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Lasorda leads US fight for gold
SYDNEY, Sept 13 (AFP) - Tommy Lasorda fought for the American flag as a soldier, before lawmakers and even during a baseball game. Now the United States Olympic baseball manager wants to see the Star-Spangled Banner flying high here. The former manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who will turn 73 here at the Sydney Olympics, sees no greater honor than combining his two great passions - baseball and patriotism. "I have managed world championships, all-star victories - to me, this is bigger," Lasorda said. "Being selected to manage the Olympic team is a great privilege and honor, greater than the World Series. "It's bigger than the Dodgers, bigger than Major League Baseball. Because it's the United States of America. It's your country." Lasorda, who served as a US Army soldier in 1946 and 1947, ran onto the field during a 1976 Dodger game when two fans ran from the stands into centerfield and began trying to burn an American flag. "I said to those guys, 'Take a punch at me because I want to bury you guys right here,'" Lasorda said. He didn't, but only because outfielder Rick Monday got to them first. Lasorda has also appeared before a US Senate Judiciary Committee to lobby for a constitutional amendment banning flag burning, lammenting what he sees as a lack of patriotism in modern American youth. Lasorda won two World Series titles, four National League crowns and eight NL West division titles from 1976 to 1996 as manager of the Dodgers. Now he guides a set of minor-league players in the first Olympics open to professionals. "We're going to win the gold medal. We aren't flying 6,000 miles to lose," Lasorda said. "I want to go down as a trivia question 50 years from now - Who managed a world championship and managed an Olympic team to a gold medal?" In tuneup games here, the US team crushed South Korea 15-0, routed South Africa 17-1, edged Australia 5-3 but lost 4-3 to the Dutch. The Americans open round-robin preliminary play against Japan on Sunday. "I'm extremely pleased with the progress our team has made during these exhibition games," Lasorda said. "We're picking up our level of play and getting ready for the Olympics to begin. Our team will surely be ready to play by Sunday." Lasorda, well known in Asia for managing Japanese pitcher Hideo Nomo and Korean ace Park Chan-Ho, was a pitcher himself. The southpaw threw in a total of 26 major-league games for the Brooklyn Dodgers and Kansas City Athletics from 1954 to 1956, going 0-4 with a 6.52 earned-run average. The Italian immigrant's son served as a Dodger assistant until replacing Walter Alston as manager in 1976 and kept the job until a heart condition forced him out. He was 1,599-1,439 as a manager and named to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997. "I miss it very, very much. But I think I did the right thing," Lasorda said. "When I had the heart problem, it scared the daylights out of me.
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