Riley’s Lineup Could Really Add Up

Pat Riley has the opportunity to field the tallest lineup in NBA history Sunday, and he admits he’s intrigued by the idea.

Riley, coach of the West for the All-Star game at Indianapolis, could go with 7-4 Ralph Sampson and 7-0 Akeem Olajuwon at forwards, 7-2 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at center and 6-9 Magic Johnson and 6-8 George Gervin at guards.

“I think it could work,” Riley said. “Ralph could float a bit, and we could play a double-low post with him high. But there’s only so much space out there. It’s something I’d use only when I felt a power lineup could really be an advantage.

“Quickness can kill a lineup like that. But I think I’d probably give it a look.”

Riley’s eyes lit up at the thought of inserting Sampson, Olajuwon and Abdul-Jabbar into the game at the same time.

“I might send the three of them to the scorer’s table just to see the look on K.C.’s face,” Riley said, referring to East Coach K.C. Jones.

North Carolina State basketball Coach Jim Valvano, who went to Rutgers, said he actually wanted to go to St. John’s.

“But they said something I didn’t like,” Valvano said.

Which was?

“They said they didn’t want me.”

Add Valvano: He was born in Manhattan and grew up in Queens under the elevated train line.

“That’s the reason we talk so fast,” he told Furman Bisher of the Atlanta Journal. “We had three minutes to make our point before the next train came along.”

“The Bob Knight Show,” carried by a Fort Wayne, Ind., station, carries into Ohio, where a devoted watcher is John Brigle, coach of the girls’ JV basketball team at Edon High School.

“I had never coached before,” Brigle told USA Today. “I’m learning how to coach from watching him.”

Asked what he’s learned, Brigle said, “I yell a lot.”

Florida Southern Coach George Scholz, asked what he told his team before the game against Georgetown, said: “I told them they lace up their shoes the same way we do.”

Said Scholz after Georgetown won, 79-31: “Maybe they don’t.”

New Jersey General linebacker Stan Blinka, formerly of the New York Jets, said of Doug Flutie after a workout: “I only saw one ball batted down, and that was on a pass over the middle that a 6-4 quarterback would have had knocked down. Flutie said he throws in lanes, not over people, and I agree with him. You don’t have to be 6-4 to do that.”

Said guared Doug Lapham, formerly of the Cincinnati Bengals: “He’s under tremendous pressure, but from what I’ve seen, he’s capable of learning quickly. The stuff that some quarterbacks take a week to absorb, he was running in a day.”

Wait a minute: Carl Lewis, comparing his Olympic experience with that of Jesse Owens, said: “You must remember that Owens was not that well known before his Games.”

In 1935, the year before the Berlin Olympics, Owens broke three world records and tied another in the Big Ten championships at Ann Arbor, Mich. It remains the greatest single-day achievement in track and field history.

Lewis, if you can believe it, has yet to set an outdoor world record.

New York Yankee pitcher Phil Niekro, who will be 46 this season, on how he keeps in shape: “I don’t lift weights, or anything, I just dance the polka.”

Quotebook

Tampa Bay Bandits defensive lineman Jim Ramey, hoping that Doug Flutie plays tonight for the New Jersey Generals: “It makes you feel good that you can beat up on a millionaire and not get into trouble for it.”