Sideline chatter 7/23/03

Horse tail raises stink at USC

Traveler, the white Trojan horse that has galloped along the sideline at USC football games for the past 42 seasons, has been given his walking papers.

"I'm not going to get into all this," Michael Jackson, USC vice president for student affairs, told the Los Angeles Times. "The important thing is, Traveler has been a part of USC's tradition for many years, and we are working on continuing that."

The university and the family of the late Richard Saukko, which supplied the lineage of horses, had quibbled over issues ranging from Traveler's checks -- expenses for the steed's care and transport -- to trademark rights to the horse's name.

So, while "Travelergate" is spawning angry e-mails and threats of protest from USC fanatics, the search is on to find a replacement.

Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle, for one, says it's time to scrap the horse idea and go with a more modern approach, offering this suggestion: "After every Trojan touchdown, O.J. Simpson will be driven around the field in a white Bronco."

Uneasy riders

Members of one Danish motorcycle gang are so despondent over countryman Thomas Bjorn's collapse at the British Open, we hear, that they're wearing black armbands over their "Bjorn to Lose" tattoos.

OK, how about draft cards?

Those crazy Bronx Little Leaguers -- the ones who foisted off Danny Almonte, the world's oldest 12-year-old, two years ago -- are at it again: Two Bronx teams just got booted from this year's playoffs because they refused to provide proof-of-age records.

One team reportedly is appealing its ouster, saying it should have been told that tournament officials wanted birth certificates, not driver's licenses.

Leather report

Considering that the Dodgers' defense leads the NL West in errors, didn't the wrong L.A. team sign The Glove?

Open microphone

Scott Verplank, recently ranked 178th in driving distance, to the Los Angeles Times on Tiger Woods saying there are corked drivers on the PGA Tour: "I don't think he means me. When they start testing, I can go to lunch."

Kevin Scarbinsky of the Birmingham News, on Alabama football coach Mike Shula banning media, boosters, parents -- all outsiders -- from Tide practices: "It's the Huggies philosophy, befitting a man with one small child in the house and another on the way. No leak is a good leak."

From The Sporting News' Caught On the Fly column, after NBA rookie Carmelo Anthony compared playing in Denver's mile-high altitude to getting punched in the chest: "It's got nothing to do with air, kid. That's just what it feels like playing for the Nuggets."

They feel it in their bones

Thieves stole a rare dinosaur skeleton -- a psittacosaurus sinensis -- over the weekend from the Newcastle Regional Museum, but forensic psychologists have already given Australian police a good head start.

The theft is likely the work of a copy cat, they say -- or more precisely, a Dodgers fan who got overly aroused last week when his team unearthed Rickey Henderson.

-- Dwight Perry, Seattle Times