SUTTER’S FINGERS HIS SAVING GRACE

WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. – Except for enough hair on his face and head to stuff a small mattress, Bruce Sutter is as ordinary as any of us who makes $1.7 million a year working roughly seven or eight minutes a week.

Sutter likes hunting and fishing, ignores exercise and avoids lifting anything heavier than a 5-ounce baseball or a 12-ounce can.

“I get my exercise on the mound,” Sutter said, swabbing off the sweat he had gathered by watching his new Atlanta pitching mates try to advance imaginary baserunners on a remote field at the Braves’ spring-training complex.

When Sutter left St. Louis to gain greater wealth as the most significant free agent of the winter (“What it boiled down to was they didn’t want me anymore,” he said), Cardinals’ manager Whitey Herzog moaned, “I am now 45 games dumber.”

What makes Sutter different from the rest of us, as well as from the 100 or so members of his own fraternity of late-inning game-savers, is the way he holds the baseball.

The first two fingers of Sutter’s right hand look long enough to scratch both ears at the same time. That is a good trick at parties but not something anyone would give him $48 million to do, which the Braves have agreed is fair over the life of Sutter’s new contract–a life that will most likely last longer than his own.

Sutter’s right wrist is long enough to keep him from buying his shirts off the rack. He wraps his fingers around each side of a baseball, snaps his wrist and tickles the underside of the ball with his thumb as he releases it. His thumb ends up between his fingers, just like yours does when you pretend to steal a baby’s nose.

And that, pretty much, is how the forkball is thrown.

“I know the mechanics of the pitch,” said Johnny Sain, the Braves’ pitching coach who has been around Sutter for less than a week, “and I surely know what it does when he throws it. But why it works so well I’m kindly hoping to learn from him myself.”

Good luck. Sutter can show it and will explain it if he’s in the mood, but he is as mystified as the next guy as to what makes the forkball–or the split-fingered fastball–the deadliest pitch since the Sirens sang to Ulysses. “All I know is that it is easy for me to throw,” Sutter said. “I don’t think a lot about it, where my head is or my shoulders are. I wouldn’t make a very good pitching coach.”

Other pitchers have tried it, or so they claim, most notably the staff of the champion Detroit Tigers. But Sutter holds the patent.

“It looks like a fastball, but it’s not,” said Braves’ center-fielder Dale Murphy, who has had as much success hitting it as anybody. “It looks like an off-speed pitch, but it’s not. Usually when you swing at it, it’s not a strike.”

Sutter learned the pitch when he was in the Cubs’ farm system, in Quincy, from the late Fred Martin. Sutter was a 20-year-old prospect who had signed for $500, in contrast to the $500,000 signing bonus the Braves gave him 12 years later.

Sutter remembers Martin showing a group of young pitchers how to throw what he called an off-speed curve. Because of his long fingers and his wrist snap, Sutter realized that he could throw the ball harder than it was meant to be.

What a batter sees when Sutter’s ball comes at him is a fastball that suddenly disappears below his knees.

“When Sutter is pitching well,” said Atlanta’s Bob Horner, “the ball jumps under your bat.”

“It’s kind of like a dry spitter,” Sutter said.

And the beauty of all of this is that Sutter only has to show off when his team is ahead, and for not very long.

“I’ve never pitched for more than five innings in one game in the major leagues,” Sutter said.

Most batters see so little of him, their knowledge of how to hit his pitch relies largely on rumor.

“I have more trouble with slap hitters,” Sutter said. “But they usually bring me in to pitch to the stars in the big situation.

“I only face a hitter maybe three-four times a season, so none of them can really get familiar with the pitch. And I throw it 95 percent of the time. “I’m not an intimidator like a Rich Gossage, where if he has one slip, he could end a guy’s career. Mine is a freak pitch. It goes spiraling in like a football, but I can’t explain it any better than that. I know that when it’s working best, I can’t see it break. And if I’m in the game for more than two innings, we’ve lost.”

Sutter’s value, as with most things in baseball, must be put into numbers. He saved 45 of St. Louis’ 84 victories last season and won 5. No Atlanta relief pitcher had more than 16 saves.

Atlanta lost nine games after leading in the ninth inning; St. Louis lost only two. Had those numbers been reversed, the Braves might or might not have caught San Diego, to whom they finished second, but Ted Turner’s money is saying that they would have.

“I can’t really help a fourth- or fifth-place team,” Sutter said. “I can’t make a team a winner by myself. The team has to be good enough to give me a lead to protect. I think the Braves are that good.”

“The worst feeling you could have,” said Murphy, “was to see Sutter get up in the bullpen. You’d tense up just knowing you had to get some runs before he got into the game.

“Now it’s somebody else’s turn to sweat.”

FLUTIE COMES UP SHORT USFL DEBUT IS LESS THAN A BIG SUCCESS

Dateline: BIRMINGHAM, ALA. – What might have been, for Doug Flutie, could be reduced to simple mathematics.

“What did we score in the fourth quarter, 21 points?” Flutie asked. “Over a whole game, that’s 84.”

And that would have been ample to overcome the 38 points scored by the Heismanless Birmingham Stallions here Sunday. That many points, or even half as many, may have justified Flutie as an adult quarterback for the New Jersey Generals, if not the most recent savior of the United States Football League.

