Good Thing She Wasn’t Too Quick on Trigger

The source of Chick Hearn’s wit may have been his wife of 64 years.

Marge Hearn was at a recent Pasadena Quarterback Club’s awards luncheon to present the group’s Chick Hearn Award for broadcasting to Keith Jackson.

“Keith, I don’t know you very well,” Marge said, “but your name was mentioned a lot around our house in recent years. You were quoted in The Times, talking about retirement, and you said, ‘Vin Scully is going to go on forever, and as for Chick Hearn, well, they’re just going to have to shoot him.’

“After that, whenever Chick would do something to upset me, I’d say, ‘Keith Jackson was right, I’m just going to have to shoot you.’ ”

Trivia time: Who holds the NBA record for free throws made in a regulation game?

Practice, practice: Magic Johnson was an above-average 78.5% free-throw shooter as a freshman at Michigan State. He was a 91.1% free-throw shooter by his 10th season in the NBA. Once asked by Sports Illustrated how he did it, Johnson said, “I shoot 150 free throws a day.”

Another example: Bill Sharman, in his book, “Sharman on Basketball,” writes that he was only a little above average as a free-throw shooter through high school and his first two years at USC. Then he got serious about practicing free throws and during his junior year he never missed a free throw in 12 league games.

Sharman’s 56-year-old son Jerry says when he was a youngster in Boston and would go to Celtic practices, his father sometimes wouldn’t leave until he had made 50 free throws in a row.

“He’d get to 48 or 49, then miss and start all over,” Jerry Sharman says. “I just wanted to go home.”

Awards aplenty: USC’s Carson Palmer is a finalist for the Heisman Trophy, which will be presented on ESPN on Saturday at 5 p.m., and he is also up for the Davey O’Brien National Quarterback Award, which is to be presented Thursday on ESPN at 4 p.m.

A question asked of some of the Heisman finalists: “If you couldn’t vote for yourself, who would you vote for as the top player in college football this season?”

Said Palmer: “I’m a quarterback, but I believe quarterbacks get too much of the credit when you win and too much blame when you lose. So I’ll go with a running back, Larry Johnson of Penn State.”

Trivia answer: The record, 28, is shared by Wilt Chamberlain and Adrian Dantley. Chamberlain was 28 for 32 when he scored 100 points against the New York Knicks in 1962, and Dantley, when he was with the Utah Jazz, made 28 of 29 against Houston in 1984.

And finally: Jim Brown is profiled in a two-hour documentary on HBO tonight. Raquel Welch, who had a sex scene with Brown in the 1969 movie “100 Rifles,” talks about Brown as an actor.

“Jim is not the ideal candidate for an actor, in my opinion, because a long time ago somebody said to me that an actress is a little bit more than a woman and an actor is a little bit less than a man,” she says. “See, because you need that little bit of femininity in there, even if you are a he-man type. And Jim, really, as far as I can see, has not got an ounce of femininity in him.”

-- Larry Stewart