Tampa Bay Times du lieu suivant : St. Petersburg, Florida • 35

CLASSIFIED ADS section SB ST. PETERSBURG TIMES WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 26, SPORTS EDITOR JIUDIOI mizEii atoir gireaH Warni SSckel does at 9 Talent hunt worldwide i fit rva By BOB LeNOIR St. Plributg Tim StaH Writr A i I i i I I I I 't -I j.y i i 1 -1- I I I i I A JT lu were winning eight in a row and being the national scoring leaders in 1928." At Florida, Van Sickel also lettered in basketball and baseball. He was also an outstanding amateur boxer. Van Sickel's widow, Iris, a native of Starke, recalled her husband as a shy, modest man who seldom spoke of his football exploits.

"A LOT OF people knew him for years and never knew he was an Ail-American," she said. The Van Sickels married while he was still an undergraduate at Florida. After he graduated in 1930, he remained on as an assistant coach at UF, Then one day in Jacksonville, a brother-in-law of the late Humphrey Bogart told him he ought to be in the movies. So Van Sickel went to New York for a screen test. His first acting opportunity came in of all things a football picture.

He appeared in "The Spirit of Notre Dame," starring Lew Ayres. Van Sickel played the role of the captain on the arch-rival Army team. (In those days, the Notre Dame-Army series was football's most-storied rivalry.) His second film was another football film, "Touchdown," which featured Richard Arlen. Work as a stuntman proved steadier, however, and that was where Van Sickel would find greatest success. He doubled for the late Robert Taylor in all of Taylor's films, also playing scenes for Dana Andrews and David Niven.

He served four years as president of the Motion Picture Actor and Stunt Man Association. He had been semi-retired for several years prior to his accident, accepting only two or three jobs a year to keep from growing stale. The last picture he completed was "Walking Tall II." See VAN SICKEL, 7-C Dale Van Sickel, actor, stuntman and the University of Florida's first Ail-American football player, died Tuesday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 69. A two-way end for the 1926-28 Gators during football's era of 60-minute men, Van Sickel had been seriously ill since a July 1975 injury suffered while filming an attempted stunt.

Van Sickel was driving a car that was supposed to go off the end of a wharf in the Walt Disney production "No Deposit, No Return." The wharf had been pre-slicked with oil to facilitate the stunt. Apparently, however, too much oil was put down. The car skidded into an abutment, leaving Van Sickel in critical condition. He suffered some brain damage and was to be an invalid until his death. A lawsuit is still pending in the case.

VAN SICKEL achieved All-America status in 1928 when he played on a Florida team that won its first eight games in a row. The team also led the nation in scoring, amassing 336 points (40.7 per game), but lost its last game and a Rose Bowl berth to Tennessee 13-12. Charles Bachman, the coach of that Florida team, has fond recollections of Van Sickel. "We threw the ball more than most teams in that day, because we had several passers and we had a fine receiver in Dale Van Sickel Dale made All-American in 1928 partly because of a play in 1927 against Washington and Lee," Bachman recalled. "He broke through, took the ball out of a passer's hand and kept on going.

It was kind of a spectacular thing the newspapers liked, and it put the spotlight on Van Sickel while we ft 'l J. Special Photo Dale Van Sickel: Florida's first Ail-American. Coaches It' ta i Fourth of a series By MIKE TIERNEY Si. Plrburg Timl StaH Writtr Football recruiters live mostly on Hertz, Holiday Inn and Bteak. Soccer talent freaks go more via Pan Am, The Dorchester and caviar.

When Doug Dickey hungers for a quarterback, he goes to Tampa, Titusville or Tarpon Springs. For Eddie Firmani and his Tampa Bay Rowdies people, a search for a midfielder can reach Southampton, Capetown and Sydney. Fascinating business. Although American players are being force-fed into the major U.S. soccer league, anybody who knows Pele from Evel Knievel realizes that a NASL team's backbone still must be foreign-bred.

It's an expensive, risky, unpredictable, political, colorful business. Francisco Marcos of the Rowdies departs soon on a $2,000 expedition to Chile to scout one player and attempt formation of an exhibition series in South America; "MAYBE WE'LL GET a star and a series," Marcos says, "but there is also a chance of winding up with nothing a player who's not for us and my inability to set up a profitable tour for our team." Beau Rogers, Tampa Bay general manager, is on his sixth trip to England since the Rowdies' season ended last summer. He will proceed to Holland and Sweden. He has been joined this time by majority team owner George Strawbridge of Philadelphia. Firmani, the Rowdies' coach, took the 24-hour flight to South Africa in November to sign Steve Wegerle.

The Los Angeles NASL team, owned by entertainer Elton John, later song-and-danced Wegerle into signing a contract with the Aztecs. Commissioner Phil Woosnam was called in to mediate. The South African was handed to Tampa Bay. vr Wes McLeod is another of the new Rowdies, the first Canadian for this franchise which in three years has become an international stew blessed with on-field artiste from 16 countries on five continents. McLeod is a story, too.

