News-Journal from Mansfield, Ohio • 27

Sunday, May 23, 1976 News Journal, Manslleld, 0. 5 I Longer abho wcase Stars Bypass Olympic Trials IS mm Jim Murray Id 1976, The Los Angeles Times 3r Mime Inspired Terror No one ever played football with the Intensity of Dick Butkus. His very name inspired terror even among the other 250-pound behemoths of the NFL. "But- By Rick Uosselin NEW YORK (UPI) S. Olympic Basketball Coach Dean Smith not only has to contend with the top amateur basketball teams of the world in his quest for a 1976 gold medal but also a variety of excuses from players in his own country why they should not play.

The U.S. team was once a showcase of the nation's top collegians-players like Bill Russell, Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Jerry Lucas and Bill Bradley-all of whom went on to lucrative careers in the proessional ranks. But in recent years, some of the top American collegians have chosen to bypass the Olympics lor personal or politi 4f from last season will be on hand for the Iryouts as well as just ihree of the country's top 20 rebounders. The siphoning ot talent initially surfaced in 19B8. The won the gold medal, but the triumph came in the absence of players who could have made the chore much easiernamely Lew Alcin-dor, Wes Unseld and Klvin Hayes In 1972, it was Bill Walton, one of the most dominating centers ever to play the college game, who chose not to join the U.S.

team in Munich This inability to land the top player finally caught up with the Americans as thev saw their ti3-game winning streak and string of seven consecutive gold medals snapped in a controversial 51-50 loss to the Soviet Union in the championship game. State and Terry Furlow of Michigan State will be prominently noted. "I'd like to have a Washington, a Lucas or a Tatum," explained Smith. "But the fact we didn't get them doesn't mean we will take an inferior team to Montreal. We could bring in 100 guys to the tryout but we still can take only 15 to Montreal.

Some of the guys we have may not be as good as those players but they are certainly right up there. "The kids we didn't get are not necessarily unpatriotic," Smith added. "Each has his own reason for not playing Some plan on turning pro, some are filing for hardship and some already have agents. I don't want guys coming here to play for their pro contract. That's not good lor our team concept." Only 10 of the nation's top 50 scorers 4 cal reasons.

This year, you can add "professional" to that list of reasons. your threshold of pain tolerance has gone down, it's been 1 tell 'em, 'You're damn right it's been lowered! And what's lowered it is the pain of the bones grinding away to Paid for Anything The problem was the five-year contract. It was no-cut, payable even if surgery was needed, Butkus says, "George Halas calls me and says 'If you can't play next year, we're not going to pay I says, 'Hey, how can I play on crutches, or with one I told them, '1 listened to you for nine freaking years, and I'm a half-cripple for it. I take nine and a half years of freaking crack-back blocks, what am I goona do, go through like some freaking Toulouse-Lautrec? Who's going to pay for the skateboard I sell pencils off Butkus filed suit against the Bears. He flew to Oklahoma City where Dr.

O'Donoghue took an even dimmer view of his X-rays. "He told me he wasn't even sure he could fuse my leg so it wouldn't be stiff, but there was no way I could play football on it." The operation was a success but the law suit is still pending in the judicial shuffle at Chicago. Dick Butkus, of all people, is now a bigger foe of the Bears than the New York Giants ever were. "All my life, I thought I was going to be a Bear forever. Other guys want to get traded, but me, I say to them, 'How can I get traded? I'm I mean, if they come to me and say, 'Hey, we want you to be a coach, we can't pay you 115 freaking thousand to coach, but we'll make a I would have said, But they're like trying to make a sucker out of me." Butkus never did like quarterbacks to get fancy on him, or flankers to crack back on his flaming knees.

He decided to go into an all-out blitz. Invitations for the tryouts were extended only to players who could assure the selection committee they would not sign a pro contract nor hire an agent to negotiate a future pro pact prior to the Games. The committee settled on 56 players to vie for the 15 spots at a tryout in Raleigh, N.C., during the first week of June. Smith will have some of the finest college talent in an attempt to regain the Olympic championship America lost to Russia in 1972. Among others, he secured the biggest name in college ball last season Scott May of unbeaten Indiana.

Kent Benson has declined an Olympic bid because of a second operation on his left wrist HOME ECONOMICS Henry Childs, a tight end for the' New Orleans Saints, was one of only four men receiving degrees in home economics from Kansas State University. Childs, 25, said he wanted to degree in family and child development so he could work with young people. (AQ Qhoto) Speedster Sparkles ATLANTA (UPI) Speedster Steve Williams of the Florida Track Club tied one world record and came within one-tenth of a second of tying another Saturday while winning the 100 and 200-meter dashes in the Martin Luther King Freedom Games. Williams was timed at 9.9 seconds in the 100 to tie the record he had matched four times before, nipping Harvey Glance of Auburn by one-tenth of a second. He then came back to win the 200 in 19.9 seconds with Glance, a freshman, again second by three-tenths.

Williams, running into a 2.2mile headwind, had a slow start off the blocks and needed a last-second kick to pass Glance just before the wire in the starstudded 100-meter race. III MlMw ii 2 TIRES $49 I rscsa WHITEWALLS i Immm ANY SIZE plus tax MOBIL-KELLY SPRINGFIELD 4 I -J SEIBERLING-MOHAWK THE TIRE MARKET DIY. I 26 E. 6th St. Hollinqiworth Rubber Products 526-0600 But it will be the players he did not land who will be singled out if the Americans come up empty-handed again.

