A Return to Sideline Apparently Not on List

The day after former USC coach Larry Smith was fired at Missouri last season, he and wife Cheryl went for a walk.

“I told her, ‘Write down 50 things you have always wanted to do,”’ Smith, 62, told the Tucson Citizen.

“She said, ‘There aren’t 50 things I want to do that I haven’t already done.’

“So I said, ‘OK, you write down 25 and I’ll write down 25.”’

So, Paris, London, Rome, Venice? Not exactly.

Besides a lot of family time and golf, the itinerary for the new retirees includes trips to see former coaches Grant Teaff and Spike Dykes in Texas, a visit to football practice at the University of Florida and a couple of games in Jonesboro, Ark., where the Smiths’ son, Corby, is an Arkansas State assistant.

“I miss the game because I still love it,” Smith said. “But as far as the day-to-day business of running a football program, no, I don’t miss it at all. I helped Corby and his family move, and just hung around and went to practice, sat in on meetings, etc.

“I called Cheryl one day and said, ‘I don’t miss this stuff at all. I musta been crazy to coach all those years.”’

Trivia time: How many losing seasons did Smith have in six years as USC coach?

Maple sugar: With Barry Bonds among its customers, the mom-and-pop Original Maple Bat Corp. in Ottawa, Canada, has done quite well since major league baseball approved the bats four years ago.

The company has taken orders from 300 major league players this season and expects to produce 10,000 of the $50 bats by year’s end, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

There’s no better advertisement than Bonds, with 54 home runs.

Still, the major benefit of maple over the standard ash is durability.

No one is claiming it’s the key to Bonds’ sweet swing. “It’s the soldier,” Bonds said. “If you had a gun, would it shoot by itself?”

High times: In the wake of questions about dietary-supplement use and football deaths, Lisa Olson of the New York Daily News reveals she tried ephedrine as a weight-loss aid.

“I was a linebacker, mowing down people as if they were blades of grass,” she wrote, hardly endorsing the diet. “I was flying, drumming my fingers on the dashboard, faster, harder, too impatient to wait for a green light.

“I was sweating, shaking. Hot flashes hit me in tsunami rushes. Was it early menopause? I was hallucinating. My heart raced, my mind ran, my temples pounded, drunk with adrenaline. It was clear: I was an athlete.

“I was invincible.

“I was a sucker.

“I was high on ephedrine.”

The side effects and a near-accident while driving put an end to Olson’s diet.

Trivia answer: Smith had one losing season, 1991, when the Trojans were 3-8. Overall, Smith had a 44-25-3 record.

And finally: The surly athlete apparently is not a recent invention. Consider the account by Bud Collins in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about his childhood encounter with Bob Feller.

“It went like this, as I proffered notebook and pencil: ‘May I please have your autograph, Mr. Feller?’

“‘Get the hell out of the way, kid, or I’ll run you over.’

“Mom commented, ‘At least you two had a conversation.”’