PEOPLE
"The only way I know how to settle this is just to ask you how big your catch was. And no fudging," Governor Dan Moore of North Carolina said sternly to Governors Lester Maddox of Georgia and Mills Godwin of Virginia. The point at issue was a trophy for the largest fish caught during a fishing trip at the Southern Governors' Conference, held in Asheville, N.C. No doubt there are cynics who would snort at the idea of putting a pair of politicians thus upon their honor, but Maddox and Godwin came through like a couple of Rover boys. Maddox told Governor Moore that he thought his fish had only gone about 11 inches. "I doubt that mine would have exceeded 11 inches," Godwin said modestly. "I was a little worried about his falling through a crack in the boat." To break this Alphonse-Gaston deadlock, Governor Moore decided to flip a coin. Godwin got the trophy, and the governors finally got down to conferring.
In the off season a football player should take a rugged job in a steel mill or on the docks, right? Well, nobody told Texas Long-horn Quarterback Bill Bradley, so in his ignorance the poor boy spent the summer working in the personnel office of an airline in Miami. "One of the things I did," he recently mentioned, casually, to a gaggle of sports-writers, "was interview stewardess candidates." "How do you do that?" the sportswriters wanted to know, a question they would not have asked had Bradley spent the summer unloading bales of cotton. "Well," Bradley answered, "first I took a look at their fingernails to be sure they were clean."
"We're proud to be hooked up with the National Football League. You can't get on a subway without somebody talking about pro football." So said one Dickson Fairback recently. The hookup with the NFL to which he referred was the league's endorsement of his company's product, which happens to be underwear. Hanes Knitwear announced its new close relationship with the NFL at a press dinner in Philadelphia, and District Representative Fairback introduced the company's local player representative, Eagle Tackle Floyd Peters. Peters is not a pretty boy. A 31-year-old veteran of nine years in the NFL, he is a tough 255 pounds, two-thirds bald and shy two teeth. He is obviously trying to get into the spirit of the thing, though, having been quoted as saying, "Watching the football and thinking of Hanes I dreamed I played a complete football game with my Maidenform shorts!" Hanes representatives winced at the mention of Maidenform, but they would have felt a lot worse to hear him confide later, "I really used to wear Jockey shorts."
Six-day bicycle racing has returned to London after a 15-year absence from the scene, and to celebrate the fact Britain's new Minister for Sport, Denis Howell (above), gamely got aboard a bicycle and wavered around the city's new $120,000 track. Six-day competition lapsed because it was far too expensive to finance—the current race will require a total outlay of some $400,000—but enough cyclists have been lured to London from the Continent to make up 12 two-man teams. Obviously Minister Howell is content not to be among them.
It is about as easy to get NASA to send you into space because you think it would be fun as it is to talk your way into a real race car just to see what it is like. Television's Johnny Carson (right) recently became one of the few people to manage the latter when he climbed into Andy Granatelli's turbocar, only the fourth man to take out the machine now banned from competition at Indianapolis for being too fast. The deal with the Indy Speedway, which takes a dim view of people fooling around and killing themselves on the track, was that Carson might idle around a few times at 70 mph. Even for a 70-mph run Parnelli Jones and Granatelli took him around in the Indy pace car so that he could find the groove for himself. Carson drove 20 or 30 laps, toward the end of which, says Jim Cook, P.R. manager I for the Firestone Racing Division, he was turning nothing under 90 mph. "They were ready to bail out," Johnny himself said of Jones and Granatelli. "I looked over and all I could see was white knuckles." If Jones and Granatelli had white knuckles the track superintendent nearly had apoplexy later, when Carson got into the turbocar and began turning laps that averaged around 115 mph, hitting an estimated 168 mph on the back straight. When Race Driver Mario Andretti came over to meet Carson, still alive, in the turbocar, still intact, Johnny said, "It's all over, Mario. I don't know how to break it to you. Get a chicken farm."
Texas millionaire Lamar Hunt owns the Kansas City Chiefs, but he does not hang around Kansas City much. His absence apparently makes that city's heart grow fonder, however, because Mayor Ilus Davis recently proclaimed a Lamar Hunt Day, and 95 Kansas Citians took the proclamation, via chartered plane, to Dallas. The 95 belong to a booster group calling itself The Red Coats, and they burbled a good deal about their mission. "We love Lamar." "We never met a man we liked better." "Lamar Hunt changed the entire personality of Kansas City!" And Kansas City made quite a dent on the personality of Lamar Hunt, though he only said, wryly, to his admirers, "I am shocked that so many people in Kansas City had nothing better to do."
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