Tony Kimbro

Denny Crum, an expert on the subject, knows how to win the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. basketball championship. His Louisville team did it just last season. Check off his advisory items: --"Just play one game at a time." This should not be hard, since there are no doubleheaders scheduled for teams in the NCAA tournament. --"Concentrate and don't worry about tomorrow." And when tomorrow becomes today? "Then concentrate on today." --Have a great player. Or two, or three.

Louisville didn't bring its national championship banners along, just that valuable tournament experience. The 12th-ranked Cardinals kept their poise down the stretch Thursday and turned back Arkansas Little Rock, 76-71, in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Midwest Regional at Indianapolis. "Down the stretch, I'm not so sure that their tourney experience didn't pay off," Little Rock Coach Mike Newell said.

Before I get into the nation's top two teams playing for a national championship, I must relate the most unique thing I've seen in Dallas: I saw a blimp hovering over Reunion Arena taking pictures of a building. Now that's unique. As far as the game goes, the prime-time game gets two teams that have been ranked in the Top 10 since December. The differences are very slight. Louisville, however, has one major problem--no true ballhandler.

UCLA's basketball team has been a flop this season on national TV. The Bruins have lost to St. John's and Notre Dame before national television audiences. When their 52-game winning streak against Cal ended, it was before a regional television audience. Not what you might call real troupers, these Bruins. But they will have another chance at noon (PST) today when they play the University of Louisville here, with NBC televising the game to the rest of the country (Channels 4 and 39).

Like the old woman who lived in a shoe, Louisville basketball Coach Denny Crum has so many players he doesn't know what to do. Crum reaped a bumper harvest of high school recruits this spring, leading the nation, but the Louisville staff got so exuberant it wound up with more players in the Cardinal nest than NCAA rules allow. Louisville inked six prospects, leaving them with 17 players on scholarship.

The team of the 1980s is running out of time, and now its coach says it already is too late. Louisville started the decade with a national championship in 1980, and won another in 1986. The Cardinals came within a day of taking over the No. 1 spot in the polls this season, but a loss to Ohio State Jan. 29 spoiled their chance. Since then, almost nothing has gone right--including, most memorably, the goaltending call in Pauley Pavilion.

Duke might have had two political science majors out there and three studying economics, but no one asked them anything about proportional representation or the supply side. Instead, the sons of the Doctors of Dunk, Louisville's Cardinals, just asked if they could keep pace. Whereupon Duke's rocket scientists forgot what they'd done with Johnny Dawkins, the one gun they had that was still firing, and fell, 72-69, Monday night in the NCAA final.

The calendar read Dec. 6, but Syracuse and Duke made it seem like March. In a game with the intensity of an NCAA tournament game, top-ranked Syracuse used David Johnson's two free throws with three seconds to play Wednesday night to beat No. 6 Duke, 78-76. The victory by the Big East's Orangemen (5-0) evened the ACC-Big East Challenge series 3-3 with two games to play tonight at East Rutherford, N.J., including the matchup of No. 3 Georgetown and 17th-ranked North Carolina.

Kentucky basketball Coach Eddie Sutton adopted a son Saturday. Freshman guard Rex Chapman hit 5 of 8 three-point goals on his way to his third 26-point performance of the season to lead the 18th-ranked Wildcats to an 85-51 rout over defending NCAA champion Louisville at Louisville. "He's my son," Sutton said as he hugged Chapman during a postgame interview. "I've got three others, but I just adopted him. He was wonderful.

The long arm of Norm Stewart reached out to the seventh-ranked Missouri Tigers Saturday. With Missouri trailing top-ranked Oklahoma by a point at halftime, the Missouri coach, who is recovering from cancer surgery, made a telephone call to acting coach Rich Daly. The Tigers responded with a 12-2 run at the start of the second half and toppled Oklahoma, 97-84, in a Big Eight Conference game at Columbia, Mo., as Byron Irvin scored 34 points.