T.O. Has ‘Em Rattled in Dallas Already

Texas may not be quite ready to embrace Terrell Owens as the newest member of the Dallas Cowboys.

Under the headline, “Face it, a snake can’t shed his skin with a new team,” Randy Galloway wrote in Sunday’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “A beaming Jerry Jones pulled the string, unleashing Saturday afternoon the biggest snake in the NFL’s sack. Terrell Owens, the football reptile from hell, slithered into Valley Ranch.”

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More Owens: “Best wishes and all my prayers,” wrote Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News. “That’s not for T.O. That’s for you, Drew Bledsoe.”

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Trivia time: UCLA played Alabama in season-opening football games in what back-to-back years, and who won?

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Marathon man: Larry Rawson, the Emmy Award-winning broadcaster who worked every Los Angeles Marathon through 2001, went through 2 1/2 months of intense treatment for throat cancer last year. Shortly after completing the treatment, he worked the New York City Marathon for NBC in November.

Afterward, broadcast partner Al Trautwig presented Rawson with a finisher’s medal and said, “Larry, you just completed your own kind of marathon.”

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Technically impossible: Ray Stallone, former DePaul sports information director, points out that Ray Meyer, who died Friday at 92, had only a handful of technical fouls called against him in his 42 years of coaching basketball at DePaul.

When Meyer was honored in an elaborate ceremony before his final home game in 1984, Al McGuire was broadcasting the game with Dick Enberg for NBC and, according to Stallone, said, “What does Ray Meyer have to do today to get a technical?”

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Hard to read: HBO’s unofficial ringside scorer, Harold Lederman, had Hasim Rahman beating James Toney, 116-112, Saturday night, but the fight was ruled a majority draw.

If you’ve never seen Lederman on camera, you’re not alone. In 20 years, he has scored more than 560 fights for HBO and has been on camera maybe twice. When not scoring fights, he works as a pharmacist in the New York area.

That means Lederman has two difficult jobs -- trying to decipher doctors’ handwriting and trying to figure out how boxing judges’ minds work.

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On the dotted line: When Loek Van Mil, a 7-foot pitcher, was asked by the St. Paul Pioneer Press how a guy from the Netherlands signed a contract with the Minnesota Twins, he said: “With a pencil.”

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Looking back: On this day in 1965, Gail Goodrich scored 42 points to lead UCLA to a 91-80 win over Michigan in the NCAA basketball championship game.

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Trivia answer: In 2000 and 2001. UCLA won, 35-24, at the Rose Bowl and then won, 20-17, at Tuscaloosa.

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And finally: Brad Pitt got a lot of airtime Sunday on CBS. During Bradley’s upset victory over Pittsburgh, the graphic displaying the score in the lower right-hand corner continually read “Brad Pitt.”

Larry Stewart can be reached at [email protected].