Burst of Adrenaline Doesn’t Necessarily Bring Good Results

A distinguished medical scientist, having studied in Vienna under the well-known authority on the pituitary gland, Dr. Labbermacher, we dedicate ourselves to the education of sports announcers.

Regularly, they speak of the “adrenaline flowing,” with reference to a player, or team, running hot.

For instance, the other night, during the NBA playoffs, Mr. Chick Hearn, who used to work in Peoria, reported the adrenaline flowing in Kurt Rambis, performing well at the time for the Phoenix Suns.

What we have to tell Chick, however painfully, is that adrenaline also flows when a player is falling on his face.

Explains Labbermacher: “Output of this hormone accelerates when one gets excited. But it needn’t produce positive results. Fast chemical change can throw one off.”

As an example of adrenaline working both ways, Labbermacher likes to cite the World Series of 1988. If the adrenaline was flowing in Orel Hershiser, it also was flowing in Jose Canseco.

Hershiser is a hero, Canseco goes 1 for 19.

The point advanced here is, announcers have to keep an eye on that adrenaline. When they think it’s flowing, it may be backing up.

So now we’re watching the Laker-Sun game on CBS when commentator Lesley Visser appears. And what is Visser wearing? She is wearing pearls.

Of course, she also is wearing other things, but impeccable in fashion, a prince of Rue Saint Honore, we want to take Visser aside and whisper that one doesn’t wear pearls to a basketball game.

This is a sweaty pastime, played by guys in their underwear, usually in enclosures that stink. Pearls are for Barbara Walters, reporting from Buckingham.

We would like to help Visser. If she wants her accessories checked, she is free to phone before she leaves the house.

How the Lakers will do in the current NBA playoffs isn’t yet ascertained, but if they come to trouble, and they are heading that way, we are going to blame Pat Riley for not instituting the discipline of the Italian soccer coach, prepping for the World Cup.

The Italian coach has imposed on his players sexual abstinence for the next two months, explaining such sacrifice is required for maximum effort on the field.

This thought never occurred to Riley, who has allowed his Lakers to wander at will.

When a survey once was made on sexual activity as it pertained to pro football, Dr. Robert Kerlan, medical chief of the Rams, was asked what advice on sex he gave the players.

“I tell them,” he answered, “that I don’t recommend it between halves.”

You have to assume Riley is giving such counseling to the Lakers, but how he proceeds in the future may be determined by what the team does the rest of the playoffs.

It hasn’t been documented, but word is escaping that the Lakers may boost the price of their floor seats at The Forum next season to $500 a game.

For those occupying that sector, it would be no more Mr. Nice Guy.

They got away this year paying only $350 for the tickets. It was like letting them in for nothing.

At $500 a game, each season seat would run $21,000, or $42,000 a pair.

And what is supposed to happen with the $90 seats in The Forum? Word is that price may not change. But what would change is the number of $90 seats in the house.

In other words, the $90 area would be widened to include seats for which the consumer is paying a lot less right now.

Showtime at The Forum doesn’t occur when the Lakers are on the floor. The real suspense develops over how much the pigeons who follow them will be made to pay.

When, a while back, pro basketball had come to hard times, when franchises were being unloaded, or going bust, when tickets were in abundance, a lot of scholarly reasons were advanced for the game’s decline.

Foremost among them was that basketball had become largely a black game and that white customers wouldn’t pay to see blacks. Certain analysts even whispered quotas.

So another brilliant theory goes down the sewer. More blacks than ever populate today’s teams, and more customers than ever are turning out to watch them.

And, of course, the upshot is that when you read that a basketball player has his car stolen, it isn’t often a Honda Civic.

The Clippers’ Benoit Benjamin, for instance, gave up, at gunpoint, a $75,000 Mercedes the other night. It was a grim experience for Benoit, but he sustained well the image of his colleagues.

If his reading material were taken, you would want to learn that the gunman got away with a Wall Street Journal.

Since pro basketball has been played a long time, we are bound to get arguments on the following assessment, but it is our unclouded view that Magic Johnson is the best passer ever to appear in the game.

There is little reason, you deduce, that one with Magic’s arm couldn’t throw a football, too.

In the search for height, Magic could give the Raiders 6 feet, 9 inches.

What you would have is Bo Jackson starting for Kansas City in April and joining the Raiders in October, and Johnson starting for the Raiders in September and joining the Lakers in January.

One who throws as well as Magic shouldn’t sit around.