
SCORECARD
WAR OF THE INITIALS
The Basketball Federation of the United States of America (BFUSA) clearly outdid its bitter rival, the Amateur Athletic Union, in schedule-making for foreign teams. To meet Peru's best players, BFUSA scheduled such opponents as Pittsburgh, Penn State, Iowa State, Wichita, Kansas State, Bradley and Oklahoma State. Best the AAU could do for the Italian national team was to provide opponents like Marion-Kay of Brown-stone, Ind., Georgia Southern, Troy State of Alabama, Gallaudet of Washington, D.C. and Glassboro (N.J.) State.
The AAU struck back. Its executive director, Colonel Donald Hull, wrote to universities on the Peru team's schedule, threatening that athletes who play against the Peruvian team will automatically suspend themselves from further AAU and international competition, including the Olympics. Wichita's Dave Stallworth and Kansas State's Willie Murrell, among others, are Olympic possibilities. The AAU claims jurisdiction over competition between U.S. teams and foreign "national" teams. The BFUSA holds that the Peruvian team is not "national" in the sense that a country's Olympic team is national, though most of its players will, in fact, represent Peru in Tokyo.
This is, of course, a disguised renewal of the boring war between the AAU and the NCAA. There were encouraging signs of a possible era of better feeling between the two organizations last week, however. The late President John F. Kennedy stepped into the AAU-NCAA row and obtained a truce through the good services of General Douglas Mac-Arthur. We hope President Lyndon Johnson will not have to follow his predecessor's example.
NO KEEP, NO SCORE
The nation marveled at Navy's goal-line stand against the University of Texas, when the Texans all but scored a fifth touchdown in the final minute at the Cotton Bowl. What television announcers did not report was that the Texas team by that time was a mishmash of third-, fourth- and fifth-stringers. Coach Darrell Royal had told them, "Everybody who hasn't played, go in and pick a spot." Everybody did, among them Mickey Riggs, a nonscholarship senior who earned his keep by serving food to the other Longhorns in the dining hall.
With a first down on Navy's one-yard line, Royal exclaimed, "Man, we got a tackle playing center and a guard playing tackle, and I don't know what else." Two plays failed. To himself, but as if Marvin Kristynik, third-team quarterback, might hear him through extrasensory perception, Royal said, "26 Keep," a play in which Kristynik would fake to the fullback but keep the ball for an end run. "That will score," Royal said. "You have 40 seconds," a bystander pointed out. "Why don't you send the play in?" "I want to see what he'll do," Royal replied.
Kristynik, a sophomore who will replace Duke Carlisle next season, was making up his own mind. He did not call 26 Keep, and Texas did not score again.
BIKE'S PEAK
Puffed but proud, Australian mountain climbers visiting New Zealand knocked off 7,000-foot Mt. Rolleston in the Southern Alps last week. They knew it had been climbed many times before and half expected that they would find signs of other people's ascents at the top. They did not, however, expect to discover, on the highest, snow-covered crag, a bicycle. It would have been impossible for anyone to carry it up, let alone ride it, but there it was.
The prevailing theory is that the bike has something to do with the New Zealand Alpine Club's training school for young mountaineers, which is situated at the foot of Rolleston. The assumption is that the bicycle was taken apart at the foot of the mountain, carried up in parts by several young mountaineers and reassembled.
Now the police have on their hands a report of a found bicycle. Will the constabulary climb Rolleston, recover the bike and attempt to find its rightful owner? Chances are the constabulary will not.
TRAINING TABLE, 1964
The nation's athletic trainers are in for a nasty jar. They have been feeding their athletes all wrong, according to Dr. Warren Guild of Lexington, Mass. Instead of serving the performer a thick, juicy steak before a match, says Dr. Guild, feed him pie, spaghetti, waffles, pancakes and all such starchy stuff.
Dr. Guild should know. He is a vice-president of the American College of Sports Medicine and senior associate in medicine at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Each morning he runs eight to 12 miles, and he has competed in a variety of road races, including several Boston Marathons.
The Guild theory is that of the three basic kinds of food—fat, starch and protein—starch is best for the athlete's preperformance meal, since its residue of acid is easily eliminated, just by breathing. The same applies to fat, except that it hangs around in the stomach too long. But proteins give off their acid through the kidneys.
"An athlete's kidneys shut down when he exercises," Dr. Guild explains. "When the kidneys aren't working, he doesn't get rid of the acid."
A proper menu, he said, might be made from a combination of some of the following:
Macaroni, spaghetti, bread, crackers, pancakes, waffles, rice, pie, fruit juice, honey, clear candy, baked and boiled potatoes, fruits and squash. "An athlete must have liquids before a game because he sweats so much," the doctor says. "To get salt and liquid together in one combination, I'd recommend bouillon.
"Coaches and trainers do a wonderful job getting players ready for a game, but they don't know much about nutrition. There are about 50 deaths a year in sports. Half of them are due to injuries, the other half are from exhaustion. If we can reduce the toll of exhaustion fatalities by scientific methods, then we are making considerable progress."
Cancel that sirloin. Spaghetti, please—and no meatballs.