Alas for Flutie, they still count the actual points scored in each quarter before adding them up, even in the USFL, and he thus will forever have to live with the indelible fact that he was a loser, 38-28, the first time he had a chance to show anyone why he is worth $7 million.

“I made no promises when I came into this league,” Flutie said. “I don’t owe anything to anybody.”

Well, that is not exactly true. He owes a small debt to whoever taught him his times tables, if no one else.

Flutie might just as easily have multiplied his first-half completions by two, which would still have been zero. In fact, he could have gone all the way until two minutes were left in the third quarter and not have projected a completion for himself, unless you count the two he threw to Birmingham.

By the end of the game, Flutie was 12 of 27 for two touchdowns and three interceptions, but until his last futile flurry, he played like a baby with his thumbs on backwards.

“I just wasn’t on the money,” Flutie said, intending no pun.

Other great athletes have had ineffective starts. Someone was mentioning that Willie Mays went 0-for-50 or something when he broke in, but of course, someone was throwing the ball at Mays, not just handing it to him.

“No one said it was going to be easy,” Flutie said.

Of course they did. Everybody said so. Anyone who saw him whip Miami with his miracle pass or applauded him for taking the Heisman without blushing thought so. Certainly Donald Trump, Flutie’s new landlord, who paid him all that money and traded veteran Brian Sipe to unclutter the backfield for him, thought so.

Watching Flutie flail away at his own myth for most of his first game was like watching a shiny new Ferrari turn into just another used car.

The first four passes he threw did not touch another human being. His fifth pass bounced off Herschel Walker, who has a Heisman of his own, and his sixth pass was swatted down by 300-pound tackle Doug Smith, who is big enough to be sliced into several Fluties and frozen.

Flutie’s seventh pass finally found a companion, though it happened to be David Dumars of the other team. No. 8 was a time zone too long and No. 9 came down in the arms of Birmingham’s Chuck Clinton.

Cynics as well as realists were trying to get up a pool in the press box on when Flutie would complete his first pass. I took August.

It wasn’t until Flutie introduced the ball to teammate Clarence Collins that the game ball had anyone’s fingerprints on it but Flutie’s and his enemies’.

Once he completed his first pass, with the score 31-7, Flutie outscored Birmingham by 21-7, but it was still another interception, by Dennis Woodberry of the Stallions with seven minutes to play, that stopped whatever chance Flutie had of working his magic.

On this day, there was nothing up his sleeve, except a rather ordinary arm, shorter than most.

“It was frustrating and irritating,” Flutie said. “I was angry at myself for not getting off to a better start. I just . . . shoot, I just wish I could have done it the whole game.”

Flutie was asked, quite properly, if he possibly had any trouble seeing over the Birmingham linemen.

“No comment,” said Flutie, who was game to talk about everything but why he has never grown bigger than your average placekicker.

He did not alibi on his lack of preparation, a mere two weeks of training with the Generals.

“If I had only one day of practice, I still would have felt I should start,” Flutie said.

And yet . . .

“What I need,” Flutie said, “is more game experience. Week after week, game after game, I will get better.”

The pressure of his debut, he said, was no bother.

“I was relaxed and I was calm,” Flutie said. “I knew what I was doing.”

And yet . . .

“I know what people will say,” Flutie said. ” ‘Flutie didn’t win his first game. When’s he going to win one?’ There will be more pressure.”

But what happened against Birmingham?

“We didn’t have the ball,” Flutie said, which was true. In all, New Jersey had the ball for only 18 minutes, just two minutes in the second quarter and three in the third. “When you make a mistake, you like to get out there and fix it. I didn’t work up a sweat until the third quarter.”

And when Flutie did, a few of the things for which he became notable began to happen.

“We’re a running team,” Flutie said, “but I feel more comfortable when things are helter-skelter. When I have to think on my feet, I react better. I don’t feel like a robot, just handing the ball off.”

That is a matter for his coach, Walt Michaels, to solve. The fourth- quarter Flutie was much preferable to the first-, second- and third-quarter Flutie, and if he is to be anything close to what the USFL imagines him to be, Flutie may have to play the game on the edge, as he did in college.

“I don’t give a damn about stats,” Flutie said. “If I was 0-for-30 and we won the game 6-0, I would be happy.”

That would make one. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Doug Flutie, New Jersey’s $7-million man. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Doug Flutie passes under pressure Sunday during his first regular-season game with the New Jersey Generals. He completed 12 of 27 for 189 yards and had 3 interceptions.

SPRINGING ANOTHER USELESS IDEA ON US

If you think of the United States Football League at all, think of it as a cucumber sandwich. It was a bad idea to start with, it was hard to digest and here it comes again.

Yes, spring football is with us once more. Not us, exactly. Not Chicago. The late and unlamented Blitz is somewhere in the ether, or the mind of Eddie Einhorn, which can be counted as twins.

The expiration of the Blitz removed the USFL from the Midwest, where folks know how to read the calendar, if not always without moving their lips.

In fact, the USFL is no longer where anybody lives, except for Los Angeles and New Jersey, if you call that living. It has essentially become a southern suburban league, following the example of soccer, a sport that at least knew what time of year it was most likely to be ignored.

