Scorecard

UPDATES

?In a victory for proponents of legalized sports gambling, the Oregon lottery commission last week approved plans for Sports Action, a statewide football lottery (SI, June 19) to begin in September. Each week during the NFL season, lottery players will try to beat the point spread on some or all of that week's games. The NFL says it may sue to stop the lottery on the grounds that it threatens the sport's integrity. But Oregon lottery officials believe that Sports Action would survive a legal challenge, and they may eventually expand the lottery to include NBA and major league baseball games. Sports Action's proceeds will be used to fund intercollegiate athletics at Oregon's seven state colleges and universities.

?A North Carolina university system commission has completed its six-month investigation of the N.C. State basketball program—but without the full cooperation of Wolfpack coach Jim Valvano and his players. The probe was prompted by revelations on the prematurely released dust jacket of Peter Golenbock's book on the Wolfpack program, Personal Fouls (SI, Jan. 30, et seq.), which is to be pubished in September. According to Samuel Poole, vice-chairman of the system's board of governors and head of the investigative commission, all current N.C. State players either refused to speak with investigators or claimed not to know anything about alleged wrongdoing in the Wolfpack program, which according to the dust jacket included payments to players. "It certainly was frustrating," says Poole, who last week presented the commission's findings to C.D. Spangler Jr., head of the North Carolina university system. "You really don't get the full story."

Valvano did speak with investigators but would not release business records from his company, JTV Enterprises. "We were informed that a player or players had been employed by the company, and we wanted to look at those records," says Poole. Although some state officials object, Spangler says he won't issue a written version of the commission's findings; he will present them orally to the board at a meeting in August.

BASEBALL BUFF

"I call it sex art," says Ziff Sistrunk, director of the Chicago Sports Council and bullhorn-toting protest leader. Sistrunk and 20 or so boys from his youth sports program recently marched outside the Chicago Public Library demanding that New York City artist Eric Fischl's oil painting Boys at Bat, which is hanging in the library's cultural center as part of a touring baseball art exhibition, be removed. The painting depicts a muscular man, dressed only in a baseball cap, swinging a bat in front of a fully uniformed and rather perplexed-looking Little Leaguer. "Tell me, why is that man naked?" says Sistrunk. "The painting has nothing to do with baseball. It's pushing child molestation."

Fischl's painting also stirred controversy in some of the seven other cities through which the exhibition has passed. A gallery in West Palm Beach, Fla., refused to display Boys at Bat at all. "There is this growing literalness, fundamentalism and lack of tolerance," says Alene Valkanas of the Illinois Arts Alliance. "Artists have always stretched the envelope and raised important questions. But right now people don't seem interested in the answers."

In response to Sistrunk's objections, the library has posted a sign warning visitors that the baseball exhibition contains works that some may consider objectionable. Fischl's reaction to Sistrunk is somewhat sharper. "That guy's response is totally irrational and misguided," says the artist. "I think the picture portrays the anxiety boys have about becoming men. There's that great line about baseball being a boys' game played by men. That's what this is all about. It's showing the rite of passage and the frustrations inherent in that."

THE MOORE TRAGEDY

Loren Coleman, a researcher at the Human Services Development Institute at the University of Southern Maine and the author of Suicide Clusters, a 1987 book that examines suicide patterns, is finishing up a study of suicide among major league baseball players. He found that 77 big leaguers had taken their lives—most of them after leaving the game—and concluded that baseball needs a counseling program to help players adjust to retirement. In a letter last October to then commissioner Peter Ueberroth and team owners, Coleman warned that another baseball suicide was statistically likely in 1989 or 1990.