
A roundup of the sports information of the week
BASKETBALL—NBA: Syracuse, winning all five games, including a 126-109 victory over first-place Boston, has toughened into a strong second-place team in the East, as it showed by beating Detroit 162-135. Boston, meanwhile, won four, with Bill Russell passing Dolph Schayes of Syracuse as the league's alltime rebounder. His total is 11,022 in less than seven seasons. San Francisco's Wilt Chamberlain was held down as defenses worked hard on him, his only big night being 56 points in a win over Cincinnati. The Warriors also beat Detroit 117-116 to take over third place in the Western Division after the Pistons had lost 120-105 to second-place St. Louis. Chicago, game but guileless in last place, played four times, lost each one after a close battle. In three games with the league-leading Los Angeles Lakers—slowed by the absence of Jerry West—Chicago lost in the last few minutes, all by a total of six points. New York had worse luck. The Knicks played Boston twice and Syracuse twice, losing all four without a murmur.
BOATING—MRS. PAT DUANE, with husband Jack as crew, hiked out on her 20-foot Hang Over to win three times and finish second twice for a total of 79¾ points, successfully defending her Midwinter Flying Dutchman title at Tampa, Fla.
BOWLING—ANDY MARZICH of Long Beach, Calif. rolled five straight strikes in the final round to win the $24,000 St. Louis Open with a last-game 238, his second PBA tour victory in a month.
BOXING—LASZLO PAPP, 36, the only acknowledged professional athlete behind the Iron Curtain (to claim the European middleweight title he had to openly accept professional status), battered Britain's George Aldridge for 14 rounds in Vienna, then sent him down so solidly in the 15th that the referee didn't bother to count. The victory brought Papp's record to 20 wins and two draws and put him in a position to challenge the winner of the Dick Tiger-Gene Fullmer world championship bout later this month.
Emile Griffith, world welterweight title-holder, celebrated his 25th birthday by defeating Chris Christensen of Denmark by a TKO in the ninth round in Copenhagen.
FIGURE SKATING—THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS in Long Beach, Calif. saw a display of talent that could help the U.S. begin to reestablish itself as a leading nation in figure skating. Boston's Albertina Noyes, 14, the 1961 novice titlist, won the junior ladies'; Tommy Litz, in third place after the compulsory figures, unwound two triple jumps to win the senior men's over the defending champion, Monty Hoyt, and Lorraine Hanlon, 17, of Boston won the senior ladies' title.
The European Championship, in Budapest, awarded the men's title to Alain Calmat of France, whose only real opposition, ailing Karol Divin, of Czechoslovakia, could not compete. Sjoukje Dijkstra, a 21-year-old Dutch girl, took her fourth straight European women's title. The pairs competition was won by West Germany's Marika Kilius, 20, and Hans-Jürgen Bäumler, 21, who put on a dazzling display to earn the highest scores ever given in a European championship. In second and third places were the two Russian pairs, whose imaginative presentation indicated the U.S.S.R. has mastered another sport.
GOLF—NANCY ROTH, a 23-year-old amateur from Hollywood, Fla., won her third major tournament in a row, the Palm Beach Women's Amateur, by defeating National Amateur Champion JoAnne Gunderson 2 and 1.
HOCKEY—NHL: It was a week of only seven games, and five were ties, but one that really counted was a 2-1 victory by fourth-place Detroit over Toronto. The Leafs had been tied for second with Montreal. The Canadiens pulled out a 5-5 tie with last-place Boston for the one point that gave them sole possession of second. The other unbalanced score was a 6-3 upset by New York over Montreal. Don McKenney, traded from Boston, broke the tie for the Rangers and assisted on the clinching goal, while iron man Gump Worsley had seven stitches taken in his scalp in the first period and came back to hold Montreal scoreless. He also made 32 saves in a 3-3 tie with the league-leading Chicago Black Hawks.
HORSE RACING—KELSO ($6.70) surged out of fourth place on the final turn to run down a prestige field that included Ridan and Jaipur and win the $58,200 Seminole Handicap at Hialeah by a convincing 2¾ lengths under Jockey Ismael Valenzuela.
Sky Wonder ($8.50), liking the slow track at Hialeah, finished fast under a smart ride by Steve Brooks, to win the seven-furlong Bahamas Stakes in one minute 24[3/5] seconds (sec page 44), beating Gray Pet by a head and earning his way into the $100,000 Flamingo Stakes, the first major race this year for three-year-olds.
