BRIEFLY : SALT LAKE GAVE $500,000 TO IOC MEMBERS' RELATIVES.

Byline: Daily News Wire Services

In the years before Salt Lake City won the 2002 Winter Games, its bid committee paid for college educations for six relatives of members of the International Olympic Committee.

Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials insisted, however, that the bid committee's privately funded $500,000 ``humanitarian assistance'' fund was not set up as a mechanism to buy the votes of IOC members as they looked to Salt Lake in 1991 and 1995 as the potential site of the Games.

``This was such a minute part of that effort, that to stretch it to a campaign of vote influencing rather than a campaign to work in the spirit of the Olympic movement, I don't think is justified,'' SLOC president Frank Joklik said.

SLOC officials on Tuesday provided general details of the fund, which operated between 1991 - the year Salt Lake lost the bid for the 1998 Winter Games to Nagano, Japan - and 1995, when it was awarded the 2002 bid. Joklik said that 13 individuals were given scholarships or athletic training of which six were ``direct relatives'' of IOC members, mostly from Africa.

HOCKEY: The six Canadian NHL teams might stage a tournament during the exhibition season to boost the sport's sagging financial condition in Canada.

The six teams reported that they had combined losses of $55 million (U.S. money) last season and are projecting losses close to $64.7 million this season. Three teams - Edmonton, Ottawa and Calgary - shared $17.6 million in revenue from the NHL's Canadian Assistance Plan last season, the NHL said.

BASEBALL: John Puccinelli of Notre Dame High School has signed a national letter of intent to attend Santa Clara next fall, Broncos coach Mike Cummins announced.

BASKETBALL: Fred Hobdy, who served 40 years as basketball coach and athletic director at Grambling State before stepping down in 1996, died after a long illness. He was 75.

Hobdy remains the winningest coach in Louisiana collegiate basketball history with a record of 572 wins and 288 losses. He coached numerous outstanding players, the most successful being ex-NBA Most Valuable Player and NAIA All-American Willis Reed.

JURISPRUDENCE: The mother of one of Ben Coates' children testified that the New England Patriots tight end pushed her to the pavement and hit her head on a car outside his condominium.

Jennifer Marshall testified on the first day of Coates' trial on an assault-and-battery charge stemming from a confrontation outside his Franklin, Mass. home on July 26. He has pleaded innocent, saying he was defending himself from an attack by Marshall.