PEOPLE

Those who paid $83 apiece for tickets to a charity hockey game at New York's Rockefeller Center rink were privileged to see Steve Lawrence score three goals in the first game of his life, Eydie Gormé fall on her fanny and Skitch Henderson fall on his head. "I didn't realize you had to look where you're going," said Skitch, "and consequently I had the aft portion of my skull reshaped."

"Muhammad Ali will box again," says Stepin Fetchit, the champ's old comic relief man. "He'll be back in the ring because the only thing that can defeat him is age." Fetchit further revealed that the wrong end of a shotgun had accomplished what such heavy artillery as Sonny Liston and Cleveland Williams failed to do—bruised that pretty Ali kisser. Said Fetchit, "The champ told me the shotgun had bolted on him when he was hunting in Alabama. He said he aimed it in front of his face by sighting down the barrel."

When John H. Reed, the former governor of Maine, landed in Portland recently, he didn't expect a welcoming committee. But as he stepped off the plane he was met by TV newsmen, a newspaper photographer, a contingent of Boy Scouts and Scout leaders and a team of huskies, which were hitched to a cart. The Scouts handed the dazed Reed a pair of snowshoes, hustled him into a fur parka, plunked him in the cart and before you could say "mush" he was rolling across the air strip. When Reed circled back, a Scout leader told him how much he resembled former Governor Reed. "But I am former Governor Reed," said Reed. It seems he had been mistaken for an associate editor of Scouting Magazine, who was coming in to cover a winter survival course and missed the flight. "I thought he looked awfully familiar," said another Scout leader.

The girl Miler Jim Ryun calls his own will wear track shoes and sweat pants and smell of cologne? The suit Jim bought Anne Snider before their wedding in Bay Village, Ohio wasn't of satins and laces, but then few warm-up outfits are. Ryun worked off any pre-ceremony jitters in characteristic fashion, and in the interests of togetherness his bride-to-be and her father, also wearing a gift suit, jogged alongside. Anne's mother didn't join them, but the track shoes Jim gave her enabled her to whiz through the household chores.

Bob Short, the new owner of the Washington Senators, was recently introduced at a baseball banquet as "the only man who bought a ball club so he could make sure it stayed at his hotel." Short, who also owns the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis, was asked whether the team would stay there when it played the Twins, rather than at the Radison, where it has bedded down in the past. "What do you think?" he replied.

Now on the University of California Board of Regents, Robert O. Reynolds may soon be yearning for the idyllic days when he was merely president of the California Angels and vice-president of the Los Angeles Rams. After all, what are eighth-place finishes and mutinous players compared to the troubles in the groves of Academe?

Passions are high at San Francisco State, but Acting President S.I. Hayakawa, relaxed and decisive from participating in his favorite sports, has kept classes open. "Fishing is good for thinking," he says, "whether you are bringing them in or just waiting, while fencing trains the eye and the responses." A new sport at San Francisco State is window breaking, but Semanticist Hayakawa has been prudently wordless on its virtues. A while back his sports car rolled down a hill and broke a glass door in the now-famous administration building.

Hockey may be a curious passion for a type like Tiny Tim, but he does have this thing for Gordie Howe. "He's so wonderful," gushes Tiny, who requested a seat next to his hero on the Detroit Red Wing bench. "People throw things at him wherever he goes," Tiny's manager explained. "He figures he'll be safe next to Gordie." The NHL thumbed down the seating plan, but Howe admitted, "If he likes hockey he can't be all bad." Undaunted, Tiny sent Gordie an autographed copy of his latest album. The inscription: "Keep puckering those nets."

Lionel Rose, a member of the dwindling, largely impoverished aboriginal race that populated Australia before the advent of the English in 1788, has been named Australian of the Year. The world bantamweight champion is the first nonwhite to have gained this distinction, which previously was conferred on such as Joan Sutherland, the opera singer, and Robert Helpmann, the choreographer. Said Rose when informed of the award, "A hundred and eighty years ago one of my mob would have been a dead cert for this."

TWO PHOTOS