Agents Grumble While Lockout Continues

While the commissioner worked from his home in Colorado and his deputy was in Florida, NBA players and agents stewed on the telephone Tuesday as the lockout approached its half-year anniversary.

“If the league doesn’t want to play, then we don’t need to wait until Jan. 7. Just cancel the season,” said Jerome Stanley, an agent who represents five players in the lower- and middle-income ranges. “But if they’re not going to cancel the season, then crank it back up. We don’t need any more gesturing or grandstanding, just do some trade-offs and end the thing.”

Stanley and two other agents, Keith Glass and Steve Kauffman, held a conference call with reporters while players participated on a separate conference call with union leadership.

Commissioner David Stern, meantime, was still vacationing in Aspen, and deputy commissioner Russ Granik was in Florida with his family. Neither is expected back in New York until the new year.

The league has scheduled a Board of Governors meeting for Jan. 7, and Stern and Granik have said they will recommend canceling the season if no agreement has been reached by that date.

The league says it has made its final offer, and no further talks are scheduled.

A hearing will be held today in Houston federal court on a lawsuit filed by players Nick Van Exel, Marcus Camby and Reggie Slater charging USA Basketball and the NBA with denying them clearance to play in Europe.

The NBA was added as a defendant Monday night.

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Free-agent center Arvydas Sabonis joined Lithuania’s national champion Zalgiras Vilnius and will play for the team in the European league during the NBA lockout.

Sabonis, who played for the Portland Trail Blazers last season, signed a five-month contract, but both sides said he could return to the NBA on short notice if players and owners settle their labor dispute.

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Dino Radja, who played four seasons for the Boston Celtics, scored 17 points to lead the East to a 104-98 victory in the European All-Star game at Berlin.

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Since Reggie Lewis collapsed and died on a practice court in 1993, there have been rumors that the Boston Celtic star’s death was fueled by cocaine use.

Now Northeastern University, Lewis’ alma mater, has agreed to turn over to his former doctors results of an internal investigation that might show whether the 27-year-old tested positive for the drug in 1987.

The Boston Herald reported Tuesday that lawyers for four doctors being sued by Lewis’ widow, Donna Harris-Lewis, had asked Northeastern for the documents collected by a Blue Ribbon Commission on Athletics that investigated allegations of drug use by players.

The doctors said that if Lewis had used cocaine, it might have contributed to his heart attack, and that they would have treated him differently.

Winter Sports

Hermann Maier won his first downhill since he narrowly avoided injury during a spectacular spill at the Nagano Olympics, and Austrian skiers finished in the first six positions during a race at Bormio, Italy.

This was the first time a nation finished 1-6 in a men’s downhill; French women accomplished the feat in a 1968 downhill at Abetone, Italy.

Fritz Strobl finished 0.70 of a second behind Maier and Stephan Eberharter was third, 1.28 seconds behind the winner.

Daron Rahlves of Truckee, Calif., was the top U.S. skier, finishing 20th in 1:58.04.

Norway’s Bente Martinsen won her third consecutive cross-country World Cup sprint, beating Slovenia’s Andreja Mali at Kitzbuehel, Austria.

Germany’s Peter Schlickenrieder won the men’s race when Sweden’s Thobias Fredriksson fell.

Miscellany

Former Senate majority leader George Mitchell promised that an investigation of alleged bribes by Salt Lake City officials to help win the 2002 Winter Olympic Games would be “thorough and prompt.”

“One of the most difficult parts is the judging of past actions by current standards,” Mitchell said. “How do you treat people fairly? We will do the best we can within the limits of time and scope.”

After his first meeting with members of a special commission investigating the allegations, Mitchell told reporters that the five-member panel must file its report to the U.S. Olympic Committee by Feb. 28. He said there would be no public reports before then.

First she won the LPGA Championship, then one of the most memorable U.S. Women’s Opens in its 53-year history. Se Ri Pak got only better as the galleries got bigger, signs that maybe she is the LPGA’s version of Tiger Woods.

Now they share something else in common.

Pak, the South Korean rookie who won two majors and took women’s golf to its highest level of popularity in 20 years, was honored as Associated Press female athlete of the year in a close vote over Tennessee basketball star Chamique Holdsclaw.

The award comes one year after Woods became the first golfer in 26 years to win AP male athlete of the year.

Pak received 19 first-place votes and 156 points in voting by AP member newspaper and broadcast outlets. Holdsclaw, the top player on what many regard as the best women’s college basketball team ever, got 142 points.

Tara Lipinski, who won the Olympic gold medal in figure skating, was third with 105 points. Sprinter and long jumper Marion Jones was fourth with 101 points, followed by U.S. Open tennis champion Lindsay Davenport.

Names in the News

Richard Winning, the skipper of the sunken yacht Winston Churchill, vowed never to race again after the deaths of his close friends, and even American billionaire Larry Ellison questioned whether he would ever compete again on the open seas.

Winds up to 90 mph and 35-foot seas carved a path of destruction through the annual Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race this week. After recovering the bodies of four sailors, Australian authorities gave up hope of finding two other missing racers, ending one of their largest-ever maritime rescue operations.

Of the 115 yachts in the race this year, 70 boats withdrew because of the hurricane-strength winds. Ten yachts were abandoned.

Amid claims race organizers knew of the potential danger 24 hours before the massive storm, two planned inquiries were announced into the world’s worst yachting disaster since the Fastnet race off Ireland in 1979, in which 15 sailors died.

FINA, swimming’s world governing body, said Giedu Rafanavicius was given a four-year suspension by the Lithuanian federation after testing positive for a steroid, metandienone metabolite.

Meanwhile, water polo players Wilson Caldeira of Brazil and Claudio Reginato of Chile were suspended for three months by the South American association for positive drug tests during last April’s South American Championships in Venezuela.

Lloyd “Shorty” Rollins, the first NASCAR rookie of the year, has died in Pensacola, Fla., after a brief illness.

Rollins, the circuit’s top rookie in 1958, died Monday at age 69, a day after lapsing into a coma from complications of a heart ailment.

He ran 29 races that season with one victory among 22 top-10 finishes in the NASCAR series now known as Winston Cup. He finished fourth in points.

A year later, Rollins won the first stock car race at the new Daytona International Speedway, a 100-lap preliminary to the inaugural Daytona 500. Three days later, he was running fifth in what was to become the world’s premier stock car race when his engine blew.

“He would have been another Richard Petty,” said a former crew member, Mike Flannigan of Corpus Christi, Texas. “He could outrun them all and he did outrun them all.”

But Rollins moved his family to Pensacola in 1959 and got out of racing the following year after watching some friends die in an accident at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Former heavyweight fighter Jerry Quarry is in critical condition at Templeton Hospital in Templeton, Calif., after a reported heart attack. . . . Left-handed reliever Pedro Borbon, 31, who hasn’t pitched in the majors since 1996, agreed to a $375,000, one-year contract with the Dodgers. . . . First baseman Mark Johnson, released by the Angels last week, agreed to a $1.1-million, one-year contract with the Hanshin Tigers of Japan’s Central League. . . . Thailand’s Veeraphol Nakonluang-Promotion won the World Boxing Council bantamweight title, stopping Japan’s Joichiro Tatsuyoshi at 2:52 of the sixth round at Osaka, Japan.