PEOPLE
It was not a case of a little old lady from Maida Vale having a flutter and striking it rich, but it was newsworthy anyhow. By picking the winners of all six races at Newbury, the wife of a steward of the British Jockey Club, the Duchess of Norfolk, collected the princely sum of $7,804.30 for her five shilling (70¢) bet. She is a wily horsewoman who takes a firm hand in training the duke's stable. Once before she backed all the winners on the card, and that time she took home $28,000. At Newbury, she bought $70 worth of tickets and finally parlayed one into her big winner. Said the duke of his wife's gambling tactics, "All too complicated."
Perhaps it was just hokum out of Yoakum, Tex. before his coming heavyweight title fight with Cassius Clay, but Cleveland Williams did manage to look like a large Huck Finn. Cutting himself a pole, he baited it with a grasshopper and leaned back against a tree (below) waiting for the catfish. In a little while, so the report goes, he hooked a nine-pounder, and wife Irene caught a black bass. Said Williams' manager, Hugh Benbow, "J had 35 expensive rods down there, the finest money can buy, but all Cleveland wanted was a cane pole. He didn't want a rod or a reel. He did take a fancy, though, to my $4,200 Thunder-bird cruiser."
His intimates have long said that Dwight Eisenhower plays a mean game of golf, but no one has ever explained where his mean swing came from. Recently the ex-President was reminiscing about some of the games he played as a youth, especially shinny. "It was a crude kind of field hockey," he said. "We used any stick we could get hold of, preferably one that was a little bent at the end, and for balls we used tin cans, which we crushed together. When one of those things hit you, you really felt it." That's how a man becomes a mean golfer.
The way Marcello Mastroianni put it was fittingly romantic: "When a man gets to be 40. he gets all kinds of urges. Mine is to own a boat. Ah, a boat is like a woman. She has her own personality and distinction, and you fall in love with her." Mastroianni has a yearning for a black-hulled ketch, and he wants black sails. "They tell me I cannot have black sails," he says, "because the sun and salt would fade them. But the hull will be black. I will christen her Diomede." The name hardly seems suitable. Diomedes was a Greek warrior, not a woman. And, worse still, he disappeared while sailing the Adriatic and his crew was turned into birds.
When Kentucky beat North Carolina 10-0, Governor Ned Breathitt settled back in his Kentucky mansion and waited for the country ham that he had won in a bet with North Carolina Governor Dan Moore. Instead of the ham, he received a 50-pound pig and a bag of feed. On a tag that accompanied his payoff. Governor Moore had written, "I am sending the ham which I bet on the University of North Carolina football team. Not only am I sending this ham, but I am putting on the line a similar wager on the outcome of the next meeting of these two teams." Kentucky is not scheduled to play North Carolina in 1967. and, as of now, no future game between the two teams is planned. "By the time I have won this pig for keeps," said Breathitt, "it will have become a pet." But until the pig is all his, he will keep it in a pen behind the State House. He also announced he would give an extra week's vacation to the state employee who came up with the best name for the pig by November 8 (Election Day). Who said you can't make something of a sow's ear?
A Bat Horse! Gleeps! cried Bat-buffs when Burgess Meredith, the man who plays The Penguin in Batman epics, turned up this week riding a working hunter at the National Horse Show in Madison Square Garden. "I don't expect to win anything here," said Meredith. "I just want to get through it with some dignity." That would put him one up on his only riding performance on TV. Playing a hangman on Wagon Train, he was shot dead and carted away on a donkey.
Being a new employee, Pat Nugent understandably is out to make points with his boss. So when Austin's TV station KTBC announced it would carry the Texas-Arkansas football game in color and asked everyone attending to brighten the scene by wearing Texas orange, Nugent, the station's new assistant promotion manager, showed up at the game in an orange tie. But wife Luci helped the family even more. She wore eye-popping orange-framed sunglasses.
In the past four months Australian Ron Clarke, considered by many to be the best distance runner in the business, has lost his last three races, and now a horse named Sir Cameron has beaten him, too. The latest race (below) was strictly for charity and horse laughs, 12 miles through the sheep country of Victoria. Clarke was first away at the start, but after a furlong it became a one-horse race. Sir Cameron walked and trotted the distance and occasionally would pull up and wait until Clarke came into view. After the race the officers of the charity that had raised $600 were all smiles, but not Ron Clarke. A defeat is a defeat.
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