Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 51

laws talks of injury; Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski is used to getting banged up, but not to lying in a hospital bed. Page 6D. Sports Phone, 1-976-1313 Thursday, Nov. 29, IS84 HORSE RACING 5 COLLEGE FOOTBALL 7 TELEVISION 9 (J Call with tportt newt: 222-6660 1 "At the risk of sounding conceited, I think I'm probably the best all-around back in football. Raiders' Marcus Allen, assessing his abilities in me uecemDer issue 01 insiae bporis DETROIT FREE PRESS LJ Turner glad Lions snubbed him r( Downey Part of his success comes from those people helping him from Knox down through his teammates.

The Seahawks have the second-best record in the NFL, 11-2, going into Sunday's game against the Lions at Seattle. BUT A LOT OF Turner's success was his own doing. "He has the ability to chase down the long ball, exactly what George Perles told me before the draft," Knox said. "George Perles said when he was in Pittsburgh they had Stallworth and those people who had that ability, and he said, 'Daryl has that Turner started the season as the Seahawks' No. 3 receiver, playing mostly in third-and-long situations and catching a touchdown pass in each of the first three games.

I iV 1, 1 By CURT SYLVESTER Free Press Sports Writer Daryl Turner never did care much about the Lions. The little bit of attention he paid to pro football as a youngster in Flint usually was reserved for the Los Angeles Rams. And that was mostly because they were next-door neighbors to the Lakers. Basketball not football was Turner's sport. "As far as football, I never thought I'd play football," he said.

"I watched Wilt Chamberlain and I was going to be a basketball player." But that was before a junior varsity football coach spotted him at the end of his sophomore year at Flint Southwestern and convinced him to try out for football. Before Muddy Waters recruited him to play at Michigan State and George Perles convinced him he could play in the NFL. Before Seattle Sea-hawks coach Chuck Knox took him in the second round of the 1984 draft and made him a starting wide receiver early in his rookie season. BUT ONE THING hasn't changed: Turner still doesn't care much about the Lions. "It wasn't that I didn't like the Lions," he said.

"Maybe it was just too close. I didn't want to play that close to home. "If it had come down to it and I had been drafted by the Lions, it would have been better for my folks, but this is the greatest thing that could have happened to me going to Seattle. "I'm having a great time; I'm loving it here. It's a learning experience.

You can make it hard or you can make it easy. Right now so many people are helping me that it's making it easy." Free Press File Photo See DARYL TURNER, Page 7D Daryl Turner: Seattle success Lemon's pal, Ricky, met a foe he couldn't block Ricky Bell was the blocking back of his high school football team. The back he blocked for was Chet Lemon. They were good friends. "Man, we had so much fun," Lemon remembers.

"We just laughed and laughed and laughed until we hurt. Those were great times." Lemon was a year older. His high school sweetheart, Valerie, knew Ricky Bell almost as well as he did. She was one of the football team's, statisticians. She used to add up the yardage Chet and Ricky gained.

At their home in Troy, Chet and Valerie Lemon turned on the 1 1 o'clock news Wednesday night. That's when they found out Ricky Bell was dead. "We were just in shock," Lemon, the Tigers' center fielder, said Thursday morning. "I didn't even know Ricky was sick." They never ran into each other For the past two years, as it turned out, Bell had suffered from a condition called dermatomyositis that caused an inflammation of his skin and muscles. He also had a related heart disorder called cardiomyopathy.

He did a TV interview a week ago that did not get much exposure on anyone's 1 1 o'clock news. Pistons closer to original lineup By CHARLIE VINCENT Free Press Sports Writer When John Long is in shape to play basketball and when Kelly Tripucka's aching right hamstring is healed, the Pistons will, for the first time this season, resemble I mm, In it, Bell said he had regained some of the weight he had recently lost, and he was feeling better. "I'm going to beat this thing," he said. The recovery of a former football hero was not a big story. But Ricky Bell, the great running back, was brought down by cardiac arrest.

