Today's Top Sports Stories • Prosecutors allege sports players got steroids from online ring - • Steelers say no evidence doctor gave hormones - • Matthews apologizes, says little else - • Steroids are just a click away - • '08 Olympics offer chance to help Chinese workers - • Add USATODAY.com RSS feeds What's this?

Buy and sell tickets to premium and sold out events Search by events or regions: Location Select a region Atlanta Baltimore Boston Buffalo California North California South Chicago Cleveland Dallas Denver Detroit Houston Indianapolis Kansas City Las Vegas Miami Milwaukee Minneapolis New Orleans New York Metro Orlando Philadelphia Phoenix Pittsburgh Portland,ME Portland,OR Raleigh-Durham Salt Lake City San Antonio Seattle St. Louis Syracuse Tampa Bay Toronto Washington D.C. Genre Select a sport Baseball NBA NCAA College Basketball Football NCAA Football NASCAR Golf Tennis More Sports Tickets Ticket holders:

Looking to sell tickets quick? Register now.

Corso penciled in for variety By Michael Hiestand, USA TODAY HEATHROW, Fla.  Lee Corso is a multi-tasker. ESPN's most prominent college football pontificator, likely alone among the stars of TV sports, works a year-round office job unrelated to sports. He is director of business development for Dixon Ticonderoga, best known for its yellow No. 2 pencils, hired in 1992 after getting to know Dixon executive Gino Pala as a golfing buddy. While coaching at Indiana, Corso once called a timeout to take his team's picture in front of the scoreboard when his Hoosiers had their first lead on Ohio State in 25 years. By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY In his Dixon office, Corso has found the file for one of his "favorite" office projects — helping create a crayon made of soybeans in 2001. Now he can get back to talking about his nasty elephant ride. "You laugh, but look at these scars," says Corso, holding up his hands. "They have hair like needles. I couldn't get off it. And it turned its trunk around and spit at me." Corso is serious. He rode the elephant in a circus parade in 1969 to help sell season tickets for the football team at the University of Louisville, where he showed up for his first job as a head football coach only to hear the school was ready to drop the sport. The program survived — Corso went 28-11-3 over four seasons — although his ride produced sales of just four tickets and left him with two pulled groins. Corso returns to pulling out more files to explain his Dixon job. There are programs from trade shows he has attended, such as an "international conference on powder metallurgy," the company history he commissioned and notes from trips to schmooze retailers and motivate Dixon workers. "He'll do anything we ask him do," Dixon CEO Rich Asta says. "The funny thing is, he's always going 110 mph. He never even walks slowly to pick up a fax." Says Dixon executive vice president Len Dahlberg, "It's hard to keep up with him walking through airports." You would think Corso, 69, might be worn out by now. The son of an Italian immigrant father with a second-grade education and a second-generation Italian immigrant mother with a fifth-grade education, Corso showed up at Florida State in 1953 to play football and baseball — at just 142 pounds. But college worked out. He met Betsy, his wife of 48 years, roomed with Burt Reynolds and remains friends with the actor and left as the school's all-time interception leader, a record that stood until Deion Sanders broke it on the last play of his FSU career. Reynolds offers a telling memory of Corso in college: "Nobody was funnier, especially in the huddles." Then Corso went on to a pretty funny life. From turkeys to coffins After Corso's 1.3-mile commute in his black Jaguar to a spacious home down the street from Masters runner-up Chris DiMarco, he was ready to talk turkey. Says his wife, chuckling, "I'll never forget that turkey." No wonder. The turkey sort of captures Corso's lifelong faith in the unconventional. His first Louisville team, coming off a big loss and depleted by injuries, was playing Thanksgiving Day at Tulsa. Corso, searching for an edge, remembered "we used to rally around the goat mascot" when he was an assistant coach at Navy. He decided the team needed a turkey on a leash. "Everybody at the pregame meal had to pat it," says ESPN NFL analyst Tom Jackson, on that Louisville team before going on to playing 14 seasons in the NFL. "It charged out on the field with us. And he told us about the bet." Corso had taught the mascot to respond to a leash — it escorted Louisville's captains at the pregame coin toss — but he had not made a bet. He just told his players he had, with the Tulsa coaches: If they won, they could eat the bird. Corso, almost choking with laughter, recalls a late-game timeout to remind his players there was a life at stake: "And they said, 'We'll hold 'em!' They did and carried me and the turkey off the field." Says Jackson: "No one has ever had more fun coaching than Lee Corso. He has a shtick on TV, but he was a good coach." Good enough to go on from Louisville and last 10 seasons at Indiana, where Ohio State's Woody Hayes advised him to just forget about even trying to recruit anybody the Buckeyes wanted. And where Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight, as if there were any doubt his program reigned supreme, once held a news conference in the stadium press box as Corso's team was playing below. (No surprise, says Corso: "Everybody went to listen to him.") Corso went 41-68-2 at Indiana. He also managed to get a Hoosiers lead against Ohio State for the first time in 25 years — he called timeout in the 1976 game and had the team pose for a photo in front of the scoreboard — before the Buckeyes won 47-7. And he once crawled out of a coffin on his local TV show to suggest his team shouldn't be counted out. "Ever been in a coffin?" Corso asks matter-of-factly. "It's soft." The coffin happened to be in the TV studio for a Halloween show, Corso says, and it just occurred to him to hop in. He says his on-air TV pranks, now epitomized by donning the head of a team mascot to indicate his college football game predictions on ESPN's GameDay, are just spontaneous — "not one has been premeditated." But he'll stick with what works. When he first put on a mascot head, he says, "People in the (TV production) truck were dying. I thought, 'Wow, this must be a good shtick.' " Firing opened another avenue In giving more than 20 motivational speeches a year, Corso has maxims that include, "Believe that no matter how bad things are, they could always be worse." He should know. At Indiana, he was assured his job was safe just days before his wife read in a newspaper that he had been fired. "My kids came home from school crying," Corso says, tearing up himself at the memory. "They had every right to fire me but not hurt my family. It almost destroyed me." Still, it also led to his favorite memento in his Dixon office. Betsy and their four kids, days after that 1983 firing, presented him with their plaque, citing his "excellence and integrity." Pencil CEO eyed Buccaneers HEATHROW, Fla. — "The Orient is killing us," Gino Pala says. "As an industry, we have no shot." Pala is the departing co-chief executive officer of Dixon Ticonderoga, which recently was bought by Italian pencil-maker Fila (unrelated to the shoe marketer) in a deal worth about $60 million. Pala says Dixon each year sells out 388 million Ticonderoga No. 2s, with the trademark green-metal ferrule (ring around the pencil). Although they are still made in Versailles, Mo., Dixon had to close its other U.S. plants. "We made some moves," Pala says. "But there wasn't a lot we could do. It all went overseas." The business was squeezed as the number of U.S. pencil-makers shrunk from nearly 30 to two in the last two decades. At the same time, Pala says, Dixon went from 11,000 customers to making 85% of its sales to retailing giants such as Wal-Mart and Staples. "And they just want the best priced," he says. "Nothing else makes any difference. This used to be fun." But Pala, who hired Corso after they had become golfing buddies, came close to veering into the sports business. In 1995, Corso helped organize a $150 million bid by Pala and other investors for the NFL Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It wasn't successful. If it had been, Pala says, Corso might have become the Bucs coach: "I think he wanted to be. I accused him of wanting it." - By Michael Hiestand Corso, who never speaks off the record or quotes anonymous sources, says he still goes "utterly ballistic" when he hears media speculation about coaches losing their jobs — "that kills coaches." Al Carpenter remembers Corso dropping by his apartment after being fired at Indiana. Carpenter, who had cerebral palsy, used crutches and couldn't read or write, had become friends with Corso after he had begun hitchhiking 20 miles to sit in on Indiana football practices. Carpenter inspired Corso, who invited him to sit in as he listened to opera and drew up game plans. As Indiana's coach, Corso presented Carpenter with a game ball and took him with the team to a bowl game in California. They remain friends. "He's one of the finest men who ever walked," says Carpenter, 54. "And I'm not saying that just because he's my best friend." When Corso came by after the firing, Carpenter says he threw out an idea for his friend: " 'Coach, why don't you consider TV as a profession?' " No pencil pusher Corso wasn't ready to give up coaching. In 1985, he moved to his current home in the Orlando area to be coach of the Orlando Renegades of the U.S. Football League. Corso got in one season before the league folded. "Lee, remember how you drove past your office as it was being repossessed?" his wife says, referring to the double-wide trailer where her husband had worked before it was towed away. Corso was hired at ESPN in 1987 but landed on sporadic and relatively obscure game assignments. He caught a break when, as a last-minute substitute, he was asked to leave for Tokyo immediately to call an American college football all-star game being played on the same day as his departure. Thanks to time-zone differences, he made it. And, he says, "Ever since then I've worked for ESPN a lot." Another break came that ultimately would provide a pop for Dixon Ticonderoga. ESPN, having seen Dick Vitale emerge as a bona fide TV personality after being unleashed on studio shows, took Corso off games to team him with Beano Cook and Tim Brando on its first college football studio show, which has evolved into the migratory GameDay, now with Corso, analyst Kirk Herbstreit and host Chris Fowler. Corso didn't immediately grasp that the switch would make him a star who now has endorsement deals for the Hooters restaurant chain as well as The Home Depot, Pontiac and Scott's fertilizer. Hearing of his new assignment, he asked management if he could keep going to games instead. "And they said, 'Not if you want to work at ESPN,' " Corso says, laughing. "I'll never forget the words." From there, GameDay became a show that can sometimes draw tens of thousands of fans to otherwise empty stadiums hours before game kickoffs. Which really helps Dixon Ticonderoga. Corso's on-air trademark is waving a pencil to make his points. Although Corso isn't the only person to gesture with pencils on TV, Pala says, "He's the only one who really shakes it in your face."