Scorecard

YER OUT!
After several questionable calls in the second game of a doubleheader last week, Pan American baseball Coach Al Ogle-tree could stand the embarrassment no longer. The visiting University of Nebraska at Omaha team clearly had been victimized. Ogletree called time, walked onto the field and fired one of two infield umpires on the spot. All right, let's hear it for Al Ogletree!

EXOTIC BETTORS

In the two decades she has served as the Florence Nightingale of the railbirds at Pimlico , Nurse Imogene Hicks has seen a little of everything. There was, for example, the patron with a heart condition who used to take up his station outside the first-aid room and down liberal doses of medicine between races. "I'd rather die here than at home," he told Miss Hicks, "because I'd die happy."

But her alltime favorite is a horse-player who arrived on a stretcher showing no signs of life—no blood pressure, no pulse. The staff was about to pull a cover over his head when the results of the latest race began to come over the PA system. The cadaver sat bolt upright on the stretcher and asked, "Who won?" "We told him," says Nurse Hicks, "and he got up and walked straight out." They never knew where he went but they were fairly sure it wasn't to the Great Cashier's Window in the sky.

SURVIVAL COURSE

Jack Christiansen , the old pro who now coaches football at Stanford University and considers himself a harsh realist, had bad news last week for the minor college sports and even major ones like swimming, track and baseball. "Don't get me wrong," he said. "I'm not advocating the dropping of the minor sports. But when the time comes to start checking the spiraling costs of college athletics—and that time is really now—then you can look for the nonrevenue-producing sports to suffer most.... Those who can pay their way will survive. That's the way it has always been, hasn't it?"

Well, no. There are still a lot of schools in the country that consider athletics an integral part of the college experience and accept it as a fact of academic life that they will lose money. MIT , for one, fields, boats and courts 32 different teams—not including football—with no hope of realizing a profit from any of them.

But this is a vast subject that the NCAA will come to grips with in a special meeting set for April 24-25. And the American Council on Education, which represents 1,565 colleges and universities, is trying to put together a blue-ribbon commission to investigate "the whole series of questions relating to intercollegiate athletic programs," says Dr. John W. Oswald, president of Penn State and until recently president of ACE.

Christiansen says that Stanford last year had 120 football players on scholarship, each at $5,500 a year. He will be interested in some figures developed by the Oakland Financial Group, Inc. of Charlottesville , Va. Four years at a public college, the fund predicts, will cost $56,160 in 1993. The cost at a private college will be $98,280. At prices like that big-time football might be the first sport not to survive. The NCAA and ACE are acting just in time.

TABPSSLCPOOASSB
Sure enough, what Ohio broadcasters were dreading most finally happened. Mississinawa Valley met Gnadenhutten Indian Valley South in the semifinals of the state's Class A high school basketball tournament.