June 18, 1984

DETROIT T HEY know about good times and hard times in Detroit. Take the automobile industry, which has had both in the last three years. Or, take the local baseball team, which has had both in the last three months. Economists can explain the fluctuations in automobiles. But nobody can fully explain the ball club, the Detroit Tigers. They opened the season with a record rush by winning 35 of their first 40 games, and people started projecting that they might win 120. Twice, they won nine straight; twice, they won seven straight. Then foreign competition started making inroads, as it once did with automobiles. The Toronto Blue Jays won 19 of 24 games, the Tigers lost 8 of 12, and suddenly the good times turned into hard times. Then the Tigers steadied and began winning again, though not at the old rate.

Carl Lewis will be in the Olympics. By winning the 100-meter dash tonight in the United States Olympic track-and-field trials, the world's best sprinter and long jumper also won berths in two Olympic events - the 100-meter dash and the 400-meter relay. Lewis hopes to equal Jesse Owens's 1936 achievement of four gold medals. Here, on the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum track, where the Olympic competition will begin in seven weeks, he ran away from probably the strongest sprint field ever assembled.

Jack Greenberg, director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., surveyed the crowd on the roof of 99 Hudson Street, the new home of the organization he has led for the last 23 years. ''Professor of law at U.C.L.A.,'' he said, as he scanned from right to left. ''Law professor at Harvard. Head of Queens Legal Services. Lawyer for Center for Law in the Public Interest in Los Angeles. Head of urban law clinic at City University. Family Court judge and professor at N.Y.U.''

Swale, the colt who won the Kentucky Derby last month and the Belmont Stakes nine days ago, died yesterday morning after collapsing suddenly outside his stable at Belmont Park. Veterinarians at first assumed he had suffered a heart attack, but a team of surgeons and pathologists performed a three-hour autopsy that revealed no evidence to support that diagnosis. They said the cause of death was unknown and that they could not rule out the possibility of foul play. They said that further tests would take two weeks or more to complete, and that there was no guarantee that an official cause of death would ever be established. Dr. Robert Fritz, the colt's attending veterinarian, said that the three most likely diagnoses, in descending order of likelihood, were, ''Heart failure of some kind, a stroke, or - and I hate to say it - some toxic substance.''

Greg Norman, the Australian known best for his 300-yard drives, sank a 40- foot par putt at the 72d and last regulation hole of the 84th United States Open today to tie Fuzzy Zoeller and set up an 18-hole playoff for the championship Monday at Winged Foot's West course. Zoeller, who birdied four holes in a row on the front nine, held a three- shot lead over Norman with five to go, but the happy-go-lucky Zoeller bogeyed two of those final five holes. Norman birdied the 14th hole and scrambled for spectacular pars at each of the last three to finish in the deadlock at 4-under-par 276. Norman appeared to have lost his chance when his 6-iron approach to the 18th hole sailed way right into the crowded bleachers a hundred feet from the green. After a free drop just in front of the seats, Norman pitched to the green, but his ball rolled to the left fringe. From there, the Australian rolled in the long putt that broke four to five feet from left to right and fell into the middle of the cup.