The USFL has been argued out of playing in the spring next year, though the discussion is not over, so this could be the last time we are likely to have lilacs and punt formation at the same time.

It may be noticed that while nowhere in the heartland will be heard the sound of linebackers breaking something essential on themselves or others, the state of Florida has three USFL franchises, along with Lee Corso and his travel agent.

What can be made of this odd circumstance is not quite clear, except that the seasons in Florida are indistinguishable one from the other, as are the natives, and that every second person there sells real estate, which is how most of the USFL owners got their start.

The first two USFL champions are no longer in business where they started, Michigan having merged with Oakland, and Philadelphia having migrated down the road to Baltimore. It is assumed that this year’s winner will get a trophy and a bus ticket to Albuquerque, one way.

It has been reported that the USFL lost upwards of $70 million last season, which was reason enough for the players to threaten a strike recently. After deliberating the notion soberly and briefly, the players concluded that if they were to be responsible for the USFL’s committing suicide, they would wait until their bosses could afford the rope.

The league is down to 14 teams from 18, but that is still two more than when it started three years ago. Having now tried both addition and subtraction, the USFL is mostly interested in trying division. That is how it hopes to survive, by dividing up the $1.3 billion it hopes to get by suing the National Football League for being older, better and richer.

Failing that, multiplication is a possibility, the formula being 14 times yes equals four, or the number of teams it is willing to contribute to the NFL to stop being a nuisance.

As a grand plan, this scheme has as much chance of succeeding as a mule has of leaving an heir.

For collateral, the USFL can offer the last three Heisman Trophy winners, two on the same team, Herschel Walker and Doug Flutie of the New Jersey Generals. In between, Mike Rozier resides now in Jacksonville and will line up next to Archie Griffin, a more distant owner of two Heismans (Heismen?) all by himself.

In gratitude for stockpiling the most visible of college stars, the USFL may play football on Saturdays in the fall, or at the same time future Heisman winners are collecting votes. College football has yet to say thanks.

ABC-TV, the network of contract, has decided to show only one game a week, leaving assorted others to cable. And it will not regionalize the telecasts, thereby saving a few bucks on multiple crews and getting whatever it can out of the $15.5 million it pays for its burden. That’s $15.5 million to the whole league. Each of the 28 NFL teams makes as much alone.

The most notable game of the first weekend will feature young Flutie Sunday in his paid debut. Birmingham will be the opponent and the site, and ABC-TV will be in attendance, though not all of its outlets are enchanted with the prospect of watching Flutie make a small fool of himself.

Either that or they prefer to wait until Flutie learns to ride the bicycle before showing him in a race.

Flutie is this year’s only significant acquisition by the USFL, and the NFL is privately delighted to be free of him. On misguided fan appeal alone, Flutie would have cost some NFL team a high draft choice that can better be spent on a cornerback from Howard Payne.

Or for the money the USFL paid Flutie, Howard Payne himself. PHOTO: Lee Corso

AT LAST WE HAVE AN INNOCENT ATHLETE

In this age of the athlete as criminal, it is encouraging to still be shocked by so trivial an incident as a street conversation between a hurdler and a . . . well, let us skip the alliteration in the name of good taste.

Edwin Moses has been found innocent of being human, which is something we have long suspected, since no mere mortal has ever been able to run and jump over portable fences the way he can.

And how fortunate that is, not only for Moses, but for the rest of us as well. We now do not have to believe that Moses is as vulnerable as, say, a common tourist, for such a conclusion would have meant that superior muscle skills have no special value in life, except possibly to change a tire without a jack.

Our illusions are safe because Moses is a certified example that the lessons of competitive sports have not been wasted, or so a jury concluded.

True, the vindication of Moses is of no small importance in the marketplace where his image is sold, but to consider that he subjected himself to intense public scrutiny in order to keep wearing free shoes is too cynical. It is more comfortable to imagine that his good name and his excellent example were more important to him than his endorsements, which, after all, are only money and disposable.

Doubting Moses is as unthinkable as challenging the favorite argument of youth sports: It is better for a kid to be stealing second base than to be stealing hubcaps. We would much rather forget that it is possible for him to do both.

We are routinely challenged to keep faith with the world of games. Too many of our heroes are thieves and rapists and drug dealers. The arenas are full of them.

Our innocence unravels at each revelation, until our only immunity is indifference.

We have come too far from the time when Chief Justice Earl Warren could say, “I turn to the sports pages first. There I can read about man’s achievements. On the front page, I only see his failures.”

We should be grateful that when an Olympic champion is accused of soliciting a prostitute we still have the sophistication and the inclination to separate him from the line-up of scoundrels who consistently abuse our applause.

Among the crimes that most offend modern, or even ancient, society, striking a bargain for companionship has never been ranked highly enough to make a respectable post office wall.

In some places, in fact, such commerce is encouraged and taxed. In most places, it is policed with a broad wink.

Now that Moses is one of us again, a certified good citizen, we are left to marvel at the high cost of conversation, which usually does not increase the later the hour gets.

The most encouraging news to emerge from his ordeal is that Moses is ready to run the hurdles again with new enthusiasm. He is ready to go after a world record, which proves that incentive may be found in the oddest places, Sunset Boulevard certainly being one of those.