HE IS ONLY 19 and was playing for an obscure team, Vancouver Italia, in British Columbia. The Vancouver Whitecaps of the NASL figured McLeod was hidden. Only trouble was that the promising midfielder was on Canada's team that met the United States last summer in World Cup playoffs in Haiti. Somebody got word to the Rowdies. Firmani slipped in on a Saturday flight, saw McLeod play Sunday in Vancouver and had the kid on a plane for Philadelphia on Monday.

Strawbridge and his coach immediately signed McLeod, who has also been laboring as a longshoreman. 'Shoes' was a bust Firmani isn't always so lucky. It was during the interim between the signing of this coach nicknamed The Golden Turkey and the Rowdies' first season. Firmani flew to South Africa to check out a hot prospect named Bernard "Dancing Shoes" Hartze. "In apartheid South Africa, there are three soccer leagues," Marcos says.

"One is for blacks, one for whites and another for coloreds, where persons of mixed breeding are made to play." Dancing Shoes was in the coloreds league. His record was enormous, including 55 goals in a season. Firmani acquired the pass required to visit the non-white areas in South Africa and went to a broken-down, smelly stadium. He tells stories of spectators standing at their seats and urinating. HARTZE WAS INJURED and couldn't play that game.

But the tales and figures so impressed Firmani that Dancing Shoes became a Rowdie. Bay Area newspapers and broadcast outlets painted him as an oncoming legend. What Dancing Shoes was was an oncoming flop. His heroics had come in a league of questionable abilities and coaching and Hartze was soon shipped to a semipro team in Sacramento. Firmani learned to see prospects for himself.

The Rowdies scouted a game of the semipro Cincinnati Comets a year ago, mainly to see young Ringo Cantillo from Costa Rica. Ringo did later become a Tampa Bay player, but on that day he wasn't so hot. His signing was delayed, but Firmani spotted a gem on the opposing team. Name: Arsene Auguste. Talking this native of Haiti into leaving the New Jersey Brewers of the American Soccer League for the big-time Rowdies was the simple part.

What Tampa Bay didn't realize was that Auguste came in a package tightly bound in red tape. He was one of five stars on Haiti's national team who decided not to return to the Caribbean country after 1974 World Cup playoffs in West Germany. Auguste stopped en route at New York, remaining without adequate U.S. papers. "He had no Green Card (an alien residence permit)," Marcos said, "so we' had to get him out of the U.S.

quickly. We took him to Nassau where he could officially register at the U.S. consulate as an alien seeking the H-2 visa which can be used for a particular job in the States." THE PLOT STIFFENS. The Rowdies had a profit-offering opportunity to play in an exhibition series in Haiti. They would be a big draw, promising a crowd of 25,000, IF departed Haitian hero Auguste played.

Auguste was stuck Tampa Bay, not to mention Auguste, thought about it for some time and finally decided to chance it. The Rowdies' plane was. met by a cheering audience and customs agents eased the party with VIP quickness onto a bus. Passports were gathered there, later all to be returned except Auguste's. "We said, 'Oh, hell, this is Marcos recalls.

Auguste was detained, his future uncertain, when the Rowdies returned to the United States. -But, since Haiti's youthful president, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duva-lier, was something of a soccer nut, the young man was finally allowed unscathed departure. In this international quest of talent, the Rowdies have consistently pursued players who handle English, making publicity and local acceptance softer tasks. One man who couldn't speak it was closeted with an English tutor and soon could. IN THE LATEST BIT of global glamor, Tampa Bay's NASL franchise is transporting the Zenit team here from Russia for an indoor-outdoor exhibition Mar.

5 and 9. The cost is $40,000 plus expenses, which should add another $10,000 to the tab. Soviet coaches and sports ministers preach and police the team concept. A dandy 23-year-old soccer star named Oleg Blokhin is allegedly on the Soviets' baddie list for becoming overly superstarish and too enamored with Western ways after visits outside the Iron Curtain. We will await to see if the Zenit team has any athletes who develop a similar thirst for a capitalistic society.

He just might decide to get lost in Space Mountain or the Haunted House at Disney World. Fascinating business. A BfiSH 'Sit jtJ i.m i Getting coaching peers agree. In 1975, they passed a resolution urging that pro wrestling be billed as an "exhibition" instead of an athletic event. "There is no competition," Speidel continues.

"If people want to be deceived. it's exploitation. young, sweet kid and the old ruffian. Speidel wouldn't go so far as as to ban pro wrestling. "Those who don't believe in it shouldn't criticize it," he says.

"Let those people make a living." JOHN HEATH CHIDES amateur coaches on the Suncoast "for biting the hand that feeds them." Heath, advisor to Gordon Solie on the "Championship Wrestling From Florida" TV broadcast, organizes pro' matches at high school gyms statewide which donate 25 percent of the proceeds to the prep programs. Solie goes further, saying the growth of prep wrestling on Florida's Suncoast, still in its infant stages, was due largely to the cooperation it got from the pros. Of course, pro wrestling has a selfish motive. It is from the high school programs that its future employes may come. Dixie Hollins' Bruce Woyan, probably the best prep wrestler in Pinellas County, has determinedly committed himself to a career in the pros.

