The Ottawa Journal from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Page 14

Page 14 Rams release vice-president LOS ANGELES (AP) Steve Rosenbloom has been fired as executive vice-president of Los Angeles Rams and replaced by Don Klosterman, the National Football League team announced Thursday. Rosenbloom, whose father Carroll owned the Rams until he drowned last April 2, was fired by his stepmother, Georgia Rosenbloom, the new owner of the team. The Rams issued the following statement: "Due to basic differences In philosophies, Georgia Rosenbloom, owner and president of the' Los Angeles Rams, has terminated the services of Steve Rosenbloom as vice-president in charge of day-to-day operations, a position that Steve has held for a year. Mrs. Rosenbloom has appointed Don Klosterman, eight-year Rams' executive, as vice-president and general manager responsible for day-to-day Rams' activities.

"Georgia will continue to administer the entire Rams' organization following the wishes and dictates of her late husband, Carroll Rosenbloom. All of their philosophies and policies will continue as a part of Carroll's legacy." lot of tension was reported at the top levels of the team after Georgia Rosenbloom took over as owner following her husband's death. Steve, Carroll's son by a previous marriage, had been heavily involved In running the team while his father was alive. Klosterman served as vice-president and general manager under both owners, but his powers were diluted recently when Dick Steinberg, director of player personnel, was given the major say In Rams' drafting and trade moves. Flyers trade goaltender LANDOVER, Md.

(AP) Goaltender Wayne Stephenson, who played In 26 Stanley Cup playoff games, has been acquired by Washington Capitals from i Philadelphia Flyers, the National Hockey League club announced Thursday. Stephenson, 34, of Ft. William, played five years with the Flyers who acquired him from St. Louis Blues In 1974. Stephenson, S-foot-9 and 175 pounds, joins another ex-Flyers goalie Gary Inness, who signed with the Capitals last year.

"I was always playing behind (Flyers goalie) Bernie Parent," Stephenson said. "Basically had no future. There was no way I was ever going to get ahead. "I was very excited about the move to Washington because I think it gives me the chance to go ahead again," he added Last shot fatal for British Alain Marlon, of Pte. Gatineau, fired the last shot to enable Canada to win the Canada Match championship at the 97th annual Dominion of Canada Rifle Association Meet Thursday.

The Canadians outshot their opponents by a score of 1135 to 1133 out of a total 1200. The eight-man Canadian cadet team from the Prairies squeezed by British Athelings by a two-point margin to win the Buell trophy. The City of Ottawa Trophy went to the Queen's York Rangers team. The Botsford Match produced a three-way-He of 98 points each out of 100 among S.G. Rogers of Toronto, Dave Rumbold of Ottawa and Cadet Rob Sidhu of Kamloops, B.C.

lliliiWiipiliiliiii: Ottawa Journal Vil Meere fish and newspaper, then set up a catch-the-catfish contest with a prize of more than $2,500 to the winner and a spot for the catfish in the Dutsburg Zoo. Although Mayor Dietrich Osmers, a man with a voice like a bramble patch, said Immediately that the "beast must be shot or harpooned at once," other townspeople found the story not only hard to believe when It surfaced last month but also a lot less than amusing. "Drivel," said a woman who has a souvenir stand about 100 yards from Sergeant Grunke's glassed-in surveillance station. "All I know Is that butter is butter, and when I have five marks in my hand that's five marks. Don't bother me with monster catfish." Peter Kache, commodore at the local yacht club, "I like Grunke and think he's a reasonable man, but this catfish busi 'iX ti game wmmmm ness is for some less reasonable place, let's say Mexico, than Bad Zwis-chenahn.

Why would It come here?" Grunke takes all the doubt with reasonable good humor. He Is 41 years old and in his blue serge uniform with four gold stripes on the sleeve and a white cap. We looks like a man ready for Important naval assignments. It Is only when he talks, when his smile soars and his story races forward, that he seems like someone whose horizon goes beyond the far shore of the lake. Describing his experience, he said: "We were out on our boat, Officer Gerd Dirks and myself, that's Patrol Boat W30, making tests on our radio about 10:25 a.m.

when we saw It We saw the rear section moving in the clear water about 15 yards from us. The fish was about a shorter than our boat. rs A Yankee manager Billy Martin up t6 his friendly tricks Mets finally take sweep New York Mets had taken two in a row from Atlanta Braves and stood on the verge Thursday night of sweeping their first National League series in nearly a year. The only trouble was they were going up against one of the best pitchers in baseball the one Mets manager Joe Torre describes as "older than The man in question Was 40-year-old knuckle-ball wizard Phil Neikro who kept the Mets in check On four hits over the first seven Innings. But the bubble burst in the eighth as the Mets struck for five runs en route- to their first series sweep since last September when they accomplished against Pittsburgh Pirates.

