Trojan Fans Get Winner, Bruin Fans Get a Tie

Dave Baker, the commissioner of the Arena Football League and the father of USC offensive tackle Sam Baker, spoke at Friday’s Pasadena Quarterbacks Club luncheon at Brookside Golf Club, adjacent to the Rose Bowl.

“For those of you who are Bruin fans, I wore a blue tie today,” Baker said. “But if you are a Trojan fan, I gave you my son.”

Trivia time: Sam Baker, USC’s offensive lineman of the year as a redshirt freshman last season, played at Tustin High. What two current Trojan defensive ends also played at Tustin?

Both ends of the spectrum: Dave Baker has two sons, Sam, who is on a team that has won 30 games in a row, and Ben, who is two years older and played one year for Duke. During that Duke season, the Blue Devils ended a 27-game losing streak.

“Whenever we sit down at a dinner table, we’ve got consecutive wins and consecutive losses pretty well covered,” Baker said.

Quite the picture: Baker said when his sons were 12 and 10, he was in Arizona for an Arena Bowl and decided he would spend some time doing whatever they wanted to do. They wanted to go on a waterslide that was about 12 stories high.

Baker is a mountain of a man. He is 6 feet 9 and, as he describes it, “a couple of Hostess snowballs above 400 pounds.”

Of his Arizona adventure, he says, “I had to don my swimsuit, which I had formerly used as a car cover for my VW bus. The kid at the water slide who helped me get in said, ‘You’re the biggest guy we’ve ever had try this.’ ”

Too many strings attached: Baker said two years ago, when Jon Bon Jovi became co-owner of the AFL’s Philadelphia Soul, Tom Benson, then the owner of the New Orleans VooDoo, tried to trade a player to the Soul for a Bon Jovi autographed guitar.

“We had to negate that one,” Baker said.

Don’t invite ‘ems: There seems to be quite a feud brewing between Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban and TNT studio analysts Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith.

Said Cuban on his blog after the Mavericks and Phoenix Suns played Tuesday night: “The only downer of the night was listening to the idiots on TNT.”

Said Barkley Thursday night: “I’ll never have as much money as him, [but] if he lives to be 1,000, he’ll never know more than us two about basketball. If he knew basketball, he wouldn’t have put that little soft-cake team together.”

Looking back: On this day in 1994, George Foreman, 20 years after losing to Muhammad Ali in Zaire, stopped Michael Moorer in the 10th round at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Foreman, by taking Moorer’s International Boxing Federation and World Boxing Assn. heavyweight titles, became, at age 45, the oldest champion in any weight class.

Trivia answer: Frostee Rucker and Chris Barrett.

And finally: Greg Cote of the Miami Herald, on Sylvester Stallone, 59, planning to film Rocky VI: “Historians are calling it irrefutable proof that mankind has officially run out of good ideas.”

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