Boob tube works for coaches

Coaches are always looking for something to fire up their players. For the University of San Diego’s Bill Grier, it wasn’t what he heard before his Toreros knocked off Connecticut in the first round of the NCAA tournament, it was what he didn’t hear.

“I was in my hotel room getting ready to go, and Seth Davis, who I know fairly well, was talking on CBS [saying], ‘I feel there is going to be a lot of upsets today,’ ” Grier told Fox Sports Radio’s Andrew Siciliano. “He went through all the ones he thought were going to win, and never mentioned our name. So I used that as a little extra motivation.”

Said Siciliano: “So you pulled the old they-don’t-believe-we-can-win-on-TV card, did you?”

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Trivia time

When Grier, a former Gonzaga assistant, came to San Diego at the end of last season, who did he replace?

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Bracket busters

Grier conceded his team messed up a lot of brackets. So did a few other teams, including Western Kentucky, which eliminated San Diego on Sunday, 72-63.

Of the more than 3.65 million entries in ESPN.com’s Men’s Tournament Challenge, the best anyone did was 30 first-round winners out of 32, according to figures provided by ESPN publicist Paul Melvin. And there were only 51 entries with 30 winners.

But there was one entry that had zero winners. Now that’s quite an accomplishment.

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Finger food

Mike Finger of the San Antonio Express-News, after interviewing Stanford forward Taj Finger, wrote: “We have no way of knowing if we’re related . . . but it doesn’t matter. We talk about the jokes, the horrible puns, the Finger food, the trigger Fingers, the Finger-lickin’ good, the give ‘em the Finger.”

When asked the best he had heard, Taj Finger said, “I guess my favorite was at Cal. A guy yelled, ‘Finger, you’re more like a thumb.’ ”

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Good timing

Mike Shenkel, 35, a low-handicap golfer from Thousand Oaks, was playing at Tierra Rejada in Moorpark recently and ended up in an infomercial that was being shot there.

Shenkel was about to hit his approach shot on the downhill 575-yard, par-five ninth hole when former radio sports talk-show host Rick Schwartz, who was producing the infomercial for a new line of Bobby Jones clubs, approached.

“How about trying this wedge?” Schwartz asked.

Shenkel agreed and subsequently knocked in his 20-yard shot for an eagle as a camera was rolling.

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Burglary foiled

A would-be burglar got quite a shock when he crawled through a window in suburban Budapest. Virgine Ujlaky, 23, an Olympic fencer, was in the middle of a practice session.

Within seconds and a few slashes of the sword, Ananova.com reported, the crook was pinned against the wall, with the blade against his throat as the swordswoman reached for the phone and called police.

The arrested perp had to be treated for shock, but Ujlaky seemed to take it all in stride.

“It was good practice as I have a competition coming up,” she said.

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Trivia answer

Brad Holland, the former Crescenta Valley High and UCLA star who played for the Lakers during the 1979-80 and 1980-81 seasons.

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And finally

Austin Peay, which lost to Texas in the first round of the NCAA tournament, in the early 1970s had a player named Fly Williams, who averaged 28.5 points a game during his two seasons at the Clarksville, Tenn., school. Dan Patrick recalled on his national radio show last week what the popular Austin Peay cheer was when Williams played there.

Keep in mind the “y” in Peay is silent. It was: “Fly is open, let’s go Peay.”

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larry.stewart@latimes.com