Ill-Fated Stunt Is Not a Big Hit With Coach

In basketball-crazy Indiana, things can get crazy.

Junior guard Justin Ray of Indian Creek High in tiny Trafalgar was hired by adults as a “hit man.” He got $45 to hit teammate J.R. Angle with an errant pass -- after Angle came out of Indian Creek’s last home game and was sitting on the bench.

According to the Indianapolis Star, the townspeople were upset that Larry Angle, Indian Creek’s coach and the father of J.R., was showing too much favoritism toward his son, who is headed to Iowa to play for Steve Alford.

The message: Coach wants us to pass you the ball, so here you go.

Ray was suspended from the team, although he apologized to the Angles and returned the $45.

“Indian Creek is a nightmare,” Garry Donna, publisher of Hoosier Basketball magazine, told the Star. “I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Nothing even close.”

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Trivia time: With Stanford’s Mike Montgomery having failed to do it, only two men’s basketball coaches have gone through conference play undefeated in the Pacific 10 or Pac-8. John Wooden did it three times. Who is the other?

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Basketball hotbed: Northern Iowa is headed to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1990 after winning the Missouri Valley Conference. There are eight Iowans on Coach Greg McDermott’s team, and four of them are starters.

“It’s no joke,” writes Dennis Dodd of CBS Sportsline. “In fact, it’s almost a trend. There are more players from Iowa per capita in the NBA than any other state. The list includes Kirk Hinrich, Nick Collison, Ricky Davis, Raef LaFrentz and Fred Hoiberg.”

So take that, Indiana.

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Positive spin: Stanford’s Matt Lottich found a silver lining in the Cardinal’s loss to Washington on Saturday at Seattle, where pandemonium broke out after the game.

“To see a team so happy when they beat you, you must be pretty good,” Lottich said.

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Hot handicapper: Matt Carothers, a horse racing analyst and handicapper for TVG, hit two Pick Six wagers at New York’s Aqueduct Race Course in a three-day span last week. He hit one March 3 that paid $3,426 and hit one again Friday that paid $1,158.

“I’m usually good for about one or two a year,” Carothers said, “so I guess you could say I’m off to a great start in 2004.”

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Exclusive territory: Steve Rosenbloom of the Chicago Tribune, on the Bears’ plans to raise ticket prices for end-zone seats: “Guess the Bears figure that it ought to cost a lot of money to get to the place the Bears themselves can’t get to.”

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Trivia answer: Gary Cunningham, whose UCLA team finished 14-0 in the Pac-8 in 1977-78.

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And finally: From KFWB’s Bret Lewis: “Just wondering. If they crack down in college football and stop schools from using strippers to recruit high school athletes ... won’t that just motivate them to go to the NFL sooner?”

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Larry Stewart can be reached at larry.stewart@latimes.com.