If He Skates Close, She’ll Stick It to Him

Manon Rheaume, while awaiting her chance to become the first woman to play in an NHL regular-season game, says she is not interested in dating any of her minor league Atlanta Knight teammates because she has a boyfriend back home in Montreal.

“He played junior hockey, too,” the 20-year-old goalie told John Jeansonne of Newsday. “We play hockey sometimes. And he wants to score and I want to stop him.”

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Trivia time: Who is the only jockey named athlete of the year by the Associated Press?

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Shattered: Long before Darryl Dawkins or slam dunks, Chuck Connors became the first NBA player to shatter a backboard--with a two-handed set shot.

Before he went on to greater fame as a baseball player and “The Rifleman” on television, Connors, who died Tuesday at 71, was the starting center for Boston Celtics in 1946--their first season.

The game at the Boston Arena against the Chicago Stags was set for 8:30 that evening, and 4,329 fans paid up to $2.75 a ticket to see the first game of the new National Basketball Assn. in Boston.

“During the warmups, I took a set shot, a harmless 15- to 20-foot set shot, and, crash , the glass backboard shattered,” Connors recalled in a 1986 interview with George Sullivan, who wrote “The Picture History of the Boston Celtics.”

It was the first year for glass backboards and a worker had forgotten to install a piece of rubber between the rim and the glass. The game was delayed for more than an hour before another backboard could be found.

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Bad news: Seen on the marquee at the Sports Section bar near the Raiders’ offices: “Yo, Todd, This Does Not Bode Well for the Future of Nude Surfing.”

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The whole Holtz story: A recent Morning Briefing item mentioned that Notre Dame’s Lou Holtz was one of three coaches who has taken four different schools to bowl games. Holtz actually took five, but he wasn’t around when Minnesota played in the 1985 Independence Bowl because he had already signed to coach Notre Dame. John Gutekunst took over for the bowl game after Holtz coached the Gophers during the regular season.

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Fashion news: When the city of Toronto held a celebration for the world champion Blue Jays, Toronto Sun reporter Carola Vyhnak was taken by the display of sartorial splendor.

“From (Jack) Morris’ Marlboro Man cowboy look to Roberto Alomar’s black, white and blue velvet vest printed with Mexican jewelry designs, the Jays proved they’re not afraid to make fashion statements,” Vyhnak wrote. “(Dave) Winfield’s saffron sport jacket was a departure from his usual quietly stylish three-piece suits.”

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The Ditka influence: Life as an NFL quarterback is different if you play in Chicago, says Jim McMahon, who should know. The Philadelphia Eagle quarterback puts it this way: “I’ve gone through some bad games here and there. In Chicago if you had a bad quarter, you were in trouble.”

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Man of many moves: Michael Jordan was a geography major at North Carolina. Said Jordan: “I knew that I would be going places, and I just wanted to know where I was when I got there.”

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Trivia answer: Steve Cauthen, 1977.

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Quotebook: Houston Rocket Coach Rudy Tomjanovich, on coaching in the NBA: “I’ve had to buy Rolaids for the first time.”