MOTOR SPORTS—JACK BRABHAM, the only driver to build his own racer, won the 100-mile Australian Grand Prix with an average speed of 79.57 mph. John Surtees finished second in a Lola Climax, and Bruce McLaren, driving a Cooper Climax, was third.
Don Vesco of San Diego won the third annual Motorcycle Grand Prix of the U.S. at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway aboard a 250-cc. Japanese Yamaha cycle that both outsped and outlasted the heavier models entered.
SQUASH—MARGARET VARNER of Wilmington, Del. won the national woman's squash racquets championship for the fourth straight year, beating a field that included the British Wolfe-Noel Cup team. She defeated the top-seeded foreign player, Britain's Stella MacIntosh, 15-10, 15-6, 7-15, 15-10 in the finals.
SWIMMING—SATOKO TANAKA, Japan's 21-year-old Olympian, broke the women's records for the 220-yard and 200-meter backstroke when she finished the latter in 2:29.6, and Koichi Yamanami won the 200-yard men's breaststroke in 2:35.4, during a dual meet in Sydney, Australia.
TRACK & FIELD—THE LOS ANGELES TIMES indoor track meet produced no world records, but there was drama nonetheless. Leaner on the outside, and maybe tougher on the inside, too, John Thomas finally beat Valeri Brumel in the high jump, clearing 7 feet¼ inch. Igor Ter-Ovanesyan made it two straight victories over Ralph Boston when he broad jumped 26 feet 3 inches to beat the American by 1½ inches. In the mile, the winning time was modest (4:04.7), but the names of the beaten were impressive. It was Jim Grelle who took it. defeating a field that included the outdoor world record holder, Peter Snell, and Canada's Bruce Kidd. Hayes Jones won his 39th straight 60-yard hurdle event and equaled the meet record of 7.1, Marilyn White dashed 60 yards in 7.0 to win, and Herb Carper equaled the national indoor record of 6.0 for the 60 yards. Gary Gubner, the young NYU shotputter, who now weighs 280 pounds without his Violet skivvies, set a meet record of 64 feet 7 inches, and Bill Crothers, Kidd's teammate from Toronto, won the 1,000-yard run after Russia's Valeri Bulyshev faded to fourth. The 500- and 600-yard runs were unadvertised specials that provided the crowd of 13,459 with the best races of the evening. Steve Haas of Occidental won the 500 in 58.0, with Earl Young and Mike Larrabbee timed at 58.1 and Ulis Williams at 58.2. Jack Yerman won the 600 in 1:10.3 over George Kerr and Willie Atterberry. In the height-happy pole vault, Brian Sternberg, a 19-year-old sophomore from the University of Washington, jumped 16 feet ¼ inch to sudden fame, beating Dave Tork, Ron Morris, John Uelses and C.K. Yang.
MILEPOSTS—THINKING: DALLAS TEXANS, of the American Football League; about moving to Kansas City, if Kansans will first buy 25,000 season tickets.
BANNED: INDONESIA; from the Olympics, the first member nation ever so suspended, after being found responsible for "scandalous occurrences" when she hosted the Asian Games and refused to let Israel and Nationalist China enter.
SENTENCED: JACK MOLINAS, lawyer and former NBA player; to 10 to 15 years in prison for bribing college basketball players to fix games. A New York judge called him "a master fixer" in the basketball scandal.
SIDELINED: JOEL EAVES, Auburn basketball coach whose team is in contention for the Southeastern Conference title; after a mild heart attack, for the rest of the season.
RETIRED: WILBUR JOHNS, 59; after 38 years in the UCLA athletic department, 16 of them as director, where he helped what was the "Southern Branch of the University of California" grow to be one of the nation's best-known institutions.
RETIRED: TOM BOLLES, for 11 years the athletic director at Harvard, where he helped formulate and maintain the school's Ivy League attitude toward athletics. His likely successor, assistant Adolph W. (Dolph) Samborski.
DIED: JAMES M. CURRAN; at 83, of a heart attack, after only two years of retirement following a 51-year tenure as track coach at Mercersburg Academy, where he produced such Olympic stars as Ted Meredith (800 meters) and Charlie Moore (400-meter hurdles).