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Events and Discoveries of the Week
THE INSIDE TRACK
Baseball's interleague trading session begins November 20, runs through December 15. American League expansion (to 10 teams) will scramble the pieces even more than usual, but look for these names—and situations—to make trading headlines:
•Dodgers (loaded with promising youngsters) will sell or trade Gil Hodges and Duke Snider while they still have market value.
•Giants will trade discontented Johnny Antonelli, most probably to Yanks or Reds, try to land an above-average catcher (like Yanks' Elston Howard or John Blanchard) and steady shortstop (like Reds' Roy McMillan).
•Orioles need strong young outfielder who can hit with power, will send Pitchers Jack Fisher and Hal Brown to the National League in exchange for one.
•Tigers' new regime will shake up smug also-rans, try to peddle Pitcher Paul Foytack, Outfielder Charley Maxwell, maybe Second Baseman Frank Boiling.
•Angry Braves will put Wes Covington, Johnny Logan, Joey Jay and Carl Willey on block, try to corner a first-rate second baseman. Best bet is a deal with Cleveland, which needs pitching badly and would like to send Johnny Temple back to the National League.
•White Sox, along with Braves, will be most active in trading name players. Sox will part with anyone but Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, and Bill Veeck may ship away two power hitters he got just last year, Roy Sievers and Gene Freese.
•Red Sox will offer Batting Champ Pete Runnels for an NL shortstop, will even relinquish "untouchable" Frank Malzone for a price. His replacement: Rookie phenom Carl Yastrzemski.
•Phillies have no choice but to trade Gene Conley, who says he will not play for them any longer. For him and fading hero Robin Roberts, the Phils hope to get a couple of established major leaguers to steady a lineup of developing youngsters.
•One trade that won't happen: Kansas City's Bud Daley to the Yanks. In past years this would have been a natural—All-Star Daley for a bundle of mediocre Yanks. But new KC owners will be working hard to erase the two clubs' chummy reputation.
JUICY
Guard Don Manoukian of the Oakland Raiders was asked by a waiter how rare he wanted his steak. Said Manoukian: "Just knock the breath out of it."
SAY "AHHH"
When Forest Ranger Ed Moorehouse found a young moose leaning dispiritedly against a tree, he diagnosed the trouble right away: advanced dental decay. Moorehouse pried open the moose's jaws to confirm his diagnosis. Then he gently led the animal to his truck. In his Upper Blackville, New Brunswick backyard, Moorehouse yanked out seven rotten teeth with his fingers. He first put his patient on a whole milk liquid diet, later added oak and dead cherry leaves.
The moose, a female, quickly regained her health and composure. She clowned around for visitors, showing her bare gums. When a sick moose regains his health, does he long for the freedom of the wild woods? Moorehouse fears not. The last toothachy moose he befriended refused to be pushed out, became a showgirl, so to speak, in a New Brunswick government wildlife exhibit.
TARZAN IN VEGAS
The tall man went out for an early-morning dip in the swimming pool of a Las Vegas hotel. A caretaker waved him back and said, "You can't swim without a lifeguard on duty."
"Don't you know who I am?" said the tall one.
"No," said the guard. "Who are you?"
"I'm the new lifeguard," said Johnny Weissmuller and he plunged into the water.
THE MOSTEST
Not many people know it, but the brewers of Guinness stout also brew books. The fourth edition of The Guinness Book of Records, a Matter-horn of minutiae, is now on sale. Started as a promotion for Guinness and as a means of settling barroom arguments, the book has sold 500,000 copies to people who want to identify the "largest, oldest, smallest, richest, heaviest, fastest, deepest, tallest, longest, loudest, highest, slowest, mostest" of anything, e.g.:
•The smallest full-grown fish ever caught was a Schindleria praematurus in Samoa. It weighed 1/14,000 of an ounce.
•The shortest prizefight ever recorded took 10½ seconds (including a full count of 10), when Al Couture struck Ralph Watson "while the latter was adjusting a gum shield in his corner."
•The lowest golf course in the world is the Sodom and Gomorrah Golfing Society at Kallia on the Dead Sea, 1,250 feet below sea level.
•A snail's pace is .000361 mph. to .03125 mph.
•A flea in California jumped 13 inches in 1910. High jump record is 7 inches.
•The most brainless animal in history was the Stegosaurus. It weighed six tons, but its brain was only 2½ ounces and "it was probably only dimly aware it was alive."
