Fame Painful in Wee Hours

So you think you want to be like Mike?

In the May edition of Playboy, Michael Jordan says you should think again.

“Do it for two years. Do it for five years. When you get past the fun part, then go do the part where you get into cities at 3 a.m., and you have 15 people waiting for autographs when you’re tired as hell. Your knees are sore, back’s sore, your body’s sore, and yet you have to sign 15 autographs at 3 in the morning.”

And if he declines?

“Somebody will take a shot, saying, ‘Oh, look at him.’ ”

Last Yankee hater: Merely because reviewers raved about political columnist George Will’s best-selling book, “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball,” doesn’t mean he has to be nice when he reviews books.

In an article for the New York Times Book Review on a new book about Billy Martin, Will takes exception with several of author David Falkner’s conclusions.

“Mr. Falkner never really explains his book’s peculiar title. ‘The Last Yankee’? In what sense? Martin was indeed among the last people connected with the Yankees’ glory years, but that fact is linked with this one: The Yankees fell from glory because they fell into the 10-thumbed hands of the buccaneer (George) Steinbrenner, who knows so little about baseball that he thought Martin was a winner.

“Martin wasn’t, on the field or off. ‘Turbulent’ is altogether too pallid an adjective to describe his life. Try ‘tawdry,’ ‘squalid,’ and ‘loathsome.’ He was an appalling parent, a monster of marital infidelity . . . an infantile boor. . . .

“He became increasingly paranoid and destructive of himself and all those around him. And he was a bad manager.”

Trivia time: Who in 1991 became the first major leaguer to strike out more than 100 times without hitting a home run?

Trumped: Donald Trump says that his former wife, Ivana, has breached a condition of their divorce settlement by writing about the marriage. But she says her new novel, “For Love Alone,” is total fiction.

Fiction is not a new concept for her.

She has told interviewers that she was a member of Czechoslovakia’s Winter Olympic ski team in 1976 at Montreal.

Montreal played host in 1976 to the Summer Games.

Master of the hole: The fourth hole was the only par three at Augusta National that had never been aced during the Masters until Jeff Sluman did it Thursday. Because of capricious winds, it ranks as the course’s third-most difficult hole.

In 1971, Cary Middlecoff felt a gust of wind in his face at the tee and decided to use a driver. But when the wind died at the top of his backswing, his drive sailed past the green by 30 yards.

Although the watery Amen Corner--holes 11, 12 and 13--is more notorious, “The Major Series,” a magazine devoted to golf’s four major tournaments, calls Nos. 3, 4 and 5 the most difficult run on the course because of “erratic winds and peculiar greens that wouldn’t hold a baby grand.”

Says Lee Trevino: “Amen Corner is a pussycat by comparison.”

Trivia answer: Toronto shortstop Manny Lee, who struck out 107 times.

Quotebook: Lynn Joncowski, about to become the first woman to compete in the World Bull Riding Championships at Scottsdale, Ariz., on the disparity between the men’s and women’s rodeo circuits: “We don’t even get the quality clowns.”