Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 43

Frly, Uzi ft IZ21 a -e A Fred Thomann resigns because athletics isn't a priority with school administrators. Page 3D Sports Phone, 1-976-1313 HORSE RACING 5, 7 CLASSIFIED ADS 8-13 "If I make a mistake, they don 't mark off 15 yards or put me in the penalty box. They come out on the track and take me away in an ambulance. Auto racer Richard Petty MOVIE GUIDE Call with (ports newt: 222-6660 LJ DETROIT FREE PRESS Edmonton wins opener, 10 poiTDoy HI. hi mi ill ill mm ii II! mi L4 Oilers" defense stops Islanders By JOHN CASTINE Free Press Sports Writer UNIONDALE, N.Y.

The Edmonton Oilers, supposedly a cocky, chippy bunch, were modest Thursday after their 1-0 shutout of the New York Islanders in the opening game of the Stanley Cup finals. Kevin McClelland scored at 1:55 of the third period to break up a spectacular goaltending battle between Billy Smith and Grant Fuhr. "It is important that we won the first game because we haven't won against the Islanders in a long time," said McClelland. "It takes a monkey off our back. We now have home-ice advantage." The 10-game losing streak (15 games without a win) against the Islanders was more like an ape on the Oilers' backs.

The Oilers gave high praise to the Islanders, who swept them in the finals last year. "I feel much better than last year at this time," said Edmonton coach Glen Sather. "We know how good the Islanders are and we have to be careful." IF THE OILERS were trying to copy the defensive style of the Islanders, they did it well. They met the See STANLEY CUP, Page 6D 4 -W- jr- Sportswriters aren't slimy, second-class creeps, always Sir Laurence Olivier never has portrayed a sports-writer, to my knowledge, but Humphrey Bogart has, in "The Harder They Fall," and Spencer Tracy has, in one of those Hepburn movies, and now Robert Duvall has, in a new baseball picture called "The Natural," which opens Friday here and around much of the country. Believe me, I would much rather be in this company than with the working stiffs who really do come sniffing into locker rooms.

What I must live with, sad to say, is the change of image that the average "scribe" has undergone. From the real-life Ring Lardner and Red Smith wordsmiths to the original Hollywood concept of a crusading newspaperman Bogart set out to abolish boxing, all by himself today's sportswriter, both actual and fictional, has transformed in much of the public's mind into some sort of slimy worm who knows nothing about the games, pokes his snotty nose where it doesn't belong and makes trouble for everyone, "just to sell papers." He is a second-class creep. This is hard to digest for someone who is in the business, but certainly no harder than it was for policemen and politicians and other primarily honest laborers to see themselves portrayed as crooks or fools or ghouls. Not every cop is on the take, not every mayor is linked with the mob, and not every newspaper journalist is a lying, low-paid, unprincipled drunk. (Although some, of course, are.) 01 gunslingers and ex-presidents The profession attracts an equal number of intellectuals and dimwits, same as most others, and it is either a testament to or the everlasting shame of the American sportswriter that the gunslinger Bat Masterson later became one and that the statesman Richard M.

Nixon always wanted to be one. (I am still trying to imagine Nixon asking Reggie Jackson what sort of pitch he hit.) What distresses me just as much is that Lou Grant didn't AP Photo With an Islander's stick waving in his face, Edmonton's Grant Fuhr makes one of his 34 saves. Tigers tie one record, near another in hot start 5 I i i hi in, hi in.i. 1 1 i in V. ft I VvV I If I Y' Something tells boxers they can't say 4I quit' By MARK KRAM Free Press Sports Writer Toward the end of his long and regal career, Sugar Ray Robinson declined so steeply and pathetically that even crude, untutored inferiors left him in scattered pieces.

In even seem to have one, but, what the heck, his newspaper only had two reporters anyway. I watched "The Natural" in a Chicago screening room with such genuine baseball types as general manager Dal- 1 "I HP! 1 I ias reen toacn mm dimmer and pitchers Rick Reuschel VV and Scott Sanderson of the I i 1 Cubs, and was squirming in those final, desperate years, he closed his 25 years commentary in boxing in tank A ff By BILL McGRAW Free Press Sports Writer For the first couple of weeks of the season, it was easy to compare the 1984 Tigers with the 1968 Tigers, the last time the club won the World Series. But now, baseball fans around the nation are mentioning the current Tigers in the same breath as two teams from even longer ago, the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers and the 1912 Washington Senators. That's because the Tigers at 25-4 have tied the Dodgers' major-league mark for the first 29 games of the season. The Dodgers lost their next four games, so Friday night at Tiger Stadium against the California Angels, the Tigers will attempt to become the first team in big league history to start a season 26-4.

