The Prairie Never Seemed So Desolate

Prairie View will go for the record Wednesday--and the Panthers aren’t happy about it.

“With the players we had coming back, we thought we’d battle for the SWAC title,” Daryl Pope, one of two graduating seniors, said after Saturday’s 108-86 loss to Texas Southern. “But we had a tough nonconference schedule and started 0-10 in the conference.”

Prairie View (0-27), the only winless team in Division I, will play Southwestern Athletic Conference co-champion Mississippi Valley State (13-13) Wednesday to open the SWAC tournament at Baton Rouge, La. A season-ending defeat would give the Panthers an NCAA record for most losses in a season.

Add Prairie View: Pope said he came to Prairie View without even visiting the campus because his mother picked the school from a list in a magazine.

“Three or four schools I turned down made it to the NCAA tournament,” Pope said.

Last add Prairie View: The men’s basketball team has company--Prairie View’s women’s team is 0-24 entering tonight’s season-ending game at Texas-Pan American and the football team went 0-11 last season.

Tough lesson: Detroit Tiger Manager Sparky Anderson, speaking to a gathering of sports fans at Denver, had some unusual words of advice for the new National League expansion team that opens play in 1993:

“Hope you finish last for the first five years, because then you’ll get the No. 1 draft choices.”

Trivia time: Which school has the most players on the PGA Tour?

Luge lunacy: The failure of the United States to win an Olympic medal in luge prompted Bob Kravitz of the Rocky Mountain News to call for a renaissance in the sport.

“I fear we may have to send our professional lugers to the 1994 Games,” he wrote. “I can see luge leagues, luge summer camps, luge on ESPN. People all over our great country will be clamoring to get involved in luge rotisserie leagues.”

When do you sleep?Twenty-four hour races have always been interesting to talk about, but not much fun to watch in the middle of the night. Promoters in Norway might have a way of getting around that. They are planning a twice-around-the-clock race in late June when all 24 hours in the Arctic summer are in daylight.

Looking back: Twenty-three years ago today, Barbara Jo Rubin became the first female jockey to win a parimutuel race in America when she rode Cohesion to victory at Charles Town.

Trivia answer: The University of Houston, with 11.

Quotebook: The late Tony Hulman, owner of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, when asked who he thought would win the 500: “I don’t know. That’s why we run the damn thing.”