OLD QUESTION, SAME ANSWER
The idea began to trouble the young girl golfer five years ago, perhaps when a sporting goods firm offered her some free equipment, or when a well-heeled, well-meaning Seattle duffer suggested she take $1,000 under the table. Last December, after long study, Anne Quast Decker, women's national amateur golf champion, framed her conclusion in a letter to the United States Golf Association. Her precise, schoolteacher prose was effective enough to move the USG A last week to circulation of a 1,300-word reply to her proposals.
"Why would it be wrong," she had asked the USGA, "for an amateur to accept money for expenses entailed in going to a tournament?" The USGA rule against such expense accounts, she said, "adds an additional requirement [beyond playing for fun] for being an amateur: substantial means ... to pay for the pleasure of playing in tournaments."
"Should the possession of money be a requirement of an amateur for competing in tournaments?" she asked.
The USGA reply restated its position that "fair competition will not be assured if amateurs are permitted to accept expense money...." It cited the possible development of "golf tramps," held that those who now cheat would continue to cheat [and more easily], remarked the impossibility of establishing fair expense standards, and observed that only top amateurs would be able to get expense money, driving out lesser players who nevertheless get fun out of competition.
Our only comment would be to cite the experience of Earl (Butch) Buchholz, just returned from his first professional tennis tour and as yet unconvinced that professional tennis players make more money than some amateurs. In one old Italian town, he said, he was eliminated in the first round, and his pay for that tournament was thereby a mere $158. Later in the week, playing in an amateur tournament in the same town, Italy's top amateur, Nicola Pietrangeli, lost his first-round match to Ronnie Barnes of Brazil but still picked up $500, his guarantee for just being there.
"I'm a professional," Buchholz observed, "and Pietrangeli is an amateur, but I drive an MG and Nicky drives a Ferrari."
TEMPEST IN A BEAN POT
A certain sensitivity to bookmaking allegations has been noticeable in Boston ever since CBS-TV photographed clients and cops entering a Massachusetts Avenue bookie joint which was disguised as a key-repair shop. It was as if the Old Howard burlesque house had reopened with fanfare instead of with circumspection. Bostonians were embarrassed.
So when, in the course of ballyhoo for the limited middleweight title bout between Bostonian Paul Pender and Britisher Terry Downes (April 7), it was published that Downes was proprietor of seven London bookmaking shops there was a good deal of political comment—mostly on the order of "Harrumph! Well, now, harrumph!"
With practiced dispatch the Massachusetts boxing commission passed the buck to the state attorney general, who was confronted with the fact that Section 42, Chapter 271 of Massachusetts law forbids "wagering or selling pools on a boxing match." That, in fact, was just what Downes was doing—although he very decently refused to accept wagers on himself and, most likely, even laid off bets on Pender with someone like London's boss bookmaker, Billy Hill.
"My betting shops have been instructed to take wagers only on Paul Pender," Downes said. "The price is 5 to 4. I can't take bets on myself because I don't expect to lose."
In due course the attorney general's office handed down a ruling. It was a sensible solution. Summed up, it said: "If he's legal in London, he's legal here."
APRÈS-MIDI D'UN BISHOP
In Austria's tiny Alpine country, big game is more closely protected and hunting seasons more carefully regulated than in any other country where hunting flourishes as a full-scale tourist attraction. In fact the only species still hunted there without a license (although a winter season is quite strictly observed) is the ski instructor. This, too, may change, if Innsbruck's Catholic Bishop Dr. Paul Rosch has his way.
At a clerical conference in the town of Tutzing the other day, His Excellency noted that the country boys around Kitzbühel were being run to earth by big-city girls who were more interested in après than in ski. The situation had turned so bad that some of the neighboring towns passed regulations prohibiting ski instructors from entering bars and inns. But this, said the bishop, would not be enough. Something else must be done to protect the ski instructors from the predatory ladies. The assembled clergy agreed, but none had any immediate suggestions.
Somebody better have one before the opening of the 1964 Winter Olympics, which will be held in Innsbruck, Bishop Rosch's own district.
GUIDE TO THE MASTERS
After weeks of thoughtful consideration Jimmie (The Greek) Snyder, Las Vegas' leading oddsmaker, has come up with his line on the Masters {see page 28) and has installed Arnold Palmer as favorite at 8 to 1. Jimmy's other leading choices: Doug Sanders, 12 to 1; Sam Snead, Gary Player, Jay Hebert, Billy Casper Jr., Art Wall Jr., each 15 to 1. Longest shot in the 45 players outside the field is a tie between Bruce Crampton and Mario Gonzales, each at 50 to 1.
