Say it ain’t so, Hulk.A state assemblyman...

Say it ain’t so, Hulk.

A state assemblyman from Hawthorne says there’s no need to license wrestlers or have a physician present when they perform because their bouts are nothing more than show business exhibitions.

“It ain’t a sport, it ain’t an athletic contest,” said Dick Floyd, whose bill to deregulate pro-wrestling was approved by the Assembly, 50 to 2, Thursday and sent to the Senate.

Floyd is chairman of the Assembly’s Governmental Organization Committee, which oversees the state athletic commission.

The burly Democrat pointed out that the state does not license actors, musicians or clowns. So why should the commission license Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant or the Junkyard Dog?

Besides, he said, some wrestlers have always been unregulated.

“What about those pretty young ladies who wrestle in a tub of mud on Sunset Boulevard?” he pointed out. “The state athletic commission doesn’t worry about them.”

As for having physicians present, Floyd said: “It would make more sense to have them at rock concerts. There’s more violence there.”

The biggest liar in Los Angeles is not your next-door neighbor, your brother-in-law or the telephone caller who says you’ve just won a big prize.

The biggest liar in Los Angeles is 40-year-old Richard Stewart--and he’s proud of it.

Stewart, a painting contractor who is an aspiring stand-up comic, recently captured the regional Tall Tales competition staged by Toastmasters International.

It wasn’t easy. Stewart had to out-fib such competitors as a look-alike for Surgeon General C. Everett Koop who delivered a lecture on how to cure computer viruses in our lifetime as well as a motorcyclist who claimed that he was towing a piano across town when he was kidnaped by Hells Angels who befriended him after he played some boogie-woogie for them.

Stewart won with a whopper about the time he was shot down over Germany during World War II, gave a bird yell as he was falling to earth and attracted a flock of ducks that cushioned his fall. . . .

There’s more, but it’ll be in Stewart’s soon-to-be released movie. He says.

Not to be outdone by Long Beach’s recent skateboard art show, Los Angeles’ Thinking Eye Gallery on Figueroa Street is gearing up for an exhibit called “Motorcycles! Cycles and Art.”

Among the entries will be Gary Hull’s welded-steel piece, “Fred’s Ride.” That’s Fred, as in Flintstone. Gallery owner Beate Bermann-Enn, who plans a July 15 opening for the show, said Hull’s artwork “looks kind of like a klutzy, prehistoric motorcycle.”

It’s somewhat ironic that Long Beach will have to shell out about $700,000 to repair broken sidewalks.

Just a few years ago the International Academy for Standing and Fitness proclaimed Long Beach’s sidewalks to be the most comfortable in the nation.

The academy, a podiatrists’ group, praised the circular grooving in the downtown walkways, which, it said, created a comfortable, cobblestone-like effect.

Not everyone agreed at the time, including one resident saunterer who wrote a letter to the Long Beach Press-Telegram complaining: “Tripping over tiny cliffs puts my harried day in keen perspective.”

Speaking of clomping along, Danny Perez says he has been invited to speak next week at the eighth annual membership meeting of the International Society of Cryptozoology in Pullman, Wash. Perez heads Norwalk’s Center for Bigfoot Studies.

And the meters have been running ever since. . . .

Historian John Weaver points out that today is the 81st anniversary of the city’s first taxi cab, introduced by pioneer businessman Earle C. Anthony. Fare was 30 cents for the first half-mile and 20 cents for each additional quarter-mile.

“There is no reason,” The Times said at the time, “why a dozen cabs cannot be kept busy here.”