The absence of such standout players as Richard Washington and Marques Johnson of UCLA, John Lucas of Maryland, Earl Tatum of Marquette, Willie Smith of Missouri, Chuckie Williams of Kansas kus! rannea in terror with "Attila!" "Ghenghis Khan!" "Geronimo!" or other syllables of doom. He was 6-feet-3 of controlled fury. He looked like a guy in a monster suit. His arms hung to his ankles. His legs were bowed, giving him a rolling gait that made him look as if he had arrived by vine.

He worked himself up to such a ferocious pitch before a game that a coach one night pointed at him with a shaking finger and croaked, "I only hope they fed it." When a player died (of natural causes) in a game against the Bears, Butkus received hate mail for a week even though he had been nowhere near the tackle. Quarterbacks used to complain that Butkus bit them in pileups. He was the first middle linebacker people actually paid to see. People called Baltimore's Mike Curtis "The Animal," but they didn't have a violent-enough nickname for Butkus. He symbolized the Chicago Bears.

When the team had nothing else going for it, it was respectable so long as it had Butkus. Stange Happenings Rumor had it, the only way to stop Butkus was with a silver bullet or a blunt stake, or to poison his nightly cup of blood. But in 1973 the league began to notice a strange thing. Butkus' tackles began to tail off from SO a game to one a half And ball carriers no longer counted their fingers and arms and eyes after a Butkus hit. Doctors noticed that Butkus' right leg was no longer merely bowed, it was actually V-shaped.

Butkus tilted when he walked. Butkus had just signed a five-year, contract. He had had that knee operated on in 1971 and, when the sutures became infected, he just pulled them out. But the pain in '73 presented a more complicated offense for the old linebacker. Every backfield in the league knew Butkus was a one-legged player.

The game films showed it. The scoreboard snowed it. The television monitor showed it. So Butkus couldn't understand why the team X-rays didn't. "They put them up against the light for two seconds for me and quickly snatched them down and said, 'See, you're just bowlegged, is all." Butkus had been bowlegged all his life, but it never hurt like this before.

He began to bypass the home team doctors. "When we went to Minnesota, I went to the Mayo Clinic. When we went to L.A., I went to see Dr. Danny Levinthal. They all asked me, 'How can you play on this? Hey, your bones are rubbing I figured my right knee would be a pile of sawdust by midseason.

But the team writes me a letter telling me, 'We think "I didn't run a very good race, especially in the first half," said Williams. "I was too concerned with what the other runners were doing. That all changed just before the finish, when my entire perspective changed and I relaxed." There were so many candidates for the 100-meter race, they had to run four heats to pick eight finalists. Williams won the first heat in 10 seconds flat and Glance matched that mark in the second. Among the also-rans in the finals were high school star Houston McTear and Ivory Crockett, both of whom like Glance have run the 100-yard dash in nine seconds flat.

Williams wasn't pressed in the 200-meter and in that race he got off to a good start and led by several yards most of the way. World recordholder Dave Roberts of Gainesville, won the King pole vault with an 18-foot performance but failed in his try at breaking his own record of 18-6V2. rn Tteiir fesir ttet's strangar than sSssl Fy 12 warraritva Dollar-Sign Side "People see the dollar-sign side of football," he explains. "They see the ermine rugs and the purple Rolls-Royces. They should look at some X-rays.

They should see what nine years of fairy flankers hitting you from behind does. They should find out why the average career is 4 1-2 years. How would you like to have 4 1-2 years to make your pile in your profession?" The old linebacker is not exactly starving. Old No. 51 is, of all things, a talented actor, which will come as a surprise to a generation of tight ends who didn't think he could talk.

A written language, that is. Butkus doesn't exactly get the girl in most of his flicks, but he doesn't just guard the hideout, either. He plays a comic ambulance driver in the upcoming Fox picture, "Mother Jugs and Speed." Raquel Welch, no less, told the director she couldn't comprehend why anyone would think of Butkus as vicious or drafted out of a tree. "Just don't pick up a football around him, honey," she was told sweetly. W0 Veteran Indy Drivers Selected to 'Auto Hall' James Barrineau of the University of Georgia high jumped 7 feet 2 inches for a two-inch victory over Les Whitehead and Lee Palles of Mississippi State.

Mike Roberson of Florida State barely nipped James Walker of Auburn with a time of 13.5 seconds in the 110-meter high hurdles. "I'm satisfied with the time," said Roberson. "I've been able to run that consistently for the past several weeks, and it should get lower before we go to the Olympic trials a few weeks from now." Edwin Moses of Morehouse College said he beat his goal when he turned in a 48.8 in the 400-meter hurdles. "It didn't go as smoothly as I wanted it to, and I had a little trouble with the ninth and tenth hurdles," said Moses, "but I am pleased with my time. It was better than my goal." 1941 he became the first driver to go the full distance in a conventional race car without making a pit stop.

He placed fifth that year. Dawson was an established star prior to the inaugural "500" in 1911. Dawson is best remembered for winning the 1912 Indianapolis race, two years before he retired from active racing. Dawson, who died in the 1940s, placed fifth in the inaugural Indianapolis 500-mile race. The Hall of Fame membership now stands at 46.

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Bergere drove in 16 Indianapolis 500-mile races. He had driven more miles in competition at Indianapolis 6,130 -than any other driver until A.J. Foyt surpassed that mark in 1975. Bergere won the pole position in 1946 and finished among the top 10 on eight occasions, including two third places. In i 11 I i 1 Our ntw radial Mr to rugged, m'n given it our tint fun two yaar warranty, tft batted with an amsxtag new flbar cattad Aramid.

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