If It Happened to You Once, You Don’t Want It to See Again

When a football player at Pacific University, a nonscholarship school near Portland, Ore., left the sideline to tackle an opposing player from archrival Linfield who was heading for a touchdown recently, Dicky Maegle knew it was happening again.

“You do something like that and you get an awful lot of attention,” Maegle said after watching replays of the incident on an ABC “Monday Night Football” telecast.

The 1954 Cotton Bowl was the scene of one of the most unusual moments in sports. Maegle was running down the sideline for a Rice touchdown when Tommy Lewis of Alabama bolted from the sideline and onto the field to tackle Maegle. The Owls were awarded a touchdown.

“What it is, I guess it’s like committing a murder, except you don’t kill the guy and you get away with it,” said Maegle, who is in the hotel business in Houston.

“It’s not a very good way of being recognized,” he said. “But then again, people don’t get recognized for something like this unless it’s real stupid.”

Add tackle: Lewis is an insurance salesman in Huntsville, Ala., and is still questioned about that New Year’s Day on the floor of the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

“A lot of people made a hero out of Tommy Lewis,” Maegle said. “Hell, he wasn’t no hero. He wasn’t any star. The star of that team was Bart Starr. Not Tommy Lewis. But after that game, a lot of people knew who he was.”

Last add tackle: Lewis’ current counterpart, Joe Schmelzer of Palo Alto, a 6-foot, 200-pound junior linebacker, was suspended by Pacific for leaving the sideline to tackle Tony Chiu of Linfield. Said Bob Bonn, Pacific’s athletic director: “We don’t teach those kind of values.”

Trivia time: On Oct. 21, 1973, a Ram became the first and only National Football League player to record two safeties, in a 24-7 victory over the Green Bay Packers. Who was it?

It’s all in the approach: NBC-TV, trying to get the Raiders’ Bo Jackson to do an interview with O. J. Simpson on its “NFL Live” show Sunday, was getting the run-around from Jackson’s agent, Richard Woods.

So Simpson called his good friend Marcus Allen of the Raiders for help. Allen relayed the request to Jackson, who gladly agreed to the interview.

“Any time Marcus wants a job as a booking agent, we’ll find a spot for him,” said Dick Ebersol, president of NBC sports.

Call it coincidence: Oakland’s Bob Welch was scheduled to pitch against the San Francisco Giants Tuesday, the day Game 3 of the World Series was postponed because of the Bay Area earthquake. The last time Welch pitched against the Giants was for the Dodgers Oct. 1, 1987, the day of the Whittier earthquake.

Trivia answer: Fred Dryer.

Quotebook: Denver Nugget Coach Doug Moe, while Clipper Benoit Benjamin was still with Philips Milan of Italy: “You think that makes them better or worse?”