These Guys Don’t Horse Around With Boss

With his Yankees in fourth place in the American League East, things were already tough for George Steinbrenner in New York. And with his horse, favored Bellamy Road, finishing seventh in the Kentucky Derby, things just got tougher.

“KENTUCKY FRIED BOSS” was the headline on the cover of the New York Post on Sunday.

Trivia time: How many Triple Crown winners finished their 3-year-old campaigns undefeated?

No respect: Giacomo’s upset victory in Saturday’s Derby didn’t impress New York Post horse racing columnist Ray Kerrison.

“You’re looking at a very ordinary horse,” he wrote in Sunday’s edition. “Indeed, he would have been one of the first horses eliminated on anyone’s list.”

Not totally overlooked: Ten Post staffers made Derby selections in Saturday’s paper. One of them, Debbie Little, picked Giacomo to win.

The Post also reported that two New Jersey residents picked the $1 superfecta, each earning $864,253.50.

The tickets were purchased at the Meadowlands and Freehold Raceway.

The jello will be jiggling: Former Chicago Bear William Perry will take part in a cake-eating contest in New York on Tuesday. And if he is able to take an insurmountable lead, one could say he has “put it in the refrigerator” in more ways than one.

Wrestling to find right word: A Morning Briefing item about wrestling results being phoned into newspapers before the matches took place prompted an e-mail from Bob Voight, a member of the California State Athletic Commission from 1968 to 1976.

“We passed a ruling that promoters, announcers, marquees, etc., refer to them as wrestling exhibitions, not matches,” he wrote. “Rest assured this change did not affect the box office at all. Die-hard wrestling fans, including my father-in-law, were not convinced. He would never agree that there were predetermined winners.”

A match is a match: Olympic Auditorium wrestling promoter Mike LeBell, responding to Voight’s e-mail, said: “Bob was a good friend of my mom [boxing promoter Aileen Eaton] and mine. [But] it was kind of stupid not to say matches.”

Picky, picky: Syndicated columnist Norman Chad, figuring it will be hard for Phil Jackson to find a fit, wrote: “He’ll only coach in a big city for a team with two future Hall of Famers, with an owner whose daughter is available on Saturday nights.”

Looking back: On this day in 1993, the Phoenix Suns defeated the Lakers, 112-104, in overtime to become the first NBA team to lose the first two games of a five-game series at home and come back to win three in a row.

Trivia answer: War Admiral in 1937 and Count Fleet in 1943.

And finally: TNT’s Doug Collins, impressed by Dallas guard Darrell Armstrong’s energy, said: “He is one of the few guys in the league who makes coffee nervous.”

*

Larry Stewart can be reached at larry.stewart@latimes.com.