Bo’s Cards Are Hotter Than Ever

If Bo Jackson’s baseball career has ended, he went out in a symbolic blaze of glory.

About 350,000 of his baseball cards were obliterated recently when they were tossed into a furnace operated by the Armco Steel plant in Kansas City, Mo.

After the Kansas City Royals released Jackson in March, it was decided by the sponsors of the cards to release his card, too.

“Bo is no longer a member of the organization,” said Mike Behymer, assistant marketing director for the Royals. “Anybody else would be treated the same way.”

Trivia time: Name the four USC players who were runners-up in the Heisman Trophy balloting.

Just say no: Xisco Marcos, whose first name is pronounced “Cisco,” is a foreign athlete assigned to the Barcelona Dragons of the World League of American Football.

Although he is a wide receiver, he mainly helps his American teammates as an interpreter. He is enraptured by football.

“Before playing football, I play the typical sports I can play in Spain--soccer, basketball, handball, volleyball,” Marcos told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Now, I just play only football. It’s like a drug. It’s so much fun. You want more and more. It absorbs you.”

Back-tracking: In track and field, marks usually improve over the years. However, judging by the results of Saturday’s UCLA-USC track meet, the sport is regressing.

For example, the winning long jump was 24 feet 5 1/2 inches, compared to the meet record of 27-0 1/2 set by UCLA’s James McAllister in 1973.

The 110-meter hurdles were won in 14.59 seconds. UCLA’s Greg Foster set the meet record of 13.30 in 1980.

Don’t ask me: Ernie Whitt, a veteran backup catcher with the Baltimore Orioles, says he is continually asked by young players how to hit Nolan Ryan.

“I finally had to tell them that I really don’t know,” Whitt said. “You see, I never hit him. I faced him 10 times and he struck me out 10 times.”

Add Ryan: Tom Grieve, general manager of the Texas Rangers, talking about Toronto, the victim of Ryan’s seventh no-hitter:

“It was like pitching against a Little League team. They didn’t have a chance.”

Say it isn’t so: Cow Pasture boxing, a Fourth of July tradition in Gardnerville, Nev., has been put out to pasture with the withdrawal of ESPN and Top Rank, Inc., the event’s sponsor.

Class dismissed: Jack Brenner, a University of Washington professor, was trying to teach baseball while visiting in Bulgaria.

He said it was difficult because of the language barrier.

“I remember talking about pitching,” Brenner told the Seattle Times. “I thought I could say a few things in Bulgarian. I used what I thought was the Bulgarian word for curve .”

His audience snickered. It turned out Brenner had used the word for prostitute.

Trivia answer: O.J. Simpson (1967); Anthony Davis (1974), Ricky Bell (1976) and Rodney Peete (1988). Note: Simpson won in 1968.

Quotebook: Mike Veeck, president of the Pompano Beach, Fla., Class-A team known as the Miracle, after he was denied permission by the baseball commissioner’s office to use 68-year-old Minnie Minoso as a pinch-hitter: “The major leagues aren’t so much fun right now. They’re a mirror image of what’s wrong with out society--greed, no room for compromise.”