The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 46

46 THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE MAY 29, 1994 Celtics have hit rock bottom at the top Sports Log VIE HAD TO 60 UP 0N TKG PRICSm I HAVE LONG BE-lieved that Rule No. 1 on any good sports fan's list of Things To Remember is the following: Never Trust The Owner Any Farther Than You Can Throw The Building. frp if Names: McNall files for bankruptcy Bruce McNall, who had to sell his majority interest in the Los Angeles Kings, was forced to file for bankruptcy Friday. The move came during a hearing with four of McNall's creditors in which they asked a federal judge to liquidate McNall's assets. Instead, US Bankruptcy Judge Lisa Hill Fenning converted the petition into a Chapter 11 case, which will allow a trustee to restructure McNall's assets and attempt to pay the creditors.

McNall's creditors include three banks who say he owes them a total of nearly $162 million The Florida Marlins placed Gary Sheffield back on the 15-day disabled list, a day after he reinjured his left shoulder trying to make a diving catch in right field against San Francisco. Sheffield first went on the disabled list May 10 with a bruised rotator cuff and was reactivated May 25. He played in just two games before going back on the DL Los Angeles Dodgers second baseman Delino DeShields was placed on the 15-day disabled list retroac wrmst are, mo mm tive to May 26 with a laceration on the middle finger of i his left hand Former Minnesota Viking running back Keith Henderson will remain jailed on rape charges in I Minneapolis over the weekend pending a bail hearing expected to be set early this week. Attorney Robert Miller will ask the court to reduce the $200,000 bail set I Friday on separate charges that Henderson raped a means they will own the summer. The Bruins have just concluded a good playoff run, and they are now just a couple of players away from real contention.

And the Patriots are the hottest ticket of them all. That leaves the Celtics out of the current loop. The Celtics are an amazing front office mess. I cannot tell you how many times I'll be talking with someone involved in the NBA and he'll say, "What is going on up there in Boston?" People in the league are perplexed. They see more factions than an Elizabethan court and no hope of improvement.

The Celtics dream of signing a free agent. They can keep dreaming. What free agent of consequence would come to Boston in its current state? The world knows the coach is a lame duck. The world knows the chief basketball executive is a lame duck. The Celtics are the antithesis of stability.

In the minds of the NBA the Celtics have become the Clippers East. How hard is it for Son Of to understand that he must either (a) dump Chris Ford and Dave Gavitt now, or (b) make it known they aren't going anywhere by tending their contracts? If he chooses to drop them, well, OK, that is a positive step in terms of Celtic image. It wouldn't be fair, necessarily, but it would at least be authoritative. The way things are now, no agent would recommend that a client sign on to the Titanic. This hasn't been a good week for Paul Gaston.

On Monday he hanged himself with his preposterous cries for financial assistance. Later in the week Jack Craig and Will McDonough laid out the truth about his gargantuan greed in these pages. Even Alan Cohen piped up to denounce the new regime. Come back, John Y. All is forgiven.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist woman in Bloomington May 19 and a woman in Eden Prairie Sept. 26 Art Spinney, who played with the NFL's Baltimore Colts in 1950 and from 1953-60, died of a heart attack Friday in Lynn at age 66. Obituary, Page 87. Golf: Boros dead of heart attack Julius Boros, a former US Open and PGA champion, died of a heart attack in Fort Lauderdale, after LARRY JOHNSON ILLUSTRATION The heart and sole of the Celtics Celtics. They have a faithful following all over New England.

Newspapers in Hartford, Worcester, Springfield, Providence, Lynn, Lawrence, Salem, Newburyport, New Bedford and Fall River cover this team regularly, not to mention envoys from a very viable enterprise known as the Middlesex News. No one from all-sports radio WEEI was invited. New England Cable News was excluded. So what Paul Gaston was saying to anyone serviced by any of these entities was "expletive you." Let me explain something to Paul Gaston. Hey, Paul: You need all the publicity you can get.

Look at the Boston sports scene right now. The Red Sox are contending, which collapsing while driving a golf cart around a course where he frequently played. He was 74. Boros won the US Open in 1952 and in 1963, the latter at The Country Club in Brookline in an 18-hole playoff with Arnold Palmer and Jacky Cupit. (Obituary, Page 87) The Cape Cod Times reported that South Yarmouth native Jim Hallet, a PGA Tour veteran, will undergo a wrist operation Thursday and be out 8-12 weeks.

