PEOPLE

It was, to a great extent, on the golf courses of Kuala Lumpur that Tunku Abdul Rahman put together plans for the Malaysian Federation back in the early '60s. But, said the Prime Minister while dedicating a new racetrack grandstand last week, there was a time when sport proved to be his undoing. Playing the horses, he said, "was the root cause of my downfall. If it had not been for this weakness, I might have been today a successful lawyer and perhaps a wealthy man—instead of a poor and struggling Prime Minister."

That Paramount Pictures divines theatrical talent in Sandy Kou-fax and Don Drysdale must be assumed. But where was it hidden, if it's not impolite to ask, on ABC-TV's Hollywood Palace variety show last weekend? Horsing around with Milton Berle (below), the two seemed to prove nothing so much as how dependent they are on baseball. But even if their lines were not as coyly convulsive as intended (Berle: "You're not very funny, you know." Koufax: "We're ballplayers—what's your excuse?"), their pay was right up there with what they have come to expect for seven minutes of their time: $7,500 each. Still, said Koufax manfully: "I have no misgivings about not being in a movie. I did not really feel that comfortable in front of a camera."

Mentioned repeatedly as a major owner of the new San Francisco-Oakland National Hockey League franchise, Bing Crosby disclosed that his holdings in the team were small indeed, and that he had no interest in sitting on the management's board of directors. Said Crosby: "I think they've got a long way to go—at least seven years—before they can achieve the major league stature of the eastern clubs. I'm convinced they'll make it but, for my part, I like hockey mostly as a spectator."

Holy parachutes! What a comedown! The flying wire attached to Superman in the Broadway musical parted the other night and 6-foot-2½, 185-pound Bob Holiday (who won the role over Olympic Pole Vaulter Don Bragg last fall) fell six feet to the floor. Splat!

"I can't stand bulls," said 29-year-old Juan Garcia Monde√±o with crisp finality in 1963. And, so saying, one of Spain's foremost matadors officially shed his suit of lights and donned the white habit of a Dominican monk. "The only real vocation I've ever felt," he said, "is toward the religious life." But, lo, last week Monde√±o was back in the ring in Marbella—and so brilliant that the heady crowd carried him out the main gate on its shoulders. Meditative hours in the monastery helped him recover his sense of vocation as a matador, says the ex-novice friar in reexplanation. "I have not lost my deep religious feeling, but now the bulls are squarely in focus—right there in the center of the ring and the center of my life."

While Snoopy, the daydreaming shortstop, was blowing an easy infield blooper and Pitcher Charlie Brown was well on his way to losing the season's first game 123 to 0, Cartoonist Charles Schulz was set to musing on some other athletic injustices. "There's something basically wrong with any sport—say football or basketball—that is governed by the clock," said Schulz at his Sebastopol, Calif. ranch—which has a baseball diamond, a tennis court and a four-hole golf course. "Time sets up an artificial situation and detracts from the game." Never much better at baseball than Charlie Brown, Schulz accordingly turned to timeless golf while a schoolboy. "I liked golf even better," he said, "because it didn't require a tryout—and there wasn't any coach always saying you're not good enough or you can't play today."

"None of those chic, tailor-made safari togs for me," said Singer Kay Starr. "I'm going to outfit myself at an Army-Navy store." And that goes for everything else connected with her forthcoming trek into the African veld, where there will be no thoughts of makeup and elegant attire. "I really like the outdoors," said Kay. "I have a little Indian blood in me—Cherokee—and I come from Oklahoma, where there's not an awful lot to do but pop rabbits and go fishing." That doesn't mean she's a fancy hunter. "But anything that comes at me is going to get shot."

His love for afflicted children, said Sonny Liston in an outburst of bruised feelings in Seattle, was always misunderstood as sympathy-seeking for himself. "But," said Liston with dour assurance, "I don't need sympathy from nobody." Because, he said, happiness for him lay in children's homes and hospitals such as the one he had just visited in Anchorage, Alaska (below) and the one in Denver where, not long ago, "I picked up a little boy who hugged me and wouldn't let go for nothing. I had to rock him to sleep. And in Boston this home for kids had a dairy. I sat down and milked a cow and drank milk right out of the cow's back. I'd never done that before." Sonny's convictions were plain to see as he summed up: "I don't care if my heart is as hard as a rock. When I see those kids—some can't walk and some can't hear or talk—well, every man has got a tender spot somewhere, a tender spot for something."

TWO PHOTOS