"We beat their best tonight," Torre said. "He (Neikro) is old enough to be most of my players' father, and he probably will be there 10 more years." "Doug Flynn started the Mets rally with a double, but was thrown out at third when Niekro fielded pinch-hitter Gil Flores's bunt to the mound. Frank Taveras then beat out a single and rookie catcher Alex Trevino slapped his run-scoring single to centre, with Flores also scoring on the play after Barry Bonnell's throw bounced away. After Lee Mazzilli walked, John Stearns squeezed home Trevino and Joel Youngblood followed with a two-run double. "It only takes one bad inning," Niekro said.

"I just made some bad pitches. They got a couple of runs and it gave them room to hit and run and squeeze." Elsewhere, Pittsburgh Pirates defeated San Diego Padres 5J4, Los Angeles Dodgers downed St. Louis Cardinals 4-2 In 15 innings and Chicago Cubs walloped San Francisco Giants 14-4. In the American League, Milwaukee took Texas 4-1, Kansas City downed Baltimore Orioles 4-2, Boston Red Sox outlasted Chicago White Sox 7-5 and Minnesota Twins dumped New York Yankees 5-1. Chase resumes again MONTREAL (CP) After dropping six of nine games on their latest road trip, Montreal Expos won't have much time to lick their wounds once they return home tonight.

The Expos face Atlanta Braves In a three-game weekend series at Olympic Stadium before resuming their chase for the National League East Division title with a six-game swing through Cincinnati and Atlanta. And while the past nine games have greatly altered the Expos position in the East Division race from a half-game out of first place to a four game deficit the next nine encounters should dictate whether the club will remain a contender or merely a pretender. Pittsburgh gained some ground on the idle Expos by beating San Diego Padres 5-4 Thursday night. "We need a winning streak," said veteran first baseman Tony Perez, who is no stranger to the pressures of the stretch run. "It's really important that we sweep our series against Atlanta.

All is not lost at this stage of the game." The Expos had similar visions of getting fat at the expense of the feeble New York Mets last weekend only to fall 7-1 In the series opener before rebounding to win the next two games. That was one of the few bright spots on the road trip, which began with a three-game sweep at the hands of Philadelphia Phillies and ended when Montreal salvaged one game of a three-game set with Houston Astros. What went wrong with the well-oiled unit that spent nearly two months In first place before yielding to Pittsburgh Pirates on August Hitting, particularly of the clutch variety, would appear to be the main culprit upon examining statistics produced during the recent road trip. As a team, the Expos batted a paltry .212 during the three-city swing, with Gary Carter, Warren Cromartie, Ellis Valentine, Chris Speier and Rodney Scott experiencing the most misery at the plate. Although Valentine cracked four home runs in nine games, he had just five hits in 30 at-bats for a feeble .167 mark, while Carter, recovering from a back injury, had one hit In 23 appearances for .044 and Scott, with five hits in 32 trips, a .156 average, were even more inept Friday, August 17, 1979 Cosmos jump into lead TORONTO (CP) Second-half goals by Johan Neeskens, Vladislav Bogicevtc and Rick Davis gave New York Cosmos a 3-1 victory Thursday and a one-game lead in their North American Soccer League quarter-final with Toronto Blizzard before a record crowd of 30,356 at Exhibition The crowd was believed to be the largest crowd ever to watch a soccer game in Toronto.

Second game, is scheduled for Sunday night in Giants Stadium at East Rutherford, N.J. After an uneventful first half, with neither goaltender Blagoje Tamlndzic for Toronto and Nllubert Birkenmeler for Cosmos facing any otfficult shots, the second half proved a free-scor- Both teams kept the ball moving and played evenljN during the first 45 minutes with action moving from one end of the field to the other. Neeskens scored midway through the second half when he picked up a loose ball deep in the Toronto zonexand booted it into an open Blizzard net at 60: 26 to take a 1-0 Cosmos lead. Boglcevic 'scored the insurance goal at 80:16 when he took the ball out of a crowded in front of the Toronto goal and drove It across the crease from six feet out and' Into the lower right hand corner. Davis's goal came at 87V08 and was the result of a break-away that started40 metres out.