Hallet also said he had knee surgery Thursday to take care of some cartilage damage and doctors discovered a growth, but that it was benign and was removed The Cam Neely Celebrity Classic will be held at the Sea Crest Resort and Ballymeade Country Club in Falmouth June 30-July 1. A dinner and auction will proceed the tournament For information call 241-0092 or 956-0200. Miscellany: Silver Bullets triumph The all-woman Colorado Silver Bullets made history Friday night with a 7-2 victory over the Richfield Rockets, a 35-and-over men's amateur team from St Paul. Stacy Sunny's three RBIs and Lee Anne Ketcham's 14-strikeout pitching paced the Bullets to what is believed to be the first victory by a professional women's baseball team over an all-male squad Stone, 23, of Westborough was named to the 1994-95 US Freestyle Ski Team's women's A team (aerials) Jockey Jorge Vargas suffered a hairline fracture of his left arm when his mount, Birdie Bella, broke down after crossing the finish line in the first race at Suffolk Downs in East Boston. Vargas' arm was placed in a splint Birdie Bella was humanely destroyed.

Fans' view By definition, a sports owner is guilty until proven innocent. By definition, a sports owner is a two-faced, lying, conniving, cheating, greedy subspecies of humanity. He or she is a person who has proven to be proficient at the art of Making Money, and almost by definition this means morality often has been locked in a closet somewhere while matters of state are conducted. Of course, an owner must be given a chance to disprove these notions. History has provided us with a few good owners.

Boston, in fact, has had more than the normal allotment with Walter Brown and Thomas A. Yawkey, the latter of whom, despite some flaws that would not be easily forgivable today (quasi-racism, for one), was a true sportsman who very often placed the interests of the sport ahead of his own. Paul Gaston already has blown his chance. He has proven himself to be a whiny, out-and-out liar. He double-talks about the profitability of the franchise.

He speaks of "fiduciary responsibilities" to stockholders, conveniently omitting the fact that 40 percent of the franchise is owned by nickel-and-dime investors whose only interest in owning Celtic shares is the chance to display the certificate on the wall. The only stockholders Gaston is concerned about are himself and the other family members who have done very well by this franchise already. If he raises ticket prices a year before entering the new building, he will have established a new North American record for ownership greed and chutzpah. The other great Boston owner in question, Brown, is an ironic case in light of the current Celtic situation. For there could not possibly be two owners farther apart on any scale of humanity than Walter Brown and this Paul Gaston creature.

Paul Gaston is the worst kind of rich guy. For openers, he is a "Son Of." Daddy made the money. If Don Gaston hadn't ceded control of the Celtics to his son, he wouldn't be infesting my universe, or yours. This is what so often happens in sport Daddy gives Sonny Boy a little toy so he'll stop playing in the traffic. In this case, the toy is a cherished civic enterprise.

One of the inbred traits of the idle rich is arrogance. They are led to believe they can get away with anything they choose. If something is black and they say it's white, well, by God, it's white. These people hire yes men to soothe them and publicity people to manipulate the news and they are used to having things their way. Paul Gaston didn't like the news reporting he was seeing.

His monumental greed and arrogance had been exposed, so his solution was to summon selected members of the media to "set the record straight." It's probably easy for me to say this, since it was an off-day for me, personally, but it's painfully obvious that the proper thing for the Globe, Herald, Patriot Ledger and all the TV stations involved would have been to refuse to attend this ridiculous exercise in deceit unless all other appropriate news agencies were likewise invited. If everyone in question had stood up to this dirt bag, perhaps he would have learned something. The Celtics are not just the Boston Compiled by Pete Goodwin BASEBALL players today. I remember when I went to basketball camp in 1981. There was a boy that had some physical problems.

It appeared that he did not come from much. His sneakers were very worn, yet he played with all his heart. One of the guest athletes took him aside and gave him his brand new sneakers. He told him that he was "his kind of player." That athlete was Chris Ford. I think that says it all.

