Coach Wanted a Square Deal With Triangle

Billy Packer, while playing for Wake Forest in the 1960s, recalled a game in which the calls seemed to be going the other team’s way.

So Coach Bones McKinney called time out and ordered Packer and another player to guard the referees.

“The official I’m guarding has no sense of humor,” Packer told Bruce Keidan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “He’s going to throw me out of the game. So I say to him, ‘Look, don’t blame me. I’m just doing what Bones told me to do.’ ”

The referee confronted McKinney, who said he was using a triangle-and-two defense that he learned from Adolph Rupp.

“You take three guys and form a triangle underneath the basket. You take your two best defensive players and they play man-to-man against the two guys who are beating you.”

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Trivia time: Packer scored 22 points in an NCAA tournament third-place game in 1962. Which team did Wake Forest play and who won?

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More appropriate: Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post on the New Jersey Nets’ use of piped-in noise. “Considering they’ve won 21 of 68 games, maybe they should pipe in a laugh track.”

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Second guessers? Ron Borges in the Boston Globe: “Dan Reeves said he was going to bring something new to the [Atlanta] Falcons, and he has. He has brought 15 assistant coaches. There are Army divisions that don’t have that many second lieutenants.”

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Another rip-off: According to the New York Post, the New York Liberty of the new Women’s NBA is charging $150 for courtside seats. The next-best seats are priced at $75 and $45, prompting Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Sun-Times to comment:

“What a great way to prove greed and gouging are not gender issues.”

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Battle of the bulge: Dan Bernstein of WSCR radio in Chicago on Seattle SuperSonic Coach George Karl’s waistline: “When it comes to that stomach, you don’t expect to stop it. You can only hope to contain it.”

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Perseverance: Baltimore outfielder Brady Anderson, 33, on hitting 50 home runs last year, 29 more than his previous high:

“You hear people talking about someone becoming an overnight success? Yeah, it took me about 25 years to become an overnight success.”

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FYI: Ri Myong Hun, the 7-foot-9 North Korean basketball player, is nicknamed “Chopstick.” That should provide an idea of his physique.

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Looking back: On this day in 1942, Joe Louis knocked out Abe Simon in the sixth round at Madison Square Garden in New York to retain his world heavyweight title.

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Trivia answer: Wake Forest defeated UCLA, 82-80.

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And finally: Andy Van Slyke is trying to make the St. Louis Cardinal roster at age 36, and he realizes that he’s on shaky ground:

“I’m running on retreads. There are no fresh tires in my body. I’m that foam plug that you buy at the local auto store just to get to the next station.”