In a Los Angeles hospital Wednesday, at age 29, he died. fimnn fionroc ho IniH 1 I ss: yi Si i -t I 41 i I I if i mm I 1 if 1 f4i la iiif ii MiiiiMiiflBii imiiniimniT iiim ii im wiMi iMHiiniiniiiiiMii Milium imiiinf 1 i iiitfifMi iHrtiii nwniii'iiiiriM -Mtiimi'i iMimiinTTiiriiffTiiriiTrtiitiTrn-MTiiTiiiiirniriri ifiTniTn-n-r-nrTir -iiti- "rrtmn iimhiT the basketball team they were supposed to be. Until then, Chuck Daly's job is to put the pieces together as well as he did Wednesday when the Pistons beat Portland, 120-113. That was accomplished without Long in uniform for the first time this season or Tripucka, who has missed five games. John Long Free Press Photo bv MANNY CRISOSTOMO Jim Devellano spends his time at Joe Louis Arena and on the road scouting junior players.

Chief scout Devellano on road looking for juniors Tonight, when the Washington Bullets come to the Silverdome for a 7:30 game against the Pistons, Long may be available for his first minutes of the season. But Vinnie Johnson (27 points, six assists) and Brook Steppe (13 points) did a more-than-adequate job at shooting guard in Wednesday's win, and Daly says he won't rush Long's return. "Looking at him physically," Daly said during Thursday's workout at Oakland University, "I question how much he can play at this point He'll probably play in the next couple of days (the Pistons visit Indiana Saturday), but I don't have any feel for how long he can play." Long said Wednesday he is about five pounds over his usual playing weight of 195. Though Long hasn't played, Daly is already thinking of Tripucka again as a forward, not a guard. "I want to incorporate John into our plans as quickly as possible," Daly said, "because I don't want us to continue to go with just three guards any longer than we have to." The guards would be Johnson, Steppe and Isiah Thomas.

Tripucka will be eligible to come off the injured list after Sunday and may be ready for Tuesday's game against Boston in the Silverdome. But even if the hamstring is healed, Daly may not throw him right back into the starting lineup. "At this point, I can't see moving Kelly into a starting position as soon as he comes back," Daly said. "When he's ready, he'll get his minutes, but for now it looks like it'll be a week or so before we have to decide on that." When Dan Roundfield returned after missing six games because of a strained muscle in his left calf, Daly did not immediately put him in the starting lineup. Kent Benson remained there until Wednesday, and before making Roundfield a starter again, Daly called both players in for a conference.

See PISTONS, Page 7D Rlcky Be" eyes on Bell only two or three times after they played together. "Oh, I'd see him playing football on TV, and he'd see me playing baseball, and we'd be passing messages back and forth," Lemon recalls. "Somebody was always coming up to me and saying, 'Hey, Ricky Bell told me to say hello when I saw I guess I always thought I'd run into him sooner or later and we'd get to talking about old times. "But you know how it goes. He'd be playing in California or in Florida, and I was living in the Midwest.

It just never worked out." If only Lemon had been traded to the Tigers sooner, he would have been training in Lakeland, only 30 miles or so from Tampa. But by the time the Sarasota-based Chicago White Sox traded Lemon to Detroit, Bell was no longer playing pro football for the Buccaneers. Their paths refused to cross. Lemon's first spring training with the Tigers began in March 1982, exactly the month Tampa Bay traded Bell to San Diego. Once upon a time, they had been inseparable.

They were the backfield backbone of the Fremont Pathfinders. Lemon was the halfback, Bell the fullback. On defense, Lemon was a rover back, Bell a linebacker. Ricky Bell's family moved to Los Angeles from Houston when he was 11, and a few years later he found himself at Fremont High, an assembly line for first-rate athletes. Baseball players George Hendrick, Dan Ford, Bob Watson, Bobby Tolan and Willie Crawford played there.

So did Curtis Rowe, the basketball player. With Bell doing the. blocking, Lemon and another Fremont halfback, Charles Nash, ran like crazy. "After I graduated, I got to go back and see Ricky play as a senior," Lemon says. "He dominated everybody.

He was just bigger and stronger and faster than anybody else on the field. He was like a man playing with kids." Ws easy to lose it all This time, someone else blocked for Bell. He barely needed it. Then Southern Cal signed him, and he became one of the most talked-about runners in football. The nation's leading rusher as a junior.

Second to Tony Dorsett in the Heisman Trophy voting as a senior. Top pick of the 1977 NFL draft. "He was an unselfish player," Lemon says. "Ricky wasn't a real talkative type when we played together. He was a humble person, and everybody liked him.

You know how it is when you're around people who are not very boastful. Everybody pulls for that sort of player. "Ricky was my friend, and I'll always remember him. I'll have memories of him for as long as I live. "You know what it does.