One can only hope that the next bored athlete seeking to relight his competitive fires does not resort to the Moses method. Getting arrested and standing trial is no substitute for proper diet, sensible training and a good night’s rest.

Plus, whatever achievements may be gained on the playing field must be weighed against the indelible public suspicion that follows, even if not enough of that same public is moral enough to keep the avenues of Hollywood uncluttered.

Let us not make any judgments on Moses, that having been done by the American judicial system, or what passes for it in southern California.

We can appreciate the precious irony of the whole thing. Moses has been certified a much cleaner citizen than he is an amateur athlete, and under older rules.

Justice and the sports fan have much in common. Both have to be blind.

BOXING FINALLY MEETS ITS MATCH

Boxing has never been particularly choosy about its patrons. Nobody checks pedigree, only the color of the money.

Boxing has been run by more crooks than saints and too many of its performers wore numbers before they wore gloves.

The center of boxing used to be New York, until Muhammad Ali took it on a world tour. Ali needed to hustle entire governments to get his millions for his fights.

No longer is any of that true or necessary. You won’t find the big-money fights in a geography book, or in Madison Square Garden, and you don’t really need the approval of either of the Latin American sanctioners who pass along their titles like wrestling promoters.

All you need is the blessing of a casino, or to be within the sight or sound of one.

You know it’s a big fight if the noise of the bell is drowned out by the clanking of the dollar slots.

A distinctive pecking order has emerged to define the importance of fistfights. Atlantic City gets the small ones, Reno gets the medium ones and Las Vegas takes the large and extra large.

Figuring it out is no harder than shopping for men’s undershirts.

Sportsmanship has nothing to do with any casino’s motives. Simple greed is the reason almost every important fight that comes along these days has the blessing of those windowless gambling houses full of people in tuxedos taking money from people in distress, not unlike fight promoters, come to think of it.

Still, there is an honesty to this, not a notion commonly associated with the suspicious world of boxing. Fistfighting is a lure, the come-on for the regular line of business, which is separating gamblers from their money.

Larry Holmes will fight someone named David Bey at the Riviera in Las Vegas next month and Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns will follow in another month at Caesars Palace.

Caesars is rather the godfather of all of this. It put up $4 million of the purse that put Sugar Ray Leonard against Hearns a few years back. It bankrolled Holmes and Gerry Cooney with $6 million.

Cable and pay TV and closed-circuit marketing jack up the purses beyond all reason.

Promoter Bob Arum figures that Hagler and Hearns will generate a $40 million gate, which would break the record of $36 million that curious witnesses paid to see Holmes and Cooney.

What do the casinos get from all of this? When Holmes fought Ali, Caesars estimated that on the night of the fight alone, just at its own tables, it took in a profit of $1.3 million.

Hagler vs. Hearns is expected to generate an extra $150 million in gambling action.

The Livingstone Bramble-Ray Mancini fight in Reno was fairly small as such things are measured.

The tourism authority paid the promoters nearly $600,000 to have the fight in Reno and crossed their fingers that the town might make a small profit and be spoken kindly of by visiting press. The first was easier to achieve than the second.

Reno looks as if someone took a giant push broom and shoved all the debris of the high desert up against the Sierra Nevada mountains, which are the only redeeming feature of the place and are, to their credit, a safe distance from the mobile home, pickup truck, brown-grass capital of the Western world.

The place is so ugly that even neon is too classy for it, like putting jewelry on a bag lady.

One visitor’s opinion aside, Reno’s chief intention was to lure fresh bodies into town, and enough came to generate around $5 million in business for the weekend.

The relationship between boxing–or any sport–and casinos is a fascinating one. Football is deathly afraid of gambling. Baseball kicks out Hall of Famers like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays for playing golf with preferred casino customers. Bobby Knight thinks that anyone who disagrees with him has a bet on the game and believes that published point spreads are proof of journalism’s pact with the devil.

Boxing, true to its roots, takes the money up front and would even deal a little blackjack if asked.

There is something overwhelmingly evil about gambling on the scale on which it is done in Nevada, but the state would simply not exist unless people wanted such a place.

Neither would boxing exist, especially after so many attempts at suicide, unless people wanted such a sport.

In the end, the two deserve each other. Maybe boxing has found a marriage that will work.

MANCINI FALLS AGAIN WHILE CREDITS ROLL

Dateline: RENO – When art imitates life, especially if it is made-for-television art, happy endings can be scripted, which for Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini is that proud moment three years ago when he won the lightweight boxing championship of the known world.

That is when a just-completed TV movie ends Mancini’s life, when he is on top, not when he is fighting back or just fighting on.

What we have here is a clear case of premature biography.

Real life has a way of continuing after the last commercial, often not for the better, and a champion at 21 can be a relic at 23 if he is not careful whose fists he meets face first.

Such as those of Livingstone Bramble, who relieved Mancini of his championship eight months ago and kept Mancini from reclaiming it Saturday night.

The decision was unanimous but astonishingly close, with each judge giving Bramble the margin by only one point. Had the vote gone to Mancini, it would have been like the steer getting the decision over the butcher.

“Ray fought a great fight,” said Bramble. “I didn’t think anybody could give me a fight like that.”

Great, maybe. Courageous, certainly. Mancini fought with one eye closed and blood streaming down his face for the last eight rounds.

