Taking the Air Out of Jordan Hubbub

The National Basketball Assn. playoffs have inspired a lot of Jordan vs. Magic columns. But how about Michael Jordan vs. Akeem Olajuwon, the man (along with Sam Bowie, but that’s another story) drafted ahead of Magic’s Air Apparent?

The first instinct, of course, is to declaim the chowderheads who let Jordan pass on down to the Chicago Bulls in that 1984 draft. But Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post has come up with some numbers that suggest the pick was not all that foolish.

He points out that Houston was 29-53 the year before Olajuwon but that within two seasons the Rockets won 51 games and reached the NBA finals. Chicago was 27-55 before Jordan and didn’t get over .500 until his fourth season and is still working on that NBA championship.

“Jordan,” Kornheiser wrote, “hasn’t won anything yet but the scoring title.”

Further: “Giving Jordan a great center to work with wouldn’t have improved Chicago as much as giving Olajuwon a great point guard would improve the Rockets.”

Problem is, he gets out: Iran Barkley is preparing for his Aug. 14 fight with middleweight champion Michael Nunn as does any other boxer these days: He’s going to jail. That is, he plans to spar with inmates at Rikers Island over the next couple of weeks before opening training camp in California. The idea is to get meaner. “My whole purpose is to get into the mood to kill people,” he said.

Tubular, Bob: That fight, incidentally, will be held in Reno, away from Nunn’s constituency in Los Angeles, where he has fought the most. Reasons promoter Bob Arum: “All those Nunn fans, where do you think they’ll be on Aug. 14? On the beach in Malibu. They’re not going to go to the fight when they can sit back, smoke some grass and watch it on HBO.”

How sweet it is: Ken Griffey Jr. may not have Reggie Jackson’s numbers yet but at least Seattle’s rookie outfielder didn’t have to wait until he got to New York for somebody to put out a candy bar with his name on it.

The Ken Griffey Jr. candy bar came out in Seattle stores on May 17 and the entire production was sold out two days later.

High-fives for a full count: Rich Donnelly, a coach for the Pirates, remembers hard times in the minors. “I managed a team that was so bad we considered a 2-and-0 count on the batter a rally.”

They called him Catfish Morgan then: The Dodgers’ Mike Morgan was a Charles Finley creation 11 years ago when the Oakland A’s owner put the youngster into the starting rotation right out of high school. Said Morgan: “Oakland was struggling for attendance then. I had nothing to lose, everything to gain. I gained a lot of losses.”

Morgan, 3-2 with the National League’s best ERA so far this season, lost his only three decisions for Finley and was sent to the minors. The next season he lost his first six starts before winning and has been, up until this year, the pitcher with the worst record (34-68) in baseball.

Trivia time: What winning Indianapolis 500 driver made the most pit stops? The fewest?

More annals of boxing: Buddy McGirt, who recently lost a junior welterweight title, is frustrated by his new invisibility. “Mike Tyson gets a speeding ticket and it’s news. I had three speeding tickets and no one wrote about that.”

It’s not that simple, Buddy. In all fairness, c’mon. Tyson’s were acquired in two weeks. It took McGirt a year.

Trivia answer: Bobby Unser made 11 stops in 1975. Johnny Rutherford made four in the rain-shortened 1976 race. Such records were first kept in 1923.

Quotebook: Lesley Visser, who along with other female sportswriters had to battle for years to be admitted to locker rooms for postgame interviews, said this when she was finally inside the smelly, cramped quarters of the Boston Garden: “We fought for the right to get in here?”