Looks Like Shoe’s Not on Other Foot Yet

Shaquille O’Neal was among several NBA players involved in the shooting of a series of new TNT promotional ads at a New Jersey high school. O’Neal showed up wearing a Miami Heat uniform but Laker shoes.

“We’ll have to do something about those shoes in post-production,” TNT’s Holly Northey said.

Maybe TNT can explain it as a wardrobe malfunction.

Trivia time: Who was the first athlete to appear on a Wheaties box?

Apple pie, anyone? San Francisco’s ultra-modern SBC Park is a wireless hotspot. The Giants’ ballpark has a wireless network that allows fans to bring laptops to check e-mail and visit a customized website that offers live streaming video of other baseball games, plus stats and historical footage.

Next season, network users can order food online and have it delivered to their seats.

Triple tough: Steve Vanderpool of Stats Inc. points out that the Dodgers’ Adrian Beltre does not have a triple this season, and that that isn’t uncommon among home run hitters.

Vanderpool says Mark McGwire, who finished with 583 home runs, had only one triple in his last 13 seasons (1989 to 2001) and only six in his career. And Sammy Sosa didn’t have a triple in 1998, the year he hit 66 homers to McGwire’s then-record 70.

History lesson: A recent Morning Briefing item regarding former NBA referee Earl Strom and a female heckler brought many e-mails from readers.

They pointed out that a supposed exchange between Strom and the heckler had actually originated about 60 years ago between Winston Churchill and his political enemy, Lady Astor.

Readers provided varied versions of the heated parliamentary debate, but this one was the most common:

Lady Astor stated, “Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea.”

Churchill replied, “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

Telling it like it is: In the ESPN movie “Hustle,” based on the John Dowd report on Pete Rose’s gambling, there is a scene in which Rose is called into the commissioner’s office and questioned.

“I never, not once in my life, bet on baseball,” Rose says. “I’d have to be insane. I’d have to be the dumbest ... in the whole world.”

That about sums it up.

Looking back: On this day in 1981, Nolan Ryan of the Houston Astros became the first pitcher to record five no-hitters with a 5-0 victory over the Dodgers at the Astrodome.

Trivia answer: Lou Gehrig, in 1934. Two-time Olympic pole vault champion Bob Richards, in 1958, was the first athlete to appear on the front of the box. In 1984, Mary Lou Retton was the first woman on the front.

And finally: Reader Jim Greene, regarding the mop-haired wig worn by actor Tom Sizemore while portraying Rose in “Hustle,” says, “I thought Sizemore looked ridiculous until I found out that Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan are being played by Larry and Curly.”

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