Instead of the Locker Room, It Should Be the Powder Room

The new Georgia Dome isn’t even finished yet, but there is a already a major controversy brewing. The visitors’ locker room is painted periwinkle salmon.

Yes, periwinkle salmon, which is sort of a pastel purple.

Although the visiting locker room may look sort of well, wimpy, the Atlanta Falcons’ locker room is nothing of the sort--gray walls trimmed in the team colors of black and red.

UCLA may be relegated to the periwinkle salmon room when the Bruins play Georgia as part of a basketball doubleheader at the Georgia Dome Dec. 19.

By the way, the press box is gray and the cheerleaders’ locker room is mauve.

Hue and Cry: Stadiums other than the Georgia Dome use color as a potential 12th man. The University of Iowa has a pink locker room in Kinnick Stadium for visitors. Some teams bring brown paper to paste over the pink walls, which supposedly puts players in a passive mood.

Trivia time: Who was the last male player to win the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year?

Long gone: Major league baseball and IBM are measuring all home runs daily for the first time. So far this season, the two longest are 466 feet by Frank Thomas of the Chicago White Sox, May. 16 against Baltimore at Chicago, and 460 feet by Darryl Strawberry of the Dodgers, April 26 at San Francisco.

Author, author: Chuck Daly, who signed with the New Jersey Nets for an estimated $1.3 million, has a book deal lined up on his experiences coaching this summer’s U.S. Olympic basketball team.

Rumor mill: Peter May of the Boston Globe reports that the Clippers have offered either Loy Vaught or Ken Norman, a re-signed Charles Smith, Bo Kimble and three No. 1 draft picks to the Houston Rockets for Hakeem Olajuwon.

Draft data: For what it’s worth, not one player chosen in baseball’s amateur draft last year is in the majors and only five from 1990 are--Mike Mussina, Donovan Osborne, Dave Fleming, Chris Haney and Alex Fernandez.

Actually, a Gang of Four: Barry Axelrod, agent for Baltimore Oriole pitcher Rick Sutcliffe, pointed out that Sutcliffe is one of four former Dodgers among the pitchers who have been beaten all 26 major league teams, joining Don Sutton, Tommy John and Doyle Alexander.

He’s a closer: Rally’s Hamburgers in San Diego offers free burgers any time the Padres win by a run, which has happened 11 times this year, six times when reliever Randy Myers took multi-run leads and wound up with one-run victories.

Said Myers: “I’m going to put them out of business.”

Rudolph role: Associated Press sportswriter Dave O’Hara of Boston is retiring after 50 years. He knew that was the right course after covering the Digital PGA Senior tournament, which had Mason Rudolph in the field. O’Hara covered Rudolph in the 1957 U.S. Amateur.

“You know you’re getting old when you’re writing about a guy who’s a senior and you wrote about him as an amateur,” O’Hara said.

Frozen out: Say goodby to the skating penguin logo of the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Stanley Cup champions are going for a more contemporary, abstract logo next season.

Trivia answer: Bjorn Borg in 1980.

Quotebook: Lee Trevino on his aggressive style of putting: “The ball’s got to stop somewhere, it might as well be in the bottom of the hole.”