WORLD SPORTS SCENE / RANDY HARVEY : Fame Is International, Honors Begin at Home for Rafer Johnson

The names Rafer Johnson and C.K. Yang are practically synonymous in track and field. They were friends and teammates at UCLA and rivals as the world’s two best decathletes during their era.

But Johnson, who outscored Yang by 58 points to win the gold medal in the 1960 Summer Olympics, was recently matched against an equally versatile adversary, Thomas Jefferson.

With a new junior high school in Johnson’s hometown, Kingsburg, Calif., scheduled to open next fall, school board members were unable to decide whether to name it for Johnson or Jefferson.

So they asked the townspeople to choose in a five-day referendum that began last Thursday. Voters also could choose a compromise name, Kingsburg Junior High. Results will be announced Thursday.

While presenting one of the L.A. Amateur Athletic Foundation’s World Trophy awards last Thursday night to Austrian skier Petra Kronberger, Johnson said: “You get honors as time goes by, but when people in your hometown honor you, it’s extra special. Now, if you would help me in the voting, I have four vans just outside.”

Presenting the World Trophy award to Hassiba Boulmerka, the track and field 1,500-meter gold medalist from Algeria, was Evelyne Hall Adams, who won the silver medal in the 80-meter hurdles in 1932 at Los Angeles after finishing in a virtual dead heat with Babe Didriksen.

Five years earlier, Adams stood on street corners in her hometown of Chicago with a tin cup to collect money to send U.S. athletes to Amsterdam for the 1928 Summer Olympics. In 1936, unable to raise the $1,000 required for travel expenses, she was unable to compete in the Games at Berlin.

Thumbs up to track and field’s governing body, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, for the aggressive drug-testing policies that snared Ben Johnson.

Thumbs down to the IAAF for attempting to delay action against Johnson so that it would not detract from the indoor world championships this week at Toronto. Only when his latest transgression was revealed in a Toronto newspaper did the IAAF’s doping commission decide to expedite his case.

Less than three months after undergoing an emergency appendectomy, Lynn Jennings of Newmarket, N.H., will represent the United States in the 3,000 meters in the indoor world championship meet.

That’s nothing, she said after earning the berth with a victory in the recent U.S. meet. Four days after the operation, while her husband was sleeping, she sneaked out to jog.

Her husband had insisted that she see a doctor.

“I’m glad he was there,” she said. “I was doubled over in pain, but I wouldn’t go to the hospital. I’m a tough Yankee, and I thought I could tough it out.”

Although later this month in Spain, Jennings will attempt to win the world cross-country championship for the fourth consecutive year, a five-time champion, Kenya’s John Ngugi, might have to watch from afar after refusing to submit last month to an out-of-competition, random drug test. IAAF doctors said they were snubbed upon arriving at Ngugi’s farm.

“How could I allow strangers to come to my house and demand that they test me?” Ngugi said.

How could he not? According to IAAF rules, he could be suspended for four years.

Perhaps the most anticlimactic announcement in recent sports history is expected later this month from 1988 Olympic figure skating champion Brian Boitano.

After saying for months that he is 95% certain he will seek reinstatement as an amateur before the April 1 deadline so that he can compete in the ’94 Winter Games at Lillehammer, Norway, he said last week that the only thing he still has to determine is which day to call the news conference.

As if any more clues were necessary, he recently asked an acquaintance who is going to Norway to take photographs of the rink so that he can begin to visualize himself there.

The only reason he is postponing an official announcement, he said, is to monitor the condition of his chronically injured knee.

But he already has committed to the April 6-7 Hershey’s Kisses Pro-Am at the Sports Arena and then plans to work on his competitive short and long programs during the two-month tour of world champions, which will make stops at the Forum on June 12 and the Anaheim Arena on June 23.

Boitano’s chances of returning to the Olympics will be improved if either of the U.S. men, national champion Scott Davis and runner-up Mark Mitchell, finishes among the top three this week in the World Championships at Prague, Czech Republic. If either does, the United States will earn berths for three men instead of two next February at Lillehammer.

The same rule applies to the three women and two dance teams competing for the United States at Prague. But because there are so few skaters in the discipline around the world, the two U.S. pairs teams must finish only among the top five to gain an additional Olympic spot.

Encouraged by the success this winter of an AIDS benefit at Toronto, which was organized by figure skaters, the 1980 Olympic champion, Robin Cousins of Great Britain, is producing, directing and starring in an AIDS benefit scheduled for May 15 at Birmingham, England. Among other skaters participating are U.S. Olympic champions Dorothy Hamill, Scott Hamilton and Kristi Yamaguchi.

Cousins, who lives at Lake Arrowhead, will remain in England this summer to appear as Munkastrap in the musical “Cats.”

On the subject of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, don’t cry for Argentina. The resort city of Mar del Plata, which last fall appeared close to losing the 1995 Pan American Games, has been bailed out with a $50-million investment by the Argentine government.

The organizing committee is expected to present a plan at a meeting of the Pan American Sports Organization’s executive committee this week at Mar del Plata for constructing or reconstructing venues for all but four or five sports. Those sports will be moved to Buenos Aires.

With their summer falling during our winter, the Argentines have scheduled those Games for March 11-27. That will present a problem for USA Basketball, which relies on collegians for its Pan American men’s teams.

Craig Miller, spokesman for USA Basketball, said last week that players from military or AAU teams might have to be called upon. A perennial AAU power, Marathon Oil, represented the United States last summer in an international tournament, the Jones Cup in Taiwan.

The last time the Pan American Games were held during our winter, in March of 1955 at Mexico City, the United States sent a men’s basketball team consisting of five players from the military, three from the AAU and one from college. They went undefeated.