Nagano Stories Getting Wilder All the Time

There was monkey business at the Paralympics in Nagano, Japan, but it wasn’t funny to a New Zealand skier. He had to fend off a wild monkey that entered his room in a hotel near the slopes.

“I was just watching television in my room alone when a large monkey opened a door and leaped in from the hotel’s balcony,” Mathew Butson said. “I picked up my artificial arm and threatened it.”

The 24-year-old skier said he was not hurt. Shinya Murata, a spokesman for the Shiga Kogen hotel, said more than 200 wild monkeys live in the area.

They sometimes open unlocked doors and windows and leap in to take bags from hotel rooms, Murata said, but so far there have been no reports of injuries to guests.

That’s reassuring.

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Trivia time: When was the last year that the Pacific 10 basketball tournament was held and what team won?

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Scoop! In the March 2 edition of Sports Illustrated, it was noted that there is more water on the Valencia Country Club course than Riviera Country Club, the usual site of the Nissan Open.

That was a safe assumption considering that there is no water on Riviera.

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Convenient injury? After winning a 100-meter race last Saturday in Sydney, Australia, world 100-meter champion Maurice Greene needled world-record holder Donovan Bailey, who withdrew from the meet citing a bruised heel:

“He [Bailey] just didn’t feel up to running tonight. If I didn’t think I was going to win, I wouldn’t have run either.”

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Tongue-twister: After signing with the Bills, former Philadelphia Eagle guard Joe Panos told Buffalo reporters about his formative years:

“I was coming home with bloody noses, getting picked on all the time, and I told my parents: ‘You’ve got to give me a break and shorten this thing down.’

So Panos’ parents changed his name from Zois Panagiotopoulous.

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Still airborne: Letter to Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News: “Watching the Winter Olympics makes me wonder: Whatever happened to Eddie the Eagle?”

Said Lupica: “He just jumped. CBS is going to show the landing at the Final Four.”

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FYI: In 1923, Stanford defeated USC, 24-21, in basketball. Not an unusual score for that era, but it was a four-overtime game.

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Looking back: On this day in 1982, San Antonio, with 171, and Milwaukee, with 166, set an NBA record for most total points in a game, 337, in three overtimes.

The record was broken in 1983, when Detroit and Denver combined for 370 points in another three-overtime game.

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Trivia answer: 1990, with Arizona defeating UCLA, 94-78, in the championship game.

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And finally: Colorado Avalanche General Manager Pierre Lacroix was asked after he returned from Nagano if he planned to make a trade.

“I’m still on Tokyo time,” he said. “Maybe I did it already.”