He Carried Luggage of the Garden Variety

When airline ticket agents and curious strangers asked Jeff Mann what he had in his carry-on luggage, “a piece of flooring” was his usual reply.

He wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t exactly telling the whole tale, either.

In fact, Mann was carrying the most famous flooring in sports, chunks of the parquet surface on which the Boston Celtics played for 54 years, during which they won 16 NBA titles.

On Monday, 20 pieces of the parquet floor, plus a larger panel with the famous leprechaun that marked center court, will go up for auction online at Sotheby’s, with proceeds going to the team, the FleetCenter and to charity.

To get the pieces ready for sale, Mann spent eight months poring over videos and photographs, trying to match the famous basketball moments to the small individual panels that made up the floor. He was able to find precise locations by counting how many panels stood between the site of famous plays and identifiable markers such as the free-throw line.

“If it had been a traditional floor, it would have just been a best guess,” he said.

Mann then lugged the pieces across the country so he could get the autographs of the men who helped make the parquet floor famous.

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Trivia time: Who has won the most NCAA baseball championships?

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A stiff jab: Boxing Monthly writer Graham Houston believes Oscar De La Hoya’s June 17 bout against Shane Mosley will do much to define De La Hoya’s eventual ring legacy.

“Unlike [Derrell] Coley and some other opponents of De La Hoya, you can be sure that Mosley will not be in awe,” Houston said. “He says that not only will he win but that he is going to stop De La Hoya. Coley said the same thing, but it was just so much hot air. But when Mosley says it, you can be sure he means it.”

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The neighs have it: Houston Chronicle writer Mickey Herskowitz, on why horse racing is a favorite sport.

“Unlike football, baseball and basketball,” Herskowitz said, “horses are nearly always beautiful to watch, even to those of us who don’t know a well- conformed forelock from a chicken drumstick. Horses nearly always give an effort beyond their capacity, and they avoid being arrested for being drunk or disorderly or engaging in a knife or gunfight.”

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For love and pucks: How’s this for a close-knit team?

Dallas Star forward Brenden Morrow, 21, is dating the daughter of teammate Guy Carbonneau, 40. Carbonneau’s daughter Anne-Marie is 18.

“She’s an adult,” Carbonneau told the Hartford Courant’s Paul Doyle. “She can do what she wants.”

“It’s sort of weird,” Morrow said. “But we’re teammates and we know each other pretty well, and we’ve got a pretty good relationship.”

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Trivia answer: USC, with 12.

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And finally: Tennis great Martina Navratilova, who came out of retirement to play doubles in the French Open, with her only complaint about being back at Roland Garros: “They have 18 kinds of dessert and not one vegetable.”