The Senators went 16-0 on the road at one point in 1912. The Tigers are 14-0 away from home this spring, and will continue that quest after they finish a nine-game homestand and begin a nine-game West Coast trip. For the rest of May, the Tigers play only the Angels, A's and Mariners, three Western Division teams who have won barely as many as they have lost. The Senators played in a pre-World War I era few people can recall. Clark Griffith was in his first year as manager.

Walter Johnson won 32 games. Clyde Milan stole 88 bases. Despite winning streaks of 17 and 10 games, See TIGERS, Page 4D a ran -3. AP Photo Robert Redford w'hateyer pleasure had indulged from having my on-screen counterpart represented by the Oscar-winning Duvall was overturned when the actor's character, Max Mercy, turned out to be your typical, know-nothing, corrupt but popularly syndicated sportswriter. "Tell me," Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) inquires after a particularly merciless Mercy question, "have you ever played baseball?" Ouch.

We have a hero in this picture who is literally so dangerous at the plate that he destroys property with his hits including the ball itself. This superhuman is annoyed by an inhuman newsman whose only admirable trait is that he is every bit as versatile as the hero. Roy Hobbs can pitch and hit, but Max Mercy can write and use a camera and illustrate his stories with cartoons. He's a triple threat. Never mind that Bernard Malamud's novel has taken Sugar Ray Leonard works out for Friday's comeback fight.

Leonard-Howard at a glance: towns and dim arenas in pursuit of scandalously short purses and perhaps a glimmer of past brilliance. Broke, dissipated and eight years removed from his fifth middleweight crown, he had been reduced by age to a sorrowful embodiment of despair. Like Joe Louis, Ali and hundreds of others, Robinson resisted the inevitable: peaceful and undisturbed retirement. Ironically, even in his best years he professed disdain for boxing and yet here he was, 45 years old and still groping for those beautiful gifts. To many, the sight of Sugar Ray inspired pity, but in an interview with ABC radio (circa 1963), author A.J.

Liebling penetrated the problem: "What else can Robinson do?" Liebling said. "What else does he know? Can he teach at a college? Can he broadcast on radio? Can he be an accountant? The only way he knows to make a living is fighting. A See BOXING, Page 6D WHO: Sugar Ray Leonard, 27, Poto- WHEN: 10:30 p.m. Friday mac, (32-1-0, 23 KOs) vs. Kevin TV: Home Box Office nowara, pnnaaeipnia KOs).

LAST FIGHT: Leonard, Feb. 15, 1982, a 3d-round KO of Bruce Finch at Reno, Nev. Howard, Feb. 27, 1984, a 6th-round KO of Bill Bradley at Atlantic City, N.J. PURSES: Leonard, $3 million.

Howard, $125,000 WHAT: 10-round welterweight fight. WHERE: Worcester, Centrum. a beating in this movie. They tell me Redford doesn't like his characters showing weaknesses in his movies, so Hobbs scarcely has any. The details of his relationships with Iris and with Harriet Bird certainly have been rearranged, and Lord knows the book's real ending now rests in peace.

But Mercy, the sportswriter, remains just as bad a dude as he was on the printed page. Kubek says Trammell is tops in the field I have no quarrel with this at all. Barbara Walters once howled about the movie "Network," saying it misrepresented television news, and newspaper editors coast-to-coast challenged the work habits of Sally Field in "Absence of Malice." Haven't these people ever snorts on the air Joe Lapcinte nel 4 brings you "More Real In addition to his NBC duties, Kubek appears on Toronto Blue Jays games carried by the CTV network, seen in some parts of the Detroit area on Channel 42. In that he gets around, is knowledgeable about the position and is free with words, Kubek said without much prompting: "Trammell has gotten a lot stronger, with a little weight training. I'm not putting down Trammell, or Yount or Ripkin, but shortstops and everybody else now get more at-See SPORTS ON THE AIR, Page 6D before spring training started." Kubek, who played for the New York Yankees from 1957 through 1965, is in Detroit for Saturday's NBC telecast of the game between the Tigers and the Angels at Tiger Stadium (1:20 p.m., Channel 4 in the Detroit area).

