PEOPLE

It's all nonsense about golf carts lowering your scores, says Connecticut's Senator Abraham Ribicoff. "Carts hurry you up. Walking relaxes you," adds the 14-handicap regular at Burning Tree. By refusing to use a cart, a golfer keeps himself limber and has more time to think about his next shot and discuss it with his caddie. "There is no greater adviser on the game," said the Senator, with a shrewd look toward the bag-toting vote, "than a good caddie."

Setting a better example in gamesmanship than in good, clean sport, President John Nason of Minnesota's Carleton College was tossed out of a basketball game between sophomores and faculty for accumulating five fouls. But with an old Rhodes scholar's gift of gab, the prexy talked his way back in to score six points for the faculty in a 25-25 tie.

In the wake of a successful performance, any sports hero is likely to read that he could be elected President or mayor or whatnot. This year, successful or not, the athletes are apparently beginning to believe it. Led by Oklahoma's famed football coach Bud Wilkinson (soon to declare for the U.S. Senate), they are dabbling in politics all over the place. Onetime Catcher Mickey Owen wants to be sheriff in Greene County, Mo. Heavyweight Zora Folley was defeated for councilman in Chandler, Ariz. Jackie Robinson is quitting his job as vice president of a restaurant chain to help nominate Rockefeller. And the former side center on the undefeated 1916 Maine State championship schoolgirls' basketball team (below, second from right) is running for President of the U.S. Her name: Margaret Chase Smith.

"I sold my last car some time ago," said Barbara Hutton Mdivani Haugwitz-Reventlow Grant Troubetskoy Rubirosa von Cramm's son (by her second marriage) Lance Reventlow, confirming rumors that he has lost interest in auto racing. This new apathy, however, does not include other sports. Newly divorced from starlet Jill St. John and waiting to marry starlet Cheryl Holdridge, the heir to Danish nobility and Woolworth profits keeps boredom at bay by ballooning, surfing, skiing, swimming, water skiing, polo and an occasional hill climb on a fast motor bike.

It may have been a "pleasant little trip" for 65-year-old Justice William O. Douglas, but for his bride, Joan, a novice at the rugged life, it was a hang-on-to-your-hat run that she will never forget. From dawn to sunset Douglas expertly maneuvered his tiny rubber raft down the white water of the Rio Grande and past the boulders that clog the 2,000-foot Mariscal Canyon gorge. "It was the thrill of a lifetime," said 23-year-old Joan Douglas with a gulp at the end of the ride. "I want to do more of this."

One entry failed to show up at the Palm Springs golf tournament because he preferred another sport. Amateur golfer Frank Sinatra sent word that he could not play in the 90-hole classic because of a broken hand. "Was the injury the result of the argument Frank had just after the Crosby?" Sinatra's manager was asked. "I don't know," came the answer. "Which hand was broken?" came the question. "If I know Frank," said the man who at least knows Frank's boxing style, "it was his right."

When the word got out that Pierre Salinger was going to Aspen for three days of skiing, reporters rushed to the Denver airport in shocked disbelief. But the man who was once trapped into starting a 50-mile hike soon put them straight. He had no intention of taking his 200 pounds down any ski slope. "My wife is doing all the skiing," said portly Pierre, lighting up a cigar.

Six months after the trampoline accident that paralyzed him, onetime champion Pole Vaulter Brian Sternberg's determination to get well continues to amaze his doctors. "I have to hit them with a muscle before they'll admit I have it," he said, wiggling a toe last week. "I'm confident of complete recovery."

There is nothing of the let-'em-eat-cake attitude about Britain's aristocratic Marquess of Bristol. Bristling appropriately at the objection of local townsmen to his projected million-pound yachting marina at Felixstowe, the kindly lord laid out £140 for a newspaper ad in which, "speaking as one who owns many thousands of acres," he defended the egalitarian principle that "the ordinary chap should be able to have places around Britain's coast where he can sail as easily as the rich."

People were what the famed Mayo Brothers of Rochester mostly cared about, but the taste of Mayo grandson Joseph runs more to animals. After a number of summers with the Ringling Brothers Circus and a number of winters studying animal husbandry at the University of Minnesota, Joseph Mayo is now on his way to the Nepalese jungles in search of the world's smallest pigs. Why? Presumably because they are there.

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