Entertainment World Isn’t Half as Creative as Him

Wallace Matthews of the New York Post got carried away with the Knicks’ 101-89 victory over the Lakers on Sunday with chauvinistic fervor:

“What Angelenos seem to forget is that we, New Yorkers, created their artificial paradise.

“Before we began heading West in droves to make money in the pretend world of the entertainment business, the place was nothing but orange groves bound by a desert at one end and the sea at the other.

“And what they don’t understand is what New York created New York can also destroy.”

Easy, Wallace, easy. Just lie down on a couch for a while and you’ll be fine.

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Trivia time: Who are the only coaches to take two different schools to the men’s NCAA Division I championship basketball game?

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Survivor: At 38, Orlando’s Danny Schayes is the oldest starting center in the NBA, and he put his age in perspective when he said:

“Comparing my game to today’s players is like cutting Humphrey Bogart out of one of his classics and putting him into a color movie.”

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Minor flaw: Oakland second baseman Scott Spiezio and three pals have formed a heavy-metal band called Spastic Dysphonia.

“We have all the equipment, we have all the songs,” Spiezio said. “Right now we have everything but the talent.”

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Surrender: Tim Keown of the San Francisco Chronicle has grudgingly accepted former Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser: “Part of the fun of being a Giants fan is hating guys like Hershiser and Tommy Lasorda. It’s a hard thing to give up.

“But the truth is he [Hershiser] will break you down, bit by bit, until you relent. At some point the deconstruction will be complete.

“Grudgingly, reluctantly, you’ll cave in and admit it’s good to have a guy like him around.”

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Cold: When someone asked Tom Donahoe, Pittsburgh’s director of football operations, whether his franchise had any interest in re-signing such former Steelers as Kevin Greene, Rod Woodson and Ernie Mills, he replied, “We’re not the Salvation Army.”

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Shortchanged: Otis Thorpe, recently traded from the Vancouver Grizzlies to the Sacramento Kings, on playing basketball in Canada, where tax rates are higher than they are in the United States: “Up there it’s not another day, another dollar. It’s another day, another 46 cents.”

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Figuratively speaking: British boxer Terry Dunstan, after beating Alexander Gurov in 20 seconds in their European cruiserweight title fight: “He literally committed suicide.”

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But it was prime meat: Talk about a hungry team. A last-place Romanian soccer club is trying to solve its cash problem by selling players for food or equipment.

Ion Radu, a player for the first-league team Jiul Petrosani, has been transferred to a second-division team in exchange for two tons of meat, the Evenimentul Zilei newspaper reported. A teammate, Liviu Baicea, was transferred to another team in exchange for badly needed equipment.

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FYI: An Associated Press writer in Bangkok, Thailand, has one of the world’s longest bylines: Jirapporn Wongpaithoon.

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Trivia time: Frank McGuire with St. John’s in 1952 and North Carolina in 1957, and Larry Brown with UCLA in 1980 and Kansas in 1988.

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And finally: Charles Barkley was in a ripping mood recently on Fox Sports Net’s “The Last Word.” He called co-host Matthews a “red-neck newspaper hack” and then dismissed Jim Rome as “the village idiot.”

Matthews had trashed Barkley in a recent column.