Hollins Coach Dave Mauger is encouraging his prize pupil, who attends the Tuesday night matches at Fort Homer Hesterly Armory often. "I watch it myself on TV," Mauger admits. "These guys have a lot of wrestling talent." Pro wrestlers might be more inclined to tune in "Wild Kingdom" if it ever were on TV opposite amateur wrestling. Outside of a few Midwestern states, notably Oklahoma, university athletic directors do not count on much revenue from wrestling matches. It is not talent that is lacking, for a sizable portion of the There is a youngster who walks the halls of Largo High School.

Coach Sonny Blackwelder wishes he would walk onto the school's wrestling mat. The kid, Blackwelder lieves, is a promising prospect. There is one opponent the fellow can't handle his mother. "His mom won't let him come out for the team," Blackwelder moans. "She sees the pros on TV and she thinks it (high school wrestling) is spin-'em-over-the-head and throw-'em-out-of-the-ring." Blackwelder has been unable to persuade her to attend a prep match.

Though both are tests of strengthshe would see that amateur wrestling is about as similar to the pros as swimming is to taking a bath. Beyond the holds', which do resemble each other, the sports go their separate ways. PRO FANS SAY amateur wrestling is an effective substitute for a sleeping pill. Amateur fans say they lend the same credibility to pro wrestling that basketball fans give to the Harlem Globetrotters. "Pro wrestling is some of the greatest entertainment in the world," Blackwelder says.

"Some of those guys were great ex-legitimate wrestlers." Charlie Speidel is a qualified, if not subjective, spokesman on the subject. He built Penn State into an NCAA power while coaching there for 38 years. Now he is a retiree in St. Petersburg. "I just don't feel pro wrestling belongs in the same category (with amateur wrestling)," Speidel says.

His NCAA a hold on pro wrestling pro wrestling world was weaned on the college level. The major difference is show business. Amateur wrestlers have yet to change their names to Ivan the Terrible, clad themselves in capes and masks, and turn on the blood faucet with their scar-tissued foreheads. And if they ever do, Sonny Blackwelder can forever forget about a certain kid coming out for the team. Next: The Great American Dream Dixie's Woyan wants to be a good guy By MIKE TIERNEY St.

Peteftburg Time Staff Writer 1 5 room ranch house to stay in. Pro wrestling takes care of the people it carefully chooses through an informal recruiting system. According to Gordon Solie, mastermind of television's "Championship Wrestling From Florida," most wrestlers are culled from the colleges. "I can't remember," Solie says, "a guy who's walked off the street and made it." WOYAN DOESN'T WANT to bother with any more classes after he graduates from Dixie Hollins next year. He says he'll immediately delve into the unofficial training conducted by the National Wrestling Alliance office in Tampa and devote his spare time to swallowing enough milkshakes to push his weight well above 200 pounds, the unwritten minimum for a pro wrestler.

iWoyan knows what to expect. He once phoned Bob Roop and sheepishly asked the well-known pro for a workout on the mats. "He told me to meet him in the gym at Tampa Plant High School," Woyan said. "I went there, but I never thought he'd show up. But he did.

I couldn't believe it." He learned several holds from Roop. And one other thing. "It's not fake, man. It's not staged. I asked Roop, and he told me.

I believe him. Now, when somebody says it's fake, that gets me right mad." Woyan was now warming to the subject. "I could talk about pro wrestling all day," he said. He would have talked right through his scheduled match with a helpless high schooler that night had not his coach interrupted. He makes only one condition.

"I'd never want to be the bad guy. I'm a good guy all the way." What other role could there be for a good-looking, confident extrovert who punishes bricks with his forehead? Most of the kids on Bruce Woyan's block in his small Ohio town aspired to be policemen or firemen or baseball players. Woyan wanted to be a pro wrestler. Okay, fine. But now he is almost of legal age.

And he still does. Many mommas and dads would just as soon their son become a bank robber, but Bruce has parental support. He is 17, a junior at Dixie Hollins High School and unbeaten in 22 prep matches this "It's all I wanted to be," Woyan said prior to a recent outing at Largo. "I'm not ashamed to say it. I wanted to be a pro in the seventh grade, when I was 5-foot-3 and weighed 140.

They (his acquaintances) would look at me and laugh." Today when they laugh, Woyan, now 185 pounds of suggests that they step outside. A heckler at a bowling alley recently accepted the invitation. A few minutes later, Woyan walked back in. The heckler didn't. WOYAN WOULD HAVE no trouble carving a niche in the wrestling world.

He is a talented amateur, but then so are a lot of other sticks-in-the-mud. It is his personality that may catch the eye of the wrestling moguls. He is brash and cocky, handsome and personable. He is eccentric. At the slightest dare, he might break bricks on his forehead or run full speed, and head-first, into a locker.

A listener resisted the temptation to ask if his brains had been scrambled during past confrontations with various solid materials. "I know the money's good," Woyan says, "but even if I would make enough just to have enough to eat and a place to stay, I'd still do it." If Woyan makes it, he will have caviar to eat and a 10- i St. Pataraburj Tinws NORM ZEISLOFT Bruce Woyan: 22-0 prepster this year..