Sports Beat

Former White Shadow star Ken Howard as Phil Jackson? NBC may soon be casting the role of the Lakers' coach after saying last week that it's strongly considering a dramatic series based on the life of the team's executive vice president, Jeanie Buss (below). "Here's a woman running an NBA team that her father owns—and she's dating the coach," says Chris Conti, the network's drama development head who green-lighted the project. Plans call for the series to start with the Zen Master's 1999 hiring (which Buss initially opposed), and creators plan to borrow more storylines from actual events. Pariah television producer and Lakers season-ticket holder Gavin Polone hatched the idea after sitting next to Buss at a game and asking her about her life. Polone persuaded her to sign on for the show, then hired writer-director Audrey Wells (The Truth about Cats and Dogs) before approaching NBC. Network executives consider the show a strong candidate for the 2004 season, and the NBA will allow the one-hour program to use the Lakers' name. "It's a show about basketball," says Conti, "and something that both men and women would watch."

?If the wet T-shirt contest in The Real Cancun looked like the work of highly-trained athletes, well, it was. Nicole and Roxanne Frilot, the twins who partied their way through a Mexican spring break last April in MTV's first reality movie were, in real life, scholarship soccer players at Texas Tech. But after their topless frolicking, that might change. The 20-year-olds, both juniors and public relations majors, have been thrown off the team and stripped of their scholarships—not because their stripping violated team rules but because they missed school and soccer practice while on a press tour after the movie was released. They have appealed the ruling, and the university would not say when a decision is expected. "We were pinpointed because we are athletes," says Nicole, who suspects boosters found the movie offensive and pressured the administration. "It's not like we have huge boobs and were flaunting them."

?The Paper Lions are reuniting. They are celebrating the 40th anniversary of George Plimpton's training camp with Detroit as a 36-year-old free agent quarterback from Harvard, which he wrote about first in a two-part SI story in 1964, then in the book Paper Lion. Forty players from that team are getting together in Detroit this weekend for brunch and a gala banquet, then they will be introduced at halftime of the Vikings-Lions game on Sunday. Among the players attending will be defensive tackle Alex Karras, cornerback Roger Brown, wide receiver Gail Cogdill and guard John Gordy. "We were able to get just about everybody to come out," says Bill Dow, a freelance writer who organized the event and provided the afterword to a new edition of Paper Lion that was released this month. "The only guy who wasn't interested was Alan Alda [who played Plimpton in the movie version of the book]. I don't know why; that was his first Golden Globe nomination."

? Andy Roddick rocks. Throughout the U.S. Open his box contained a who's who of musicians, including Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich and violinist Boyd Tinsley, who flew to New York for each of Roddick's seven matches while on tour with the Dave Matthews Band. A-Rod is also popular with the easy-listening set—before his finals victory over Juan Carlos Ferrero, he got a call from Elton John.