PEOPLE

It was the risk a museum takes when it permits a favorite masterpiece to be loaned out to a traveling exhibition: Willie Mays, stumping the West on behalf of the Job Corps (at the request, it was rumored, of Hubert Humphrey), collapsed and limped home to San Francisco, the victim, one doctor said, of "nerves and exhaustion." But galloping to his rescue on the Job Corps mission came Lou Johnson, a man amazingly adept at filling yawning vacancies. Johnson, an almost forgotten Dodger farm-system hired hand, took over for ailing Outfielder Tommy Davis last spring and became a major factor in the team's successful pursuit of the pennant.

Ever pugnacious, Alabama's governor and onetime Golden Gloves bantamweight champion, George Corley Wallace, slugged a punching bag in a Miami Beach hotel gymnasium. Broke his wrist.

"A man my age, 31—I should think by now I should have done something more constructive in life," brooding Middleweight Paul Pender lamented a few years back just after he had rewon his world championship. Now, almost three years into retirement, some of Pender's constructive longings are being realized in his job as director of athletics at Massachusetts' Norfolk prison (below). "We hope to get indoor boxing going here pretty soon," said Pender last week. "The guys seem to appreciate it if somebody takes an interest in them. And I'm happy."

Drop a line sometime. New York Post Columnist Maury Allen told Larry Bearnarth when the Met's pitcher followed the sun to Venezuela's winter season. In his first letter, which the Post reprinted, Bearnarth guilelessly noted the resemblance of slurred accents he heard in Venezuela to those he heard in his native Brooklyn, told a colorful story of pitching a game interrupted by a tear-gas and machine-gun riot, observed the favorite local word was "mañana," and said the people were very sensitive. They sure were. Once the letter was translated and printed again in Venezuelan papers, Bearnarth was booed to distraction, got so exasperated he bounced a ball off a fan. Now he has returned to his home on Long Island. That puts him just a discreet phone call away from Columnist Allen's house.

Passing the holidays duck hunting in California's Sacramento Valley, Chief Justice Earl Warren could wax warmly about the scenery ("Out "here I see the sun come up, a beautiful red, a gorgeous sight") even while pondering whether that alone was worth slogging through dark icy ponds in 24° weather. Coming in the first day with only a single duck in his bag, he added: "I also love to see the patterns in the sky—the crescents of ducks coming in. And I do like to get off a shot once in a while." Couple of days later the Chief Justice got off several shots to bag three greenhead and two widgeon, duck hunting's equivalent of a perfect day at bat.

Dante is a swimmer, a skier and an undressed golfer wrapped in a towel. Virgil is a track man, a baseball umpire and a scuba diver. Miler Dyrol Burleson is a babbling, Biblical Nimrod, tennis players Carole Wright and Ann Haydon are fortune tellers, and as for those giants guarding the Central Pit of Circle Eight, they're Olympic weight lifters. That, anyway, is how Artist Robert Rauschenberg has peopled Dante's Inferno in a series of 34 iconographic illustrations that went on display in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. The athletic images, most of which were lifted by ink transfer from photographs in the pages of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, update Dante's own device of using specific contemporary events and personalities when he wrote his Divine Comedy in the 14th century. Said Rauschenberg of his 20th century drawings: "A picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world."

For charter in Miami Beach: one 41-foot Hatteras cruiser named Big Bear and one 55-foot Chris-Craft named Bigger Bear. Ideal for sport fishing, social cruising, cultivated Cain raising. Available night or day, by the week, or however long one can stand the pressure (about $300 a day). Flourishes include professional crew, table settings of crystal and china and first three drinks on the house. Inquire of the owners, Miami Beach Mayor and Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, who, should the occasion demand, could fill in at the helm. "Elliott," says Patricia Roosevelt, "is a fine boatman. He can shoot the stars and all that sort of thing."

Everybody knew why Bobby, Ethel, Jackie, Pat and the kids were there, but it wasn't just a family reunion that brought Washington Mountaineer Jim Whittaker to join the fun at Sun Valley. Rather, it appears increasingly probable that Whittaker, who led Senator Kennedy to the top of Mt. Kennedy in the Yukon last spring and took him white-water boating in Idaho in the summer, will stand for election to Congress this fall. And skiing with Bobby, in that light, may be just another kind of running. Says Democrat Whittaker cozily of his political plans: "Don't say I am running and don't say I'm not."

The Americans rolled up their biggest and shiniest officers—including three generals—but were still decisively beaten in a game of volleyball by the South Vietnamese. Indeed, the finesse with which the Vietnamese unhinged the Americans was manifest in the gesture of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, who left the court on a Saigon airfield coolly spinning the game ball off the tip of his thumb (below).

TWO PHOTOS