Although Kubek is considered a member of NBC's second team, he and play-by-play man Bob Costas will be heard in 70 percent of the country because their game is the first half of a nationwide doubleheader. (Detroit doesn't get the second game; instead, Chan Who is the best shortstop in the American League? Good question for Tony Kubek, who used to be one of them. "It's a three-way tie between Robin Yount, Cal Ripkin and Alan Trammell," said Kubek, now a baseball announcer. "How's that for a cop-out?" The first two players mentioned won the most valuable player award the last two seasons as their teams, Milwaukee and Baltimore, won the American League pennant. This season, with the Tigers leading the AL East and Trammell the league's leading heard of fiction? Were all butchers like "Marty?" All hairdressers like Warren Beatty in "Shampoo?" All priests like Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald? Just ordinary people hitter, Trammell is considered an MVP candidate, at least in the early-season primaries and caucuses.

"He has a heckuva chance," Kubek said. "And I picked the Tigers to win the pennant What brought me to Chicago the other day was a 71- EAST GERMANS JOIN BOYCOTT year-old gentleman in Chicago Heights, name of John E. Meyers, who was retiring after four decades of dignified sportswriting. He never mingled with NFL or NHL or NBA players, never went to a World Series, never messed unnecessarily with athletes' minds or passed along hearsay. He stayed put in the suburbs and 1980 medal-winners Here are the top 10 medal-winning countries at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow (Soviet-aligned nations in dark tone): still did stimulating work, for which Jim Bouton and U.S.

might mop up Games Lou Boudreau and other old neighborhood friends honored him at a testimonial supper. Bouton, who played baseball and wrote about it take that, Roy Hobbs recalled how influential Meyers was in his career, a fact he mentioned in one of his books, and then he did something odd. He spoke of how he had learned something during his baseball life, that, "Sportswriters could be very interesting people, that some of them were people I was very proud to know." Not all of them, but at least some of them. It made me feel good, this recognition that while we Country Total USSR 80 69 46 195 Germany 47 37 42 126 Bulgaria 8 16 17 41 Hungary 7 10 15 32 Poland 14 -15 32 Romania ,6 6 13 25 Great Britain 5 7 9 21 Cuba 8-7 5 20 Italy 8 3 4 15 France 6 5 3 14 r- ming," said Mike Moran, spokesman for the U.S. Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs, Colo.

"Without the East Germans and without the Soviets, the U.S. women swimmers would just mop up." He also said that in the 100- and 200-meter races, American runner Evelyn Ashford had faced her main competition from East Germany. SWIMMER TRACY CAULKINS, training at the University of Florida in Gainesville, said the East Germans "have some great swimmers and to win a medal without them in the meet will take away some of the glory." The East German women hold nine world records in swimming. In track the East German women won the preponderance of gold medals at the World Championships in Helsinki last year. Their pullout could benefit U.S.

female sprinter Evelyn Ashford and others, Moran said. Moran said the Soviets' absence would help American distance runner Mary Decker. Decker's main competition in 6ee OLYMPICS, fcage 6D Free Press Wire Reports East Germany's decision Thursday to boycott the Summer Olympics would deprive the Games of some of the world's finest female swimmers, track and field competitors, rowers and shooters. The Soviets, the East Germans and the Bulgarians, in that order, were the top three medal winners in the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow, boycotted by many Western nations in response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Their absence from Los Angeles would leave the United States the clear dominant force.

"The same competition is not there with their non-participation," F. Don Miller, executive director of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said Thursday. "Certain victories might be considered hollow victories by athletes. It's absolutely not as legitimate a competition as it would have been.

And I think our athletes look at it the same way." "East Germany has the top women's track team in the world, and wey're an unbelievable force in women's svvroi- may not all be honorable citizens or poets, we are not necessarily all contemptible, either. Even Robert, Redford, after all, probably thinks of us as he does anybody else, as ordinary people. I liked his movie a lot. Individually and as teams, the Tigers' minor Sato: It Complete Book Dave Johnson'sTiger Farm Report, Page 4tK.