd player in NHL history to reach the 1,000-point mark. Who was the first?

Punch and Gary: After taking that celebrated swing at teammate Keith Hernandez during a photo session last week, the New York Mets’ Darryl Strawberry supposedly glared at catcher Gary Carter and said: “You’re next.”

And what does Carter think about that?

“I didn’t hear him,” Carter told Claire Smith of the Hartford Courant. “If I did, I would have just waved him off. But I was too busy jumping in front of the cameras, saying, ‘Come on, guys, you don’t need to shoot this stuff.’ I heard nothing but clicks . . . I felt like I was in the Japanese embassy.

“It was only talk (from Strawberry). If he’d swung at me, he would have had to put me down for good, though.”

Add Carter: Although Carter might be concerned about his less than stellar season in 1988, New York management apparently is not.

Judging by the cool reaction the Mets gave to San Diego’s suggestion that they might like to look at minor league catcher Sandy Alomar Jr., Carter’s job is safe.

“Despite what everyone reads in the papers, our reports (on Alomar) do not indicate that he is Moses incarnate,” said Mets Vice President Joe McIlvaine.

Perceptive: CBS commentator Billy Packer, on the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament:

“There are a lot of teams that can win a couple of games, but there aren’t many who can win it all.”

Only one, in fact.

Chair man of the boards: Indiana Coach Bobby Knight says he can’t understand why more attention is paid to him than to the average basketball coach.

“What difference does it make who it is? How many coaches have kicked chairs, thrown chairs, thrown jackets?” he asked the Washington Post’s Anthony Cotton. “Why is it me? If I threw 500 chairs in 900 games, that would be one thing, but I’ve thrown one and now I’m the chair-thrower. . . .

Add Knight: “It seems to me that pounding on a table pales in significance to 97% of our players graduating. How many stories are written--not about academics--where somewhere there’s a line that says, ‘By the way, Coach Jones has graduated only 20% of his players in the last 10 years?’

“You’ll never see it, but to me, that should be the same as sticking in a line that says I threw a chair.”

Trivia answer: Gordie Howe of Detroit, who reached that mark on Nov. 27 1960.

Quotebook

One of the old gems from broadcaster Jerry Coleman: “There’s a fly to deep center field. Winfield is going back, back. He hits his head against the wall! It’s rolling toward second base.”