Sponsorships Being Sought for This Headline

A college series already fraught with hyperbole--when Oregon plays Oregon State, it’s called the Civil War--now has a sponsor. It’s “the Civil War, presented by your Northwest Dodge Dealers,” which might be pretty hard to get on a logo, but for $1.4 million for four years, the schools will try.

Universities go to extremes these days to make money.

Oregon State recently sold the name of its football facility--Parker Stadium--to Al Reser, who packages enough foods for grocery stores to donate $5 million to the Beaver program. For that, goodbye Parker Stadium; hello Reser Stadium.

So every other year, we have “the Civil War, presented by your Northwest Dodge Dealers, at Reser Stadium.”

Kind of makes you want to buy a Chevy and eat out, doesn’t it?

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Fore, please: The sponsorship arrangement includes all sports in which the two schools compete, including men’s and women’s golf, presumably the most civil of the Civil Wars.

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Trivia time: What was unusual about James Naismith’s rules on fouls in basketball?

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A different view: Duke Llewellyn, a former tackle for USC and the Los Angeles Dons, was at a banquet when Marion Motley, the bruising Cleveland Brown back who died Sunday, came over. Llewellyn stood to shake his hand, and Motley said, “Duke, I didn’t know you were so tall . . . but then, I never saw you standing up.”

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The right answer: Joe Dean was trying some different things with his bowling game when he lined up for his league match in Columbus, Ohio, on June 15. Twelve strikes later, the tinkering had paid off.

“As you get older, your legs don’t always do what you want, so you keep working at it,” he said.

The work gets harder and harder because Dean is 87, the oldest player ever to roll a perfect game, according to the American Bowling Congress.

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No place to hide: When you’re a cabinet member, it seems that everybody always wants something, but Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services, can’t escape the requests, even when she leaves the office.

She is a fan of the Washington Mystics of the WNBA, and the Mystics have Chamique Holdsclaw.

“I have four season tickets . . . [and] when I can’t go . . . everyone wants my tickets,” Shalala said, adding that Holdsclaw “already is the best player in the league. She is going to be the great player of her generation.”

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Dumb at any age: Commissioner David Stern is thinking about setting a minimum age of 20 for the NBA draft. Baron Davis would oppose it.

“Guys get influenced by the wrong people, hang around the wrong crowd,” the former UCLA point guard said. “They let guys stroke their egos, and they don’t want to listen to the true advice. It doesn’t matter how old you are.”

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At last, a native: In a rush to get aboard the Texas-Is-the-State-of-Champions Bandwagon after the Dallas Stars--most of them transplanted Canadians--won the Stanley Cup and the San Antonio Spurs--find the Texan on that team--the NBA championship, the Associated Press reminds that World Wrestling Federation star Stone Cold Steve Austin is from Enid, Texas.

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Trivia answer: Three team fouls gave the other team a point, and a player’s second foul led to his removal from the game until the next field goal was scored. Free throws didn’t enter the picture until 1894, two years after Naismith set up basketball’s first rules.

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And finally: Rocky Mountain News columnist Bob Kravitz has let his friends know that the “posthumous 191st RBI Hack Wilson received means I won my rotisserie league in 1930 and I plan on collecting.”