NO COMPUTERS NEEDED
Occasional visitors to horse tracks, dog tracks and jai alai frontons often are confused by the fickle flicker of the pari-mutuel odds board. Most of them do not know—until the board flashes it—how much they are owed on a winning ticket. Now the Miami Jai Alai Fronton has done something about the matter. It has thrown away the odds board and is posting the actual amount of dollars a lucky bettor would get back from a $2 wager. Thus, instead of reporting odds of 5 to 1, the board flashes 12—the $2 bet plus $10 winnings.
The system has been in operation since Christmas and has proved popular with most fronton patrons, so much so that Richard I. Berenson, fronton president, expects it to be copied by other frontons and even tracks. He surveyed dog-track fans a few months ago and discovered that at least 75% did not know how much money they would receive for a wager. Most forgot to include the $2 investment.
But the system is not 100% popular.
"It takes all the suspense out of winning," one fan wailed.
COMPETITOR
When Mrs. Chester A. Phillips was 50 years old she took up golf because her husband, who teaches at the State University of Iowa, interested her in the game. Last fall Mrs. Phillips won the women's championship of the Elks Country Club in Iowa City. That was a few weeks before her 84th birthday.
"I hadn't been playing good golf all summer," Mrs. Phillips recalled the other day. "But match play is different, and this was match play. I won it on the last hole by one stroke."
The course is nine holes, and she goes around in the mid-40s or lower, carrying her own five-club bag. Putting is her strongest point.
Mrs. Phillips has played golf in every state except Maine, Alaska and Hawaii, and her husband has played in all but the two new ones. How does she come out when she plays against her husband?
"I don't beat him," she replied.
But she didn't say she couldn't.
THE VULNERABLES
There was a time when National Hockey League goalies faced the flying pucks without masks and—even more ostentatiously—without substitutes. But times and hockey have changed. "The way the game is played today," says Chicago Manager Tommy Ivan, "goal-tending is just too big a job for one man." The only goalie in the league to play every game this season is Ed Johnston of the Boston Bruins. He is also one of the very few who does not wear a mask.
Aging Johnny Bower, who used to man the nets for the Maple Leafs all by himself, now shares the chore with Don Simmons. "It's good for both of us," says Simmons, "and we prolong our careers."
Despite Glenn Hall's standing as top goalie in the league, Chicago relieves him regularly with young Denis DeJordy. Terry Sawchuk and Roger Crozier follow each other in and out of the Detroit nets like men caught in a revolving door. Even Jacques Plante, the original masked marvel, and Gump Worsley, whose turnabout between New York and Montreal was the talk of the season's start, have been forced to share their nets. What with the asthma that plagues him whenever things go badly, and occasional less psychosomatic complaints, Plante has five times yielded up his place in the New York nets to Gilles Villemure. And as for the Gumper—ever since a pulled hamstring put him out of action in October, his place has been so firmly taken in Montreal by Charlie Hodge that Gump and not his replacement is now the substitute. One way or another, these days, goal-tending is an insecure kind of a job, filled with uncertainties.
STILL ROOTING
The St. Louis Browns Fan Club of Chicago, which refuses to admit that the Browns ceased to exist 10 years ago, held its annual meeting in a Rush Street saloon the other night and with solemn, liquid rites chose Roy Sievers of the Philadelphia Phils as the 1963 St. Louis Brown of the Year. Of the six former Browns still active in the major leagues last year, Sievers had the highest batting average (.240), drove in the most runs (82) and played in the most games (138).
Since the end of the season, most of the old Browns have faded away. Vic Wertz (Detroit and Minnesota) retired. Bob Turley is a Boston coach, Sherm Lollar a Baltimore coach. The Yankees released Dale Long. (Long was a leading candidate for Brown of the Year because, as second-string bullpen catcher for the Yanks, he earned as much as some bullpen coaches.)
The other Browns still around are Don Larsen (San Francisco) and, of course, Sievers. When these are gone the club may establish a Brown Hall of Fame, just to stay in action. The spirit of the club is best expressed in the words of one gently swaying member. "The St. Louis Browns will rise again," he said.
HOLDUP
Just before the Davis Cup matches, Bob Kelleher, captain of a U.S. team that was hurting for money, acknowledged receipt of $2,200 from the Tupperware company of Orlando, Fla., a subsidiary of Rexall Drug & Chemical Co. Tupperware President Hamer Wilson had been a five-letter man in high school in Win-side, Neb. and starred as a miler for Nebraska State—all in Depression days.
"I learned then what it was not to have enough money to outfit an athletic team," Wilson explained.
When Australian newspapers reported the team's shortage of money, Wilson telephoned Justin Dart, president of Rexall, and suggested that Tupperware make a contribution. Could Dart refuse? Hardly. He had been an all-Big Ten guard at Northwestern.
ILLUSTRATION
THEY SAID IT
•Red Auerbach, Boston Celtics coach, on how he tried to stop Oscar Robertson: "I told my players to hold their hands as high as possible and spread their fingers wider apart to get more reach. So Oscar shot between their fingers."
•Larry Morris, of the Chicago Bears, on reports he planned to quit football: "You gotta quit every year to get a raise."
•Dick Stuart, Red Sox slugger, explaining to a traffic cop on January 2 why he still had 1963 license plates on his car: "Well, I had such a good year, I didn't want to forget it."