Mancini swung and missed. Bramble swung and hit. The actual count, which tells more about the fight than the judges’ numbers, were 1,349 punches thrown by Mancini, only 381 landing for a hitting average of .280. Bramble threw 1,220 punches and connected with 674, for .550, a mean batting average, as Mancini’s face could testify.

Mancini was cut over the left eye in the first round and on the right eye in the third. The chief question for the last half of the fight was not if Mancini would finish but if he would bleed to death first.

Mancini’s corner worked on both eyes with sponges big enough to wash a truck and still couldn’t soak up all the blood.

“No way did I want the fight stopped,” Mancini said. “The cuts did hinder my fighting. I couldn’t see all the punches coming, and I had to keep wiping the blood out of my eyes.

“It seems like the last half of my career, cuts have been a problem. After a while, you can’t kid yourself.”

Does that mean, as he had hinted before the fight, that Mancini will now retire?

“I know I look like I just went through a meatgrinder,” Mancini said, “and if I made the decison right this moment, I would probably call it a career.

“What I want to do is take a nice long rest, pray a lot, get some tender loving from my family and then decide.”

Mancini’s manager, David Wolf, had no hesitation in casting his vote for retirement.

“My own feelings are that this should be the end,” said Wolf. “There was just so much dignity in the way he fought this fight, it seems like the right way to call a halt.”

Mancini’s father, Lenny, concurred. “If it was up to me,” the elder Mancini said, “I would tell him to forget about it.”

“You’ve got to remember I’m his baby,” Mancini said.

Bramble doesn’t think Mancini should quit. “I don’t see another lightweight out there who can beat him,” Bramble said.

This was the same Bramble who had said before the fight:

“I want to cut him up, flatten him and forget him,” said Bramble before the fight. “If he gets too close, I will bite his ears off.”

Now, that is a serious threat considering Bramble is a vegetarian. Of course, he did not say anything about swallowing.

Mancini made no threats, only a promise.

“The difference between this fight and the first is that I will be victorious,” Mancini said.

In their first fight, eight months ago in Buffalo, Mancini was leading on two of the three judges’ cards when the referee stopped the fight in the 14th round with Mancini bleeding like dressed pork, though not even Mancini disputed Bramble’s victory.

“I love being the underdog,” Mancini said. “It’s the American way.”

Mancini did not join in the prefight hype with the same energy as did Bramble. Mancini also reacted to Bramble’s antics much more passively than before the first fight, when Bramble employed a bogus witch doctor to put a curse on Mancini.

Not even a voodoo doll, into whose eyes Bramble stuck pins, or a human skull Bramble gave Mancini as a gift appeared to bother Mancini. Mancini merely turned the skull over to find it was made in China.

“All I can think about is getting my title back,” Mancini said.

Before he lost that title, Mancini was in a position to be the next superstar of boxing, the natural heir to Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.

He had a natural appeal. He had guts and grit and enough talent to get by. He was unpretentious and hard working, and he was white. That didn’t hurt at the gate.

“Mr. All-American boy,” Bramble said with scorn.

Mancini was a growth industry. There were Boom Boom dolls and Boom Boom athletic gear and Boom Boom posters.

Mancini had everything, including the right motives for being in the seamiest sport of them all.

And that brings us back to the movie, which is titled “Walk in Your Shadow,” the name coming from a poem that young Mancini wrote in devotion to his father.

In its eagerness to give us Mancini’s brief life, TV may have forgotten that Mancini himself is not quite through with it yet, but for the purposes of prime-time melodrama, all the good stuff is already over.

Nothing that Mancini can possibly do from here will improve upon what so far has had the scent of bad fiction.

“It’s a real-life ‘Rocky’ story,” said Dan Duva, promoter of the rematch with Bramble.

As a child, Mancini heard the stories of how his blue-collar father, Lenny, the original “Boom Boom,” could have been the champ if he hadn’t had to go to war for his country.

His little fingers could touch the scars left by enemy shrapnel and his heart could feel the wounds that ended his old man’s dreams.

He swore that when he grew up, he would be the champ his dad never was but could have been, would have been, if only . . .

Check your TV listings later this fall and stock up on Kleenex.

Mancini wanted to play himself in the film and was briefly considered before the part was given to Doug McKeon, whom you may remember as the kid who liked to “suck face” in “On Golden Pond.”

In any case, the thing was being shot at the same time Mancini was otherwise preoccupied with trying to win back the title that climaxes the movie.

That is where the TV movie of Mancini’s life wraps things up, with tidy sentiment, the night little Ray wins the title, the night a loving son gives to his father the gift of immortality.

All in all, not a bad present.

Most of us only get neckties. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Livingstone Bramble measures Ray Mancini. Keywords: BOXING

CHAMP’S CORNER CRAWLING WITH PALS

Dateline: RENO – The soft side of Livingstone Bramble, the Rastafarian who took away Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini’s lightweight fist-fighting title by pounding Mancini’s face into sausage last summer, is that Bramble loves pets.

Bramble won’t go anywhere without his animal friends and insists on even bringing them with him to work.

Think of the guilt you have felt when leaving home to the sounds of Bowser whining on the other side of the door. Bramble would never be so heartless.