It helps put everything in perspective again. We won the World Series this year, right? And everything seems perfect. It doesn't seem like there's a problem in the whole world. "And then something like this happens, and it brings you back to reality. It shows you that no matter what you've got going for you, if it's God's will, it can change in an instant.

You can lose your most precious possession, just like that. That's what they mean when they talk about counting your blessings." By JOHN CASTINE Free Press Sports Writer In the end, it may have been 17-year-old Dan Shank's furrowed brow that put him on the prospect list of one of the NHL's master talent scouts. Jimmy Devellano sat through two periods at Longueuil Arena watching Three Rivers play Longueuil in the Quebec Junior League. It was the beginning of a day that would include scouting a second game at Verdun later in the evening. This is the part of Devellano's job that few Detroiters see.

He is the only NHL general manager who also is a director of scouting. It is that portion of his job that takes him to nearly 100 junior games a season. It's not a high-profile job, but Devellano tackles it knowing the future success of the Red Wings depends on what he sees. Today, he's not seeing much in Longueuil. For almost two periods, Devellano focuses on each player eligible for the June NHL draft (those born on or before Sept.

15, 1967) and marks "Xs" next to the names of players he wouldn't take and checks next to those he would. After Devellano watched them all, only Shank rated a check mark on his roster cards. "Sticks his nose in," Devellano wrote. As Devellano marked his roster in the muggy arena, he was surrounded by fans blowing air horns and banging pots and pans with silverware. And rock music blared from the loudspeakers.

To get away from the distractions, Devellano left his seat minutes before the end of the second period for a look at ice level. Little did Shank realize the importance of the expression on his face at the moment he walked off the ice to the dressing room. "He's not a shrimp; I had to look up at him," said the 5-foot-8 Devellano to Neal Smith, the Wings' director of pro scouting. "He's very well built Danny Gare-like. And he's got determination in his face." That means Shank will probably get a second look.

Devellano is "pecking away" seeing each of Canada's 40 Major Junior A teams once. Between Junior A and the colleges, he figures he will scout 80 to 100 games this season. "Then the most important players the ones we will consider taking in the first three rounds I like to see again," he said. "I certainly trust my staff, but scouting's been part of me for so long that I don't mind helping." See RED WINGS, Page 5D Saginaw Valley faces high-scoring foe in playoffs Ihler inherited a team that went 1-9 in 1982 and coached the Cardinals to a 9-3 record in '83. Saginaw Valley upset defending champ Central State of Oklahoma in the first round of the playoffs before being defeated by eventual champion Carson-Newman of Tennesssee.

This was supposed to be a rebuilding year for Saginaw Valley, but the team is back in the playoffs. If the Cardinals are to survive the first round this season, it'll be considered another upset. Salem is a run-and-gun outfit coached by Terry Bowden, son of Florida State coach Bobby Bowden. After smothering Samford 82-9, in that first game, Salem has scored 56 points against West Virginia Tech. The fourth-ranked Tigers have topped 30 points four other times in compiling an 8-2 record.

By GENE GUIDI Free Press Sports Writer So Salem College scored 82 points in its season opener. No big deal for a college team to score 80 points in a game, right? Happens all the time. Except in this case, it was the Salem football team scoring the 82, not the school's basketball team. The same Salem (W. Va.) football team that Saginaw Valley State plays at 1 p.m.

Saturday in the first round of the NAIA playoffs. "They're the leading offensive team in NAIA football, so we know they're going to put points up," said Saginaw Valley coach George Ihler. "We'll have our hands full." Ihler is used to that, though. His hands have been full ever since he arrived at Saginaw Valley two years ago. Saginaw Valley qualified for the playoffs with a 7-2 record, but along the way its defense had games in which it gave up 35, 42, 23 and 28 points.

Even Ihler admits that the offense better be able to play keepaway if the sixth-ranked Cardinals hope to see round fvo of the playoffs. "We are going to have to control the ball and the clock," Ihler said. "From the very first game of the season our defense has been up and down, so playing ball control is nothing new for us. We are conservative and have been right along. We'll keep riding the horse that brought us this far." Saginaw Valley's option offense is directed by junior quarterback Mike Leibinger, who won the job earlier this season from sophomore Paul Gigliotti.

Leibinger is regarded as the better of the two at running the option. See SAGINAW VALLEY, Page 3D 1.