He Remains Biggest Man on Campus

They are certainly rolling out the red carpet for Wisconsin, in the Rose Bowl game for the first time in 31 years.

What better way to mark the occasion, Universal Studios thought, than to present the Badgers football team with a special gift Sunday. King Kong gave the Badgers his personal football helmet. It is 7 feet high, weighs 200 pounds and has a banana emblem on the side.

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This just in: Now we know how hard it is to be a Trojan basketball player as long as UCLA is still in town. At the USC-Cal State Sacramento basketball game in the Sports Arena, the first three pages of the program were about USC, but all of the other pages were from the UCLA program.

USC and UCLA use the same printing company for programs, which explains the mixup. USC officials confiscated the programs before they could get out of the building.

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Trivia time: Who is the winningest basketball coach in University of Arizona history?

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Sudden death: According to Suzanne Schlosberg’s “The Ultimate Workout Log,” when the ancient Mayans played their form of basketball, spectators forfeited their clothing to the player who shot the winning goal. The losing captain was beheaded by the winning captain.

It probably was the first time anybody brought up the idea of expansion teams.

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Tell it to Marley’s ghost: San Francisco 49er Coach George Seifert said there was nothing anyone could do about having to play the Houston Oilers on Christmas Day. Said Seifert: “Bah, humbug. It’s football.”

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Unbeaten, inaccurate: UCLA (6-0) has made only slightly more than half of its free throws. Said Coach Jim Harrick: “If I was the other team, I’d foul us every time down.”

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Try half-bore: After Fox landed the NFC games, a sports producer and reporter for KTVU, the Fox affiliate in San Francisco, said there is a lot of work to do.

“Our immediate plan is to go ahead full bore,” Fred Inglis said.

Offbeat plan, to be sure, but you’re not going to have many viewers who aren’t snoring.

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Go see Cal, please: California will play Iowa in the first Alamo Bowl on New Year’s Eve, but the school has sold only about 4,000 tickets. If Cal doesn’t sell a minimum of 11,000 tickets, it will have to reimburse nearly $300,000 of its $700,000 payout.

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Down the chimney: After watching his team lose to the Hartford Whalers, New Jersey Devil Coach Jacques Lemaire said: “We played like Santa Claus . . . we were all over the place.”

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No, send a fax: New York Jet Coach Bruce Coslet criticized Jimmy Johnson of Dallas when Johnson called a double safety blitz with a 21-point lead late in the Cowboys’ 28-7 victory Dec. 18. Johnson laughed it off.

“I guess I ought to send a memo out to all the 27 other teams that if they try to score, we’re going to try to stop them,” he said. “I’d do it again. If somebody would tell me what defenses we’re supposed to play at the end of the game, I’d appreciate it.”

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Trivia answer: Fred Enke, with 505 victories in 36 seasons. Lute Olson, current Arizona coach, had 167 victories at Iowa, the most at that school.

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Quotebook: Jamie Williams on San Francisco 49er teammate John Taylor: “If you don’t wrap him up, it’s six points in a heart beat.”