He has brought many of his household favorites with him from his home in New Jersey. And the hotel where he is living and training couldn’t be nicer about it, though it usually discourages anything but casino pigeons.

It is not uncommon for Bramble to sign autographs while one of his adoring little pals nuzzles his neck, and he often will park one of them in the corner of the ring while he spars for his rematch with Mancini, or maybe hang it over the top rope. Wherever it is most comfortable.

Bramble’s concern for his pets is a treasure to see, and infinitely more urgent than his concern for the health of Mr. Mancini, whom he has taken to calling “Boy-cini” and whom he promises to rehumiliate here Saturday for cable television.

Two of Bramble’s constant companions are Turtle and Dog, the first of which is a 7-foot python and the second a 5 1/2-foot boa constrictor, neither of which will eat anything that isn’t alive. Feeding time is Bramble’s favorite part of the day.

Why they are called Turtle and Dog is not quite clear, except that Bramble’s favorite pet is called Snake, and he had the name first, even though Snake is a serious pit bull terrier that once bit the head off a friendly poodle. Or so the story goes.

Bramble likes Snake so much that he has taken on the nickname of Pit Bull himself, proving that he is generous and ecumenical when sorting out all of God’s creatures, be they large, small, slithery or full of teeth.

However, one can only be grateful that it was not Bramble’s job to name all animals in the first place, otherwise we might be calling a cockroach a sparrow, a vulture a lamb, and have no idea what to call lawyers.

Part of Bramble’s warm-up ritual is to chase a chicken while Turtle and Dog watch with interest, but Bramble never catches the chicken. It is just his way of keeping each of them in shape, like doing roadwork with a friend.

There has been no talk that Bramble’s unique method of exercise will be made into a video cassette, but the possibilities are intriguing: “Now on tape. In the privacy of your own living room. Trim down, firm up and stay fit by chasing your dinner around the house”–boiled, not fried, of course.

It has been said that animal lovers tend to take on the characteristics of their pets. Bramble will not dispute this theory.

“When I fight, I shoot out my jab and then bring it back real fast,” he says. “Just like my snakes when they’re going after a rat.

“When I get somebody in trouble, I just keep pouring it on, using my killer instinct, just like my pit bulls if they were in a fight to the death.”

How, then, can anyone who is so in touch with the harmony of nature be judged harshly, even if Bramble did beat up everybody’s boy next door, which is what Mancini was to us all, although I cannot think of any kid on my block who ever killed a foreigner with his fists, as Mancini did. At least not in public.

Bramble has yet to be widely accepted as champion. His victory over Mancini was decisive and undisputed, even if it was only the second main event Bramble had ever fought.

He has fought 24 times since leaving his home in the Virgin Islands six years ago, losing once and drawing once. Bramble oftens fights with the wrong hand from the wrong stance, appearing awkward and vulnerable in the process. He gets by on tenacity as much as skill, and the same could be said of Mancini.

He has a 9-inch reach advantage on Mancini, 74 to 65, and one year of age, 24 to 23. But, mostly, Bramble has weirdness.

Mancini confessed to being shaken up by Bramble’s sense of mischief before the first fight. Bramble kept calling Mancini a murderer for the ring death of Korean Duk Koo Kim, not something Mancini was anxious to remember, and Bramble is not exactly the kind of guy Mancini was used to running into at the neighborhood pool hall.

Bramble does not wear the dreadnoughts of the Rastafarian religion, but he does wear his hair in corn rows, as well as the occasional snake around his neck.

Mancini’s people last week wanted to make sure that Bramble’s braided corn rows were not an unauthorized weapon and requested the Nevada boxing authories to check them out.

An official dutifully went to Bramble’s camp and insisted that Bramble rub his hair against the official’s cheek.

Coming away unscarred, the official proclaimed that Bramble’s hair was soft enough to be admitted to the ring, though both snakes have to be left in the room or pay their own way to ringside. Thirty seats ought to be enough.

PHOTO: Livingstone Bramble.

OUR LOCAL PRODUCTS GROW IN STATURE

The Battle of Chicago, such as it was, went to the locals from Loyola, those basketball players who do not need a road map or a flashlight to find Lower Wacker Drive.

Local knowledge being what it is, Loyola also did not have to ask directions to find the basket, though De Paul, the visitor on its home floor at the Horizon, could have used a Seeing Eye dog or a tour guide and not found it.

The final accounting of Tuesday night’s tussle was 78-71, which is either a victory for home cooking or a loss for imported talent, maybe both.

Whatever deeper significance there is in that must be left to sociologists and recruiters, not necessarily the same people, though the emphasis of the two programs was clearly decided in favor of Loyola’s home- grown strategy for one night at least.

“We are the Chicago team,” said Loyola’s Alfredrick Hughes. “We wanted to prove it tonight.”

“They (De Paul) are a Chicago team, too,” said Loyola coach Gene Sullivan, which can only be interpreted as a compliment from a man who recruits only as far as his eye can see.

It was not quite civil war, not that it was a happy block party, either. It was more like your average neighborhood clock cleaning. Both sides walked away more or less friends and no blows were struck in anger.

“This game was personal,” said De Paul’s Marty Embry. “I guess you could say it was for bragging rights this summer. We’re just going to have to wait one long year.”

