BRIEFLY : OLYMPIAN BALTER DIES.

Byline: Daily News Staff and Wire Services

Sam Balter, a member of the first Olympic gold medal basketball team who went on to a broadcasting career, has died after a long illness, a family member said. He was 88.

Balter, who died Saturday at a Los Angeles hospital, played for the United States in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. A 5-foot-10 guard, Balter averaged 8.5 points in the U.S. team's four games, the fourth-highest average on the team that started the United States' gold medal run that lasted until 1972.

He was the sports director of KLAC radio in Los Angeles in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s and was a television play-by-play announcer for the Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels of the old Pacific Coast League. He also wrote a column, ``One For the Book,'' for the old L.A. Herald-Express.

A graduate of UCLA, whose basketball games he also broadcast, Balter was a charter member of the Southern California Sports Broadcasters Association and was elected to the SCSBA Hall of Fame.

Balter is survived by his wife, Mildred, to whom he was married for 67 years; a daughter, Barbara Kahn, and three granddaughters.

Funeral services will be private.

Ignored at home, ridiculed in the Greek press and unfairly compared to the absent NBA all-stars, the mix-and-match U.S. team beat Greece 84-61 Sunday for third place in the World Basketball Championship in Athens, Greece.

Yugoslavia rallied to beat Russia 64-62 for the gold medal.

TRACK AND FIELD: The fastest sprinters of the past two years, world champion Maurice Greene and Ato Boldon of Trinidad, will bypass the lucrative Weltklasse meet at Zurich, Switzerland, on Wednesday because of a disagreement with the organizers.

Their coach, John Smith, said that the reason for the withdrawal wasn't specifically about money, although that appeared to be the underlying problem.

BASKETBALL: University of Louisville president John Shumaker and nine of his top athletic officials appealed to the NCAA Division I Infractions Committee in Seattle not to impose the death penalty on the men's basketball program over recruiting violations.

At a nearly four-hour closed meeting, enforcement investigators and university officials discussed, among other things, an assistant coach's telephone call in 1996 that may have broken the five-year probation imposed by the NCAA two years ago.

The Infractions Committee could stop short of the death penalty - a one-year shutdown of the program - with other punishment or accept Louisville's self-imposed penalties as sufficient.