Sportswriters to Your Marks, Get Set . . . Run!

Russ Brown of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, a veteran reporter, said the toughest job he ever had was covering Bob Knight’s Indiana basketball team for 13 seasons.

Brown told John R. O’Neill of the Indianapolis Star that he once endured a profanity-laced rebuke from Knight after he had written something the volatile coach didn’t like.

After the next home Indiana game, Brown said, he left the media room and saw Knight standing outside the door.

“After I got 10 or 15 yards away, he said, ‘Hey, Russ.’ I turned around and he had a gun. It turned out to be a [blank-firing] starter’s pistol. He fired it and the sound just reverberated.”

Please, no jokes about deadlines.

Add Knight: Digger Phelps, former Notre Dame basketball coach: “I think people need to stop figuring out Knight. No one has done it for 25 years.”

Trivia time: Who are the three men who ended their college coaching careers by winning the NCAA basketball championship?

Prankster: Under the “Personal/Miscellaneous section” in the media guide biography of Milwaukee Brewer pitcher Mark Kiefer is this item: “Once swam from San Francisco to Alcatraz in three hours.”

It seems that teammate Steve Sparks, also a pitcher, got hold of Kiefer’s questionnaire at the end of last season and penned that bit of fiction.

Add Sparks: He is wearing wrap-around goggles this year rather than eyeglasses.

“I’m trying to make the all-geek team,” he said. “I can finally see the catcher’s signs, not that it matters with a knuckleball pitcher.”

Care to guess? Monica Seles told Tennis magazine she doesn’t even know her own weight:

“I have never been on a scale in my life except [when I’m weighed] for insurance--and then I don’t look.”

Dead wrong: Tom Weir in USA Today: “Last week, the Montreal franchise of the Canadian Football League drafted a player who had died of cancer in December.

“Last April, the CFL’s Las Vegas Posse drafted a player who had died in a car crash. Who does this league hire for scouts? Out-of-work undertakers?”

Oops department: Marquette Coach Mike Deane hung photos of former Marquette standout basketball players so his current team would appreciate the school’s great basketball tradition.

“Once I had the pictures put up in the locker room, I went around and asked the team who each guy was,” Deane said. “They didn’t even know Bo Ellis, and he is an assistant on my staff.”

Fireproof: New York Yankee Manager Joe Torre isn’t alarmed working for George Steinbrenner. “What can happen to me?” he said. “I’ve been fired three times.”

FYI: The smallest crowd ever to watch an NCAA basketball championship final game was 5,500 in 1939--the first year of the tournament--at Patten gymnasium on the Northwestern campus in Evanston, Ill. Oregon defeated Ohio State, 46-33.

Trivia answer: John Wooden, UCLA, 1975; Al McGuire, Marquette, 1977, and Larry Brown, Kansas, 1988.