“The local products really wanted to beat us,” said De Paul’s Dallas Comegys.

Most notable of those were Loyola’s Hughes and Andre Battle, who threw balls into the basket at times and from places on the floor no one could have expected, least of all De Paul.

Hughes and Battle finished first and second in scoring for the night with 28 and 23 points, Hughes, in fact, becoming the eighth-highest scorer in college basketball history.

“It’s nice being known as the best player (in Chicago),” Hughes said. “But you want to be on the best team. I think I’m on the best team.”

In his four years of playing against De Paul, Hughes has scored 27, 26, 42 and 28 points, for which he may expect the entire Meyer family to be at his graduation, wishing him well. And good riddance.

It took Hughes a little longer to get his act together this last time. He had only nine points at the half, as did Battle, with Hughes playing mostly at center. In the second half, Hughes moved farther from the basket and found it more easily.

“You can’t keep Mr. Hughes down all game,” said Sullivan. “You can’t keep Mr. Battle down all game.”

Still, how Loyola accomplished all of this is not quite clear, since the Ramblers were shorter than De Paul and outrebounded the Demons 54-47, and they shot from much farther away and hit 42 percent of the time to De Paul’s 33.

“If you don’t put the ball in the hole,” said De Paul coach Joey Meyer, “you can’t win basketball games.”

Not one De Paul player made as many as half of his shots, with Tyrone Corbin getting only 4 of 13, Embry getting 5 of 15 and Comegys 5 of 13.

“I thought we had good shots,” said Meyer. “They just didn’t go in.”

And when they didn’t, it was usually a Loyola player who got the ball, rather than someone from De Paul.

“I thought the key for us was Ivan Young in the first half,” said Sullivan.

Young replaced starting center Andre Moore barely four minutes into the game when Moore picked up three fouls. Young scored eight points and got eight rebounds.

“Once Moore went out,” said Comegys, “that was when we should have destroyed them inside.”

De Paul should have done lots of things this season, but hasn’t, having now lost seven games, and two of those at the Horizon. At 15-7, De Paul looks like a less desirable NCAA invitee than does Loyola at 17-5.

“This game had lots of local interest,” said Sullivan, “but it had a national significance, too. We are both after at-large bids to the NCAA and whoever got the loss would be set back.

“I think we’ll get a bid and I think De Paul will get one, too. They’re a good team. We’re a good team.”

“We just can’t seem to turn the corner,” said Meyer. “When the offense plays well, the defense falls apart. When the defense is on, the offense is off.

“The road just doesn’t get any easier.”

SAMPSON JUST IMMEASURABLE

Dateline: INDIANAPOLIS

Let’s not ask the real Ralph Sampson to stand up, please.

Sampson in his underwear already is 7 feet 4 inches, an altitude with which the rest of us are unfamiliar, except on those rare occasions when someone might ask us to stand on a ladder to wash an elephant.

But the world of professional basketball would like to see just how far Sampson can stretch, for when that happens, as it did in inspired moments of Sunday’s National Basketball Association All-Star game, the sport becomes something never imagined by Dr. James Naismith or any of his heirs, who all now apparently live in Indiana and are convinced they know more about basketball than the rest of the world put together.

“Sampson is still growing,” said Los Angeles Lakers’ and West coach Pat Riley. “Growing in his basketball life, I mean. You look at him now and you just say, ‘Wow.’

“And then you think of what he can become, and you cannot imagine where he’ll be, where he’ll take basketball. He will have an impact no one else has ever had on this league.”

Or, to quote Mr. Magic Johnson of the Lakers, many of whose 15 assists went to Sampson in the West’s 140-129 disposal of its geographic opposite in the Hoosier Dome: “You bring the ball up, and you take two guys into the paint with you, and then you just flip it over your head and here comes Sampson. Woooo. Woosh. Wham.

“You can’t wait to give it to him again. You say: ‘Let’s do it. Let’s go again. Here it comes, big guy.’ You look up and there he is, so high, and you know the game is changing. Whooeee.”

“Playing like that,” allowed Sampson, “is a lot of fun.”

K.C. Jones, the East coach from Boston, mused: “You coach against a team like that and you try to do a halfway decent job on Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar). That’s a maybe. And then Magic, that’s a maybe. And George Gervin hits 10 of 10 or 20 of 20, and still you think there’s a chance.

“Then you see a guy like Sampson, a guy that tall filling the lane, bringing the ball up, getting offensive boards, playing defense, blocking shots. Sampson was kind of awesome today.”

Awesome translated into numbers is 24 points and 10 rebounds in 29 minutes of play, all of them in motion.

As long as there are so many people saying such nice things about him, or the press voting him the most valuable star of stars, Sampson will never have to speak for himself, which he has always had a tough time doing, though he tries to prove his education at Virginia wasn’t wasted.

“I just want to be able to do what there is to do,” Sampson said.

Which is? “Drive, dribble, shoot, whatever has to be done,” Sampson said. “I’d love to play point guard.”

The point is, Sampson is not supposed to be gyrating like a playground punk, juking and jamming and driving. He is supposed to be standing right under the basket, like all 7-footers before him, maybe skyhooking when the mood is right but mostly reaching over the rim while pygmies claw at his waist.

