Coaches' corner.

VINCE LOMBARDI, explaining his traveling orders for a night game: "There will be two buses leaving the hotel for the stadium; a 2 p.m. bus for those who need a little extra work and the empty bus that leaves at 5 p.m."

DEAN SMITH, the retired hoop genius: "Never make every game a life or death proposition. You'll wind up dead a lot in between nervous breakdowns."

BUM PHILLIPS, on communications: "I never had trouble communicating with anyone. It's what I said that made me impossible."

BARRY SWITZER, on what caused his problems at Oklahoma: "We tried to implant college in our players, but their heads rejected it."

TOMMY TUBERVILLE, Auburn football coach, when asked whether he has nightmares every time he has to play Miami: "Never! You have to be able to sleep before you can have a nightmare."

LARRY BROWN, pro basketball coach: "With all those TV time-outs, you can go crazy figuring out what to say to your players all the time. But it all straightened out when we began playing 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' during the time-outs."

MIKE GILLESPIE, USC baseball coach: "They say that all the breaks even up in the long run. True, but only for marathon runners."

CHIP KELLY, former Tennessee football player, on how his wife felt when he finished second in the Ugliest-Man-on-the-Campus Contest: "She told me I was robbed."

BOB KNIGHT, on the alarming popularity of foreign basketball players: "We can get even with Europe by sending them all our basketball writers."

TOM NEWELL, NBA coach, the first time he saw 5-3 Tyrone Bogues: "At last, someone I can hug before asking him to play a little defense."

OZZIE SMITH, on why he cried when John McSherry, the 350-lb umpire, retired: "God, he was the greatest hitting background at second base I ever saw."

TIM FLANNERY, of the San Diego Padres, after hitting safely in 14 straight games: "Every night I got a hit I ate Chinese food and washed it down with a tequila. It all ended when my doctor told me to stop getting base hits or die."

CHARLES BARKLEY, on superstitions: "I have two. One, don't argue with a ref who is carrying a loaded pistol, and, two, don't call your wife Greta if her name is Vivien."

JAKE LAMOTTA'S immortal Christmas carol: "We were so poor that on Christmas my old man would go outside and shoot his gun and then come in and tell all his kids that Santa Claus had committed suicide."

JIM BROWN, on why he refused to block with the Cleveland Browns: "Do you ask Liberace to carry his piano?

BEAR BRYANT, when asked by his math professor to define the word "cosine": "How can I spell a word like that, ma'am when I have never been more than two inches away from a football."

GEORGE ALLEN, football's all-time workaholic, on his theory of leisure: "The five or six hours after 12 a.m., are the best time for it."

HANK AARON, when baseball started paying its rookies a million dollars a year: "What's killing baseball is not the high costs of its stars, but the high costs of mediocrity."

RED SMITH, columnist extraordinaire: "Knute Rockne was the most interesting idealist I ever knew. He kept building character year after year no matter how many states he had to import it from."

JIMMY VALVANO, when asked whether his wife minded his 18-hour-a-day workdays: "I'll ask her the next time I run into her."