He Hopes That Female Player Will Let Him Forget the Pasta

UC Santa Barbara women’s basketball Coach Mark French has seen enough of Long Beach State’s Danielle Scott.

“I just hope some Italian league volleyball team makes her a huge contract offer this week so we don’t have to face her again,” French said. “I’ll be on the phone with some Italian teams telling them how great she is.”

The 6-foot-2 senior was voted volleyball player of the year during four years in which she wore out the Gauchos. Then she switched to basketball and scored 27 points and took down 23 rebounds to help Long Beach end a six-game losing streak against the defending Big West champions.

Trivia time: Who has the highest scoring average in the NBA for players with 10,000 points or more?

The big one: Pin collecting has been a big-time Olympic fad for years, but the Norwegian School of Marketing and Management in Oslo might have come up with the ultimate in pins for the Lillehammer Winter Games.

It measures 9 feet 8 inches by 6 feet 5 inches and weighs 250 pounds. It will be auctioned off to help Norway’s Olympic movement.

Anything else? New Orleans cornerback Vince Buck, after the Saints had lost eight of 10 games and failed to make the playoffs, reviewed the season this way:

“Disappointment, embarrassment, shame, disbelief,” he said.

Quick success: The quickest way to make the Ryder Cup team is to win a major championship.

Winners of the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and PGA get 225 points for a victory, and the winners of all other tour events get 75 points.

In the majors, the distribution is 225-135-120-105-90, with the sixth place finisher getting 75, the same as the winner of a weekly tournament.

Mutual admiration: Toronto’s Joe Carter was the World Series hero with his winning home run, but he was highly impressed by the Philadelphia Phillies’ Lenny Dykstra.

“The little guy is some baseball player,” he told Pat O’Brien forInside Sports. “Is there anything he can’t do? I mean, Rickey Henderson is a great leadoff batter, but Lenny--man, that guy can flat-out play. He’s like a bowling ball out there.”

Quick turnabout: Jay Siegel, two-time U.S. Amateur champion and a nine-time Walker Cup team member, gave up his amateur standing this year at 50 to play on the PGA Senior Tour as a professional.

“It’s like getting divorced and getting remarried the same morning,” Siegel said.

No wipeouts: When he won the Hawaii Open tennis tournament, Wayne Ferreira’s victory was worth $42,000 and a surfboard.

Ferreira said he didn’t actually surf during the tournament, and that he had a good reason: “I didn’t want to kill myself.”

Trivia answer: Michael Jordan, 32.3 points in 667 games.

Quotebook: Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas, on today’s crop: “The biggest problem in the whole NFL is that there aren’t enough good quarterbacks.”