That’s the way he did it in college. That’s the way he did it in Houston last year, his first season as a pro. That’s the way he might have done it forever had not Houston drafted another 7-footer, Akeem Olajuwon, to take the interior pounding and free Sampson to be the best that he can be.

“Ralph is a better forward than center,” said Johnson.

“He is too versatile to just play in the pivot,” said Abdul-Jabbar. “It limits him.”

The votes of NBA fans put Sampson in the West’s starting lineup, but Riley’s sense of history kept him on the same floor with L.A.’s Johnson, who knows how to make ordinary giants look great, and what we saw on a snowy Sunday in Indy was just a hint of things to come.

“I would have to think in my own mind that he would be much better if he played with me,” said Johnson. “If I played with him all the time, I’d have 25 assists a game.”

Sampson with Johnson certainly impressed Riley, whose chief regret is that he has but the one.

“You can’t help marveling at the novelty of both,” said Riley. “Here is Magic, a 6-9 point guard, and there is Sampson, a 7-4 small forward.

“Nobody really knows what to do with either one, yet. They are just too unorthodox. They are stretching the perimeters of the game.”

“I really don’t know what I can do, what my limits are,” Sampson said. “All I know is I can do a lot more than I do now.

“I just want to get better and enjoy the days to come.”

So say we all.

NBA PUTS MONEY WHERE MOUTHS ARE

Dateline: INDIANAPOLIS

Alex English opened his mail and $5 fell out. He read the enclosed letter, printed neatly in a novice hand. “I want to help the people in Ethiopia,” it said.

“Chills went through me,” English said. “It was like she was in tune with me.

“She was 6 years old. How much does $5 mean to someone who is 6?”

How much does $2,500 mean to the winner of Sunday’s National Basketball Association All-Star game? Or $1,500 to the loser?

To the wealthy warriors of America’s climate-controlled arenas, probably less than to the generous child English had touched when he first went public with his concern for unfortunate humans a half-world away.

But added up, 12 winners and 12 losers, the total is $48,000, and with a supplement from the NBA, it will mean that $100,000 will be sent to the pained citizens of Ethiopia, though none may know English, the man or the language.

“For what they need,” said English, “it’s still not much.”

You’ve seen the pictures, the heart-stabbing pictures of skeletons that are still children, of mothers crying over dead babies and the raw, unforgiving African land that has dried up and stolen the future.

English saw them, too, after a full meal last October in his generous home in Denver, where he works as a shooting forward for the Nuggets basketball team.

“I wanted to do something,” English said.

English is a sincere and sensitive man, a published poet, if the truth be known.

He grew up poor in South Carolina.

“Nothing like the people of Ethiopia are going through,” he said.

For the last five years, English has sent $150 a month to fight world hunger, his private contribution to anonymous bellies, but Ethiopia was real, in nearly living color on his television set, and English felt its cruelty.

“It was the kids,” English said. “I have kids of my own. The kids I saw starving wouldn’t make it through the day. I knew I had to do something.” What English did was call Larry Fleischer, who runs the pro basketball players’ union, of which English is a vice president. English suggested that this year’s All-Stars donate their pay, even though he did not know who the All-Stars would be or even if he would be one.

“These are the same people who are thought of as harsh, stingy and selfish,” English said. “I’m just one guy. It took all these others to be willing, and I commend them on the gesture. I’m proud to be in the NBA just because of this.”

Pro basketball is not the first sport to embrace charity. Having a social conscience is an established and foolproof image-booster.

But basketball may be the first pro sport in which the athletes actually took money from their own pockets, or didn’t put it in, as the case may be.

“Okay,” English conceded, “this doesn’t hurt our image, but that’s not why we did it. We weren’t out to prove anything to anybody. This wasn’t for purposes of publicity; it was just a way to get people involved doing something about a serious situation.

“There are millions of starving people over there. This goes beyond color or religion or politics. It is more important than race or where it is.”

Pat Riley, coach of the Los Angeles Lakers and the West All-Stars, said the coaches’ association was considering a contribution also.

“What a magnificent thing this is,” Riley said. “Nobody forced the players to do this. It is from the heart.”

“I guess this shows that today’s athletes aren’t just bottom-liners,” said Bob Cousy, the legendary Celtic here for the old-timers’ game Saturday.

“The players of the NBA are truly capturing the spirit of America by demonstrating their whole-hearted support for the people trapped by the crisis in Ethiopia,” said NBA commissioner David Stern, who made sure a press release with his endorsement was handy.

Whatever motives are behind the effort will make little difference to the famine victims it will help.

“We’re hoping to do more,” English said. “We may run some all-star games this summer to raise more money.”

English hopes to go to Ethiopia and film a TV documentary about the problem.

“We would really like to see it snowball,” he said. “The important thing is to get others to join in, to make the general population more conscious of the situation.

“We should all be ready to reach back and help people. One person can’t do much, but if you can get the masses together, anything can be done.

“Maybe the hockey or baseball or football players could do the same thing with their All-Star games.”

Has English spoken to them about it?

“I don’t know any baseball or football players,” he said.

That’s their loss.

Keywords: ALEX ENGLISH BIOGRAPHY

The last name of Larry Fleisher is mispelled in this story. The Tribune regrets the error.