TODD ZINGALES Nashua 'Chips' made us chipper In response to comments in Jack Craig's SporTView of May 10, 1 can give an excellent reason for the viewership of "Artistry On Ice," May 7, being less than phenomenal in Boston: "Ice Chips." Really, would CBS have had me pass up a chance to meet Our Paul Wylie, the 1992 Olympic silver medalist, after he skated two brilliant programs plus an energetically charged encore before the very eyes of us in Walter Brown Arena? Sorry, CBS, but watching Our Nancy on the tube just can't compete with being there, cheering on such skaters as Our Amanda Farkas, Our Elin Gardiner and Our Paul Wylie, to mention just three of Our Own who participated in Ice Chips 1994. Ice Chips, presented by the Skating Club of Boston, had skaters from the tiniest novice right up to the Olympic silver medalist and evey level in between. It was an evening of figure skating, precision skating, ice ballet, even a hilarious slapstick-on-ice. The production's scope and brilliance surely makes choreographer and director Tom McGinnis "the Arthur Fiedler of the Ice Show." While missing "Artistry Oh Ice," I saw the show that mattered. WILLIAM WEBER Wattham Globe readers are invited to "sound off" in this column in the Sunday paper.

Send your letter (MAXIMUM 200 WORDS) to. Fans' View, do Sports Dept, Boston Globe, Boston, Mass. 02107. Letters must include name, address and phone number, so they can be verified 1 A worldly view needed The love affair between can-do-no-wrong Harry Sinden and the Boston press continues to baffle this observer. Bob Ryan's lavish praise of the Sutter-Sinden regime reached particularly nauseating proportions when the mysterious and inexplicable treatment of Dmitri Kvartalnov was justified by the latter's alleged lack of defensive commitment.

Both Ryan and regular beat writer K.P. Dupont should be much more cynical of the bizarre banishment of this highly skilled player for such specious reasons. Please look around at what this team can place in front of its defense: Does anyone in his. right mind think that Heinze, Stewart, Hughes, Knipscheer and Reid have the offensive skills to justify regular shifts while Kvartalnov is sometimes not even invited to practice? Moreover, does any careful observer truly believe that any of the aforementioned players has above-average defensive skills? The real answers lie in the Boston Bruins' historical attitude toward European players, who have always been maligned as sissies unworthy of our Gallery Gods. Sinden's philosophy has been perpetuated through the successive selections of inexperienced coaches with reputations as tough-nosed players (Cheevers, O'Reilly, Milbury, Sutter) who would never question their boss' poorly disguised xenophobia.

Has Don Cherry really departed? JOHN CUNHA West Roxbury Ford knows the way I recently read an article by Jackie MacMullan on the non-renewal of Chris Ford's contract extension. I can't agree more with her views. I was lucky enough to have my family move from LA, as in Lakers, to New Hampshire in 1978. 1 became a great basketball fan at that point and the Celtics were my team. Now that I am older and have a family of my own, I've learned that you can't win every game.

I see that the Celtics need to begin the rebuilding process with the involvement of Chris Ford. The Celtics have always had great owners but I'm questioning that now. I see a big change in the attitudes of Chicago (AL): Placed INF Craig Grebeck on 15-day disabled list; purchased INF Olmedo Saenz from Nashville (AA). Florida (NL): Placed OF Gary Sheffield on 15-day disabled list; purchased IB Russ Morman from Edmonton (PCD. Lot Angeles (NL): Placed 2B Delino DeShields on 15-day disabled list; activated INF Dave Hansen.

Oakland (AL): Optioned INF Fausto Cruz to Tacoma (PCD and OF Ernie Young to Huntsville (Southern); purchased INF Jeff Schaefer from Tacoma. Toronto (AL): Placed Mike Timlin on 15-day disabled list; purchased Randy St. Claire from Syracuse (IL). FOOTBALL Buffalo IAFCI: Signed DB Jerome Henderson. Archery: National Festival at Anheuser-Busch Brewery, Merrimack, N.H., 8 a.

p.m. Auto ratios Memorial Day Classic at New Hampshire International Speedway, Loudon, N.H., 8 a.m.; Racing card at Hudson (N.H.) Speedway, 1 p.m.; Twi-Nite Spectacular at Thompson (Conn.) Speedway, 6 p.m. Drag racing; Memorial Day Bracket Bash at New England Drag-way, Epping, N.H. 8 a.m. Rugby: National Women's Club Championships at UMass-Am-herst, 9 a.m.

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