Another Ringless Summer Is Right Around the Corner

Arizona freshman Reggie Geary from Santa Ana Mater Dei High spent last summer playing pickup games against Duke’s Cherokee Parks, a former Orange County prep star from Huntington Beach Marina.

“He’d go around bragging with his (NCAA championship) ring, saying, ‘I know you want one of these,’ ” Geary said. “He’s one of my best friends, but I thought, ‘Enough is enough.’ It just made me want to make my goal my first year, to go out and get a ring, and come back and put it in his face.”

Geary will have a long summer after the Wildcats’ first-round defeat by Santa Clara.

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Add Arizona: Coach Lute Olson: “Every year at this time you can count on death, taxes and Pac-10 basketball being ripped by Midwestern and Eastern writers.”

For good reason, apparently.

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Trivia time: Which school has made five Final Four appearances without winning the NCAA championship?

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Tales of Dale: Louisiana State basketball Coach Dale Brown is regarded as a most unusual man. A sampling from Jake Curtis of the San Francisco Chronicle:

He lived with an Amazon tribe for a week.

He searched for Noah’s Ark.

He climbed the Matterhorn.

He once stood up to tell off a speaker at a stress-management seminar in Arizona.

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Blitzing ball: Jim Plunkett was able to avoid blitzing linebackers as a Raider quarterback, but he couldn’t dodge a golf ball. Two weeks ago, while playing at the Stanford Golf Course, Plunkett was hit by a ball and needed six stitches to close a head wound.

“I just wanted to see if I could stop a golf ball with my forehead, and I was successful,” Plunkett told Mark Soltau of the San Francisco Examiner.

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Freeway audible: If the Raiders wind up signing free-agent quarterback Jeff Hostetler, it might not be so much because of his running ability or his strong arm but because of another attribute.

Raider assistant Mike White and Steve Ortmayer, the club’s director of football operations, met Hostetler at the L.A. airport Wednesday and were on their way to Raider camp in El Segundo when their car had a flat tire.

Apparently, neither White nor Ortmayer knew how to change it, so Hostetler took off his jacket and tie and did it for them.

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Nigeria Falls? Before Georgetown beat Arizona State in a first-round National Invitation Tournament game, 78-68, ASU guard Stevin (Hedake) Smith said he would prefer playing an opponent other than Georgetown.

“If you would have asked me, I would have rather picked a team like Nigeria,” he said.

Wrote Bob McManaman of the Arizona Republic: “It’s Niagara, Hedake. As in Niagara U., New York.”

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Trivia answer: Houston, in 1967, 1968, 1982, 1983 and 1984.

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Quotebook: Tom Weir of USA Today, on how to speed up baseball: “Hitters get to scratch themselves only once per at-bat.”