A LOT OF GOLD IN 48 HOURS

It may have been sport's finest weekend of the year. The most exciting competitors in the country were in action, playing for a seemingly endless cascade of money and a wealth of prestige as well. So rich was the sporting fare that newspaper readers, television watchers and right-in-the-stadium spectators hardly knew where to focus their attention next. Chicago offered the world's most lucrative horse race, and it was almost too apt when the winner—a colt that earned his owner the luscious check below—turned out to be named Golden Ruler. In Akron, Ohio they could well have given that name to Jack Nicklaus. Swinging away before a television audience estimated at 17 million, he won $50,000 on TV's own addition to the sporting bonanza, the World Series of Golf. In sad San Francisco 113,609 people saw their Giants play three games against Los Angeles, games that inched the Dodgers ever so slowly toward the real World Series and the biggest baseball payoff of all time. At stake was at least $9,000 per man for the Dodger players, a bundle of boodle for Owner Walter O'Malley and enough tourist dollars for the city to gold-plate Wilshire Boulevard. At the same time, pro football, the sporting public's real darling of the decade, opened its season. The American Football League showed the amount of prestige it has freshly won when more than 90,000 people came to its first four games. Finally, there was Forest Hills, where a near capacity crowd was rewarded with the first glimmer of a new tennis era. Down went Australia's once undownable men. Up, correspondingly, went U.S. hopes for Davis Cup victories. The Davis Cup may be silver but, as was true of sport from coast to coast last weekend, the present and future were pure gold.

The biggest prize was this check, which Marjorie Lindheimer Everett, vice-president of Arlington Park racetrack, is here handing to Mary Fisher, whose 2-year-old, Golden Ruler, won the richest race of the year. Miss Fisher received the winner's share of the $352,500 total purse.

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