USC Football Coach Learned Winning Is Never a Safe Bet

If you ever wondered how USC football Coach Larry Smith manages to retain his cool when his Trojans are in trouble, wonder no longer. If a man can survive what he survived on his honeymoon, what a bunch of football players do can’t possibly faze him.

Larry and bride Cheryl were in New Orleans for their honeymoon on Christmas Day and decided to go to the Fair Grounds track. Neither had ever been to a thoroughbred race before. Let Larry explain what happened:

“We got there after the first race. My wife wanted to place a bet on the next race. Well, she saw this horse and it was a grayish white, ugly horse. It looked like it hadn’t eaten in about six months. She decided she wanted to bet $2 on it. I looked at the odds and it was about 50-1. So, I said, ‘OK, I’ll go down and bet the horse for you.’

“On the way down, I heard these guys talking about this other horse and I ended up betting on it instead. Well, the horse my wife liked won and she’s jumping up and down thinking about all the money she’d won for two bucks. I learned my lesson real fast.”

What’s losing a football game or two after surviving a day like that?

And he’s still married to the same woman.

Different strokes: Frank Robinson was leaving the Forum one night last winter when a young man approached him and said, “Frank, my name is M. C. Hammer. Remember me? I used to work for the A’s. Remember?”

The former Baltimore manager brusquely walked past, got in his car and went home. Later, he related the incident and asked his family if they’d ever heard of this guy M. C. Hammer.

“Daddy, you mean you blew off M. C. Hammer?” his daughter Michelle said incredulously. “Haven’t you heard of him? He’s a big star.”

Before his rap-singing career took off, Hammer was a clubhouse helper at the Oakland Coliseum.

Trivia time: Has a relief pitcher in the major leagues ever won 20 games in a season?

Ryanmania: A sign in the visiting clubhouse at Arlington Stadium, home of the Texas Rangers, instructs visiting players to request autographs from Nolan Ryan only on the second day of each series, and urges those players to ask for only two autographs each.

“I’ve got to take a picture of that,” said second baseman Chuck Knoblauch of the Minnesota Twins, a native Texan. “That just shows how big he is here, limiting the autographs you can get from a guy on the other team.”

Are you ready?Tryouts for the U.S. Olympic luge team will be held July 12-14 in Griffith Park. All you need to know is how to steer a modified, wheel-equipped luge sled down a paved course.

Big bucks: Mike Schmidt, the Phillies’ Hall of Fame third baseman, isn’t exactly pleased to find that his All-American boy image doesn’t attract commercial interest the way the noncomformists do. Writing in Business Philadelphia magazine, Schmidt says:

“Occasionally, I get a little jealous that I’m not as easily marketable as an Andre Agassi, say, because he’s not married, he wears that off-the-wall . . . and he can do whatever he wants. Maybe if I played the game like (Lenny) Dykstra plays it, maybe right now I’d have a toothpaste commercial. I’d be a spokesman for Pepsodent or something if I grossed out the whole world with tobacco falling out of my mouth and down my shirt for 18 years.”

Trivia answer: No. The record is 18, by Elroy Face of the Pirates in 1959. The American League record is 17, by John Hiller of Detroit in 1974 and Bill Campbell of Minnesota in 1976.

Spelling 1A: When Ron Darling wrote a note to New York sportswriters, denying that he was the biggest basher of teammate Gregg Jefferies in the Mets’ clubhouse, he misspelled Jefferies’ first game. Sean Horgan of the Hartford Courant says that’s the kind of thing you simply don’t expect from a Yale man.

Quotebook: Pole vaulter Billy Olson, in coming back from a broken leg last year: “I’m like a bucket of bolts--the pieces don’t fit together anymore. I’m between the twilight and the no-light of my career.”