NO EGGHEADS NEED APPLY
The notion that the Peace Corps primarily attracts eggheads is prevalent, and it is also untrue. The corps has, in fact, made some recent acquisitions from the sports world and is looking for more. Consider the following:
Sam Fox, now 41, onetime Ohio State end who also played for the New York Giants and probably holds the NFL record, if there is one, for catching the shortest touchdown pass—four inches. He will be a corps representative in the Near East, possibly Turkey.
John Hohl, 37, of Pitman, N.J., who used to be a professional hunter in British East Africa and Kenya. He will serve as field representative on a team building roads in Tanganyika.
Bob Bates, 51, ski coach at Phillips Exeter Academy, who led two expeditions that tried to climb 28,250-foot K-2 in Pakistan. He will be representative on a Nepalese vocational teaching team.
Robert Poole, 30, football and baseball coach at Taft Prep, who was a Yale halfback, Rugby player and middleweight boxing champion. He is assigned to an Ethiopian teaching project as field representative.
Right now the corps is looking for fishing experts to develop commercial fishing in Venezuela, Togo and Sierra Leone. The latter two areas also need someone to teach them how to keep outboard motors in repair. But no eggheads, please.
THE INSIDE TRACK
•Brookmeade Stable, left ownerless when Isabel Dodge Sloane died March 9, will be sold this summer. If executors of Mrs. Sloane's estate do not accept a package-deal bid, of which three have already come in (one for a flat $3 million), the entire racing and breeding stock, together with the Upperville, Va. farm, will go before public auction.
•Cuba will participate in the Caribbean Games. Expect an all-out bid by Castro's athletes to sweep up gold medals the way Russia does in the Olympics.
•Frank Gifford, who suffered severe head injuries in 1960, has received medical clearance and will play next season for the New York Giants, but as a flanker back or flanker end, not as a running back.
•Prospects that Peter Snell of New Zealand and Jim Beatty of the U.S. will meet in the mile improved somewhat when Snell last week canceled a European tour in order to run in Los Angeles on May 16, in the Modesto Relays May 26 and, possibly, the Compton Relays meet on June 1.
•After four years of shifting like a light bay breeze, Boston Banker Chandler Hovey will allow his superb 12-meter Easterner to be raced in earnest as an America's Cup contender. He has put ashore the coveys of Hoveys who used to swarm over her graceful stern and has turned over the boat—together with a blank check for equipment—to Master Helmsman George O'Day (SI, April 22, 1961) and Easterner's designer, Ray Hunt, himself a formidable racing tactician.
ROUGH GAME, RUGBY
After the seventh straight win of their current North American tour (over the University of British Columbia), the New Zealand Universities All-Star Rugby team adjourned to the palatial home of Ronald Graham, Vancouver millionaire, who had invited them in for refreshments.
Next morning Mrs. Graham assayed the damage of a party that had been a smash success. There were 60 shattered glasses (her finest); a wrecked tea wagon (cherished wedding gift); a demolished iron swimming pool rail; floors stained with beans and hamburgers; and a pie-stained mirror that had been a dead-on target for a fruity heave-ho. Beer bottles and glasses drifted about the indoor pool.
Furthermore, the butler was brooding, not so much about the mess as about insults he had endured after the guests discovered his Prussian lineage. "They pushed me around," he said, "and called me a bloody German. They complained about the hamburgers and beans and threw them about the place. They insulted the Grahams, their home and their food. I have never seen such a disgraceful exhibition by invited guests before in my life."
What we'd like to see is a match between the New Zealanders and our own Fort Lauderdale All-Stars, now swinging in that student-beleaguered Florida town.
SIMPLE SOLUTION
Frank Sandy, a Hungarian visiting teacher, turned up four months ago in Heber City, a tiny town in Utah's Wasatch Mountains. He was "sick and tired," he said, of hearing that American kids aren't fit. All they need, he said, is leadership. The principal agreed to let him work on boys and girls seven to 11 years old. Sixteen weeks later the youngsters were scoring some 200% on the "White House test," doing 20 chin-ups, 40 push-ups, Swedish one-hand pushups, tumbling, and walking 40 to 50 feet on their hands.
THEY SAID IT
•Clemson Football Coach Frank Howard analyzing one of his players after first full-scale spring scrimmage: "He's not near as noticeable doing nothing this year as he was last season."
•Former Yankee Pitcher Vernon (Lefty) Gomez describing his brief experience as a minor league manager: "We lost 14 straight. Then we had a game rained out and it felt so good we threw a victory dinner."