Davis took the shot, from 25 metres, handcuffed Ta-' mlndzic. Ottawa paddler reaches semisK DUISBURG, West Germany (Reuter-CP) East Germans registered the fastest times in six of seven series of heats on the opening day of the 1 I wurni caiiuv cuaiiipiuiiMiips inursuay. Canadians, led by Ivan Charalambij of Ottawa Martin Fraser of Mississauga, qualified for the semi-finals in all seven events either through heat performances or through the second-chance repechages. Charalambij and Martin were second fastest In the men's Canadian pairs ahead of the East Germans and behind the Hungarian crew of Buday and Frey. Other Canadian semi-final qualifiers: Steve King, Montreal, kayak singles, with a time of 4: 17.726; Hugh Fisher, Bumaby, B.C., and Denis-Barre, Montreal, men's kayak pairs, Sue Holioway, Ottawa, kayak singles, 2: 10.190; Karen Lukanovich and Lucie Guy, Montreal, kayak pairs, 1: 56.451, and the men's kayak fours Scott, Reid arid Dean Oldershaw, Mississauga, Alvln Brien, Dartmouth, N.S.

in 3: 13.52. Cardinal part of super lift TOKYO (Reuter) Seven giant weightlifters, including Marc Cardinal of Ottawa and Olympic champion of the Soviet Union will take part In the first Super-heavyweight Invitational championships here on Dec. 1, the Interna tional wcigniniung federation announced lnurs-day. Tamas Ajan, general secretary of the IWF, said the participants would also include 1979 pre-Olym-pic champion Sultan Rakhamnov of the Soviet Union, last year's world champion Jurgen Heuser of East Germany and 1979 European champiop Gend Bonk, also of East Germany. The remaining lifters will be Jolko Leppa of Finland and Tom Stock of the United States.

Something fishy going on in Germany We all have our favorite fishing stories fact liberally sprinkled with fiction. Here's one, via the voice of veracity and authority, the New York Times, about "the catfish that may cat Germany." That's right. Read on. The catfish lives In Northern Germany and he weights either 220 or 390 pounds, is either 11 or 14 feet long, has gray or brown or greenish fins, eats a third or half of his weight per day in fish, birds, ducks or dachshunds, lives deep in the bottom mud or just under the water's surface and will soon celebrate his 35th, 40th or 80th birthday here, growing lonesome in this very orderly little place where a lot of people don't believe In him at all. The town of Bad Zwls-chenahn and Lake Zwis-chenahn, about an hour's drive west of Bremen In north Germany, are not the kind of places where the folks hang easy with a good story about a big fish.

It Is a land of llteralness, a lake without cattails or hoot owls or spooky mists that can turn an old log Into a crocodile at twilight. The lawns here run to the water's edge as clipped and uniform as Astroturf; the boats at the marina are arranged In size places and covered with Identical orange protective tarpaulins, like cars waiting for shipment at some vast railroad siding, and a policeman sits in a glass-enclosed watchman's post surveying behavior on the lake that loops, gray-blue, in a one-and-a-half-mile long, mile-wide curve before him. The problem at Bad Zwischenahn, population 20,700, the thing that makes the people at Kache's fruit market or Zorba's restaurant or Egon Oeltjen's eel smokehouse feel a little uneasy Is that the man who saw the catfish is Police Sgt. Peter Grunke, usually a symbol of rationality and the normal, immutable order of things. Not only did he see the catfish, but he also entered the sighting Into his logbook under "besondere Vor-kommnisse" happenings') with sufficient constabulary detail and the use of the word "alleged" to get the newspapers interested.

In no time, the catfish's size, weight and habits grew, much tike Vietnam War body counts or intelligence estimates of Soviet troop strength In Eastern Europe, depending on whose story you were reading. Bfd am Sonntag, the country's largest Sunday i i which is more than 14 feet long. I was shocked. I really didn't know what to do. So I headed the boat toward the fish and it dove under.

I just couldn't believe it, and if there weren't another witness, I never would have said a thing. But I wrote up my report and that's where things started." It was then, the sergeant said, that people began saying he might have had a beer too many. This didn't bother him so much, he said, as the idea that too many of his friends in Bad Zwischenahn were not ready to accept that a giant catfish could exist. He was an East Prussian, the sergeant said, a refugee from a part of Poland where they knew about giant catfish, eerie lakes and tales well told. Catfish weighing more than 400 pounds have been found In Europe, but to modern Germans on two-week vacations around Lake Zwischenahn, the very Idea of swimming Into such a monster seems absurd.

The catfish story has shown that in addition to all those reasonable people who say no there are plenty who want to believe In the blgfish and Grunke. Only last week, for example, Heinz Schulte's dachshund vanished with a horrible yelp at the edge of the lake and Gunter Kuhl, the head of the local anglers' club, told a reporter he thought it likely that "the catfish just snapped him up." Local fishermen also find the catfish a European variety known as a wels, or Silurus glanis In Latin a good explanation for what happened to all the bream, tench, trout and smelt they used to catch: the big guy ate them all. Some also remember that the lake was stocked with catfish during the Second World War and before In the hope that they would be ecologically sound garbagemen. The believers include dozens of fishermen who have tried to catch the fish with such bait as fattened doves, hens, slabs of beef and cattle spleen. One plan was to attach bait to barrels floating on the water.

"When he takes the bait, he pulls the barrels along, see," said Kuhl, "and then he drags them around for a while until he gets tired. Then we snap him up." Grunke considers the Interest tantamount to full vindication..