A fellow who cannot make money with this book does not know how to handle himself in a bar.
THE 3:20 MILER OF 1970
Percy Cerutty, the highly vocal and highly talented Australian track coach, thinks that someone someday will run the mile in 3:20. Furthermore, says Cerutty, he may have the someone in hand. Cerutty's choice: 9-year-old Ivor Caudle of Adelaide, Australia.
Cerutty ran into the Caudle family on shipboard in 1958, when Ivor was a lean and compact child of 7 Cerutty invited the Caudles, father and son, to join him in trotting around the boat deck each dawn. Watching the loose-jointed Ivor loping alongside, Cerutty was impressed by the boy's steady, even strides, his instinctive control of breathing and his calm temperament. He suggested that Papa Caudle, an orange grower, bring the boy to the Cerutty miler factory at Portsea. This was all the suggestion the Caudles needed, and since then they have shown up at every available opportunity. Says the Senior Caudle: "Perce can inspire young chaps. It is something more than technique. He moves them inside." Says young Ivor: "He's always laughing and joking and playing games. Sometimes it seemed funny running in a race against an old man with white hair. But really he doesn't seem old at all. He's a beaut."
At Portsea the brown-haired, impish Ivor enjoys an idyllic existence. Cerutty limits him to two hours a day of dune running and light weight lifting. The rest of the time Ivor goes fishing with Herb Elliott or just hangs around, listening. At night he sleeps in John Landy's old bunk. Meals are typical Cerutty: raw oatmeal, dried fruit and walnuts for breakfast; salads for lunch; vegetable stew with a little meat and cooked barley or fish or chicken for dinner.
The elder Caudle, who once ran a 4:20 mile, is so taken with the Cerutty interest in Ivor that he has contemplated moving the family to Portsea from Adelaide. But Cerutty counseled against the move. "I told him to wait until the boy does something," the coach said. So far the best "something" Ivor has done is a 6:03 mile, which probably is a world record for 10-and-unders.
THE BRAVE BULL
There was a bullfight in Providence the other day. The combatants were a bull buffalo named Pal, who resides in an enclosure in a city park, and a fierce matador named Manuel (Manolete) Viera, who oversees the buffaloes in the park.
At 4 a.m. Pal got out of his cage, and Viera went after him. Aided by a troupe of peones, Viera got a rope on the bull, but el toro would not be held down by anything so fragile. At that point the true corrida began. Manolete decided to tire the bull with a series of passes. He began with a verónica, followed with a couple of estatuarios and finished off with a pase de pecho. The bull gored him in the leg.
A substitute torero named Dr. Seymour Hoffman was brought in for la hora de la verdad. Declining to go in over the horns for the grand estocada, Dr. Hoffman approached the problem from another angle. He jabbed Pal in the buttocks with a tranquilizer. Pal climbed happily into a cattle truck, his tail and both ears intact. Olé!
MUSICAL HOUSES
Seasonal housing is a problem with professional athletes. They may live in Schenectady and play for Fort Worth. The same is true of coaches. Three pro basketball coaches have handled it this way. Paul Seymour, who lives in Syracuse and coaches in St. Louis, has rented a house occupied during the baseball season by Cardinal Pitcher Larry Jackson. He has rented his Syracuse home to Syracuse Basketball Coach Alex Hannum. Hannum, who lives in Los Angeles in the off season, has rented his home to Fred Schaus, new coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, who moved from Morgantown, West Virginia. Now if Jackson could be persuaded to move to Morgantown....
THE SAGA OF SOCKEYE SAM
The single-mindedness of some of nature's creatures has always amazed man—the lemmings and their suicidal drive to the sea, the eels' annual return to the Sargasso, the swallows' comeback to Capistrano. At the American Fisheries Society meeting in Denver recently, naturalists heard another such saga. Scientists at the Bonneville Dam fisheries laboratory on the Columbia River had decided to find out how seriously the salmon takes his yearly task of swimming upstream to spawn. A system of connected pools, each a foot higher than the other, was set up, and a salmon was introduced. Affectionately known as Sam, the sockeye kept climbing to the top of the system, only to be sloshed down to the bottom by the ichthyologists. At the rate of 50 jumps an hour, Sam went through 6,648 pools, gained a total elevation of a mile and a quarter. By this time, Sam hadn't even worked up a salmon's version of a sweat, but the naturalists had. They opened the last gate and let Sam swim upstream.
