Scorecard

Nebraska's Double Standard

Spin control should be a major at Nebraska. The latest Cornhusker who deserves a chair in the department is women's basketball coach Angela Beck, who last week took away the athletic scholarship of Kate McEwen, the victim of Huskers running back Lawrence Phillips's brutal Sept. 10 assault.

McEwen, who has two years of eligibility remaining, is not, according to Beck, "being kicked out of our family." Beck says that athletic director Bill Byrne "had a lot of compassion" for McEwen, and so he ordered that she receive an academic scholarship. Athletic scholarships are, according to Beck, "like a business, where you have to assess progress, and she [McEwen] wasn't progressing." Beck says that the scholarships of two other players were also taken away, proving, she claims, that McEwen was not singled out. Beck adds that she wouldn't have taken away the scholarship if she "really felt this would cause [McEwen] extreme anguish and make her world worse." McEwen declined to comment.

Considering that football coach Tom Osborne's velvet-glove treatment of Phillips was national news for months, one might have thought Nebraska would have gone to any lengths to avoid dredging up the ugly incident. Yet here is Beck crawling out on a public relations limb and sawing it off. The revoking of the scholarship was pointless. No coach needs major production from his or her bottom-tier players, certainly not the 13th player on a 14-member squad, which is how Beck ranked McEwen.

When Osborne reinstated Phillips last October, he emphasized how important football was to the well-being of his star player because it provided structure, stability and support. Apparently there's little concern about the value of sports in your life if you're a bench-warming female basketball player. When asked by SI to compare her treatment of McEwen with Osborne's of Phillips, Beck said, "You're dealing with one of the greatest backs in school history. I think there has to be a different attitude when dealing with him."

He Couldn't Buy a Home Run

Actor Charlie Sheen paid $6,537.50 to buy most of the seats behind the leftfield fence in Anaheim Stadium last Friday night, hoping to catch a home run ball. Sheen and three friends sat alone, 20 rows up, and watched the California Angels-Detroit Tigers game, on the chance that someone—preferably Tigers slugger Cecil Fielder—might postmark a round-tripper to their vicinity. "I didn't want to crawl over the paying public," said Sheen, the hell-raising star of Hot Shots! Part Deux and other cinematic landmarks, in explaining why he bought up the 2,615 seats. "I wanted to avoid the violence." Alas, no one homered and the Sheen crew went ball-less.

And to think what $6,500 used to buy the erstwhile Heidi Fleiss client.

Goodbye to a Gambler

Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder died of heart failure on Sunday, at 77, but in his eyes the end had come eight years before. Ever since he was exiled from his glamour spot as CBS's NFL Today prognosticator, Snyder, once hailed as the Oddsmaker to the Nation, had drifted into an anonymity he could hardly bear. "It's like I fell off the face of the earth," he would say. Or, simply: "I'm dead."