PEOPLE

"He'll wrestle under his own name," said the trainer and adviser of one of the grapplers on this week's program in Waverly, Ohio. "There couldn't be a better drawing card." Possibly not. The wrestler is Dr. Sam Sheppard, who is making his debut in the Waverly High gym against a pro known around Columbus as Wild Bill Scholl. The match is sponsored by Dr. William Wiltberger, a former Golden Gloves boxer and amateur wrestler himself, for the benefit of cancer research. Wiltberger met Sheppard some years ago in the Ohio Penitentiary, where Wiltberger performed surgery while Dr. Sam was serving a sentence for murder, a charge of which he was acquitted in 1966. During the almost 10 years he spent in prison Sheppard did some wrestling—it was the sport he had been interested in as a young man, before he chose osteopathy as a career. Sheppard is reported to be in fine shape, trim at 195 pounds to his opponent's somewhat less trim 285, and Dr. Wiltberger says happily of the event, "It is a real moneymaker. It's different and it's nice."

"I never had a day's fishing like this before in my life," said Jonathan Winters, properly blissful after the final day of the Bermuda International Light Tackle Fishing Tournament. Winters was the individual winner and captain of the winning team, which amassed enough points to make The Contessa, skippered by Noel Parris (below, left, with Winters, who is holding trophy), the winning boat. After a slow start, Winters, using 12-pound test, hauled in four blackfin tuna, two rainbow runners, one horse-eye bonito and a barracuda—well over 100 pounds offish—in the final six hours of the tournament. Prizes were awarded by Bermuda's governor, Lord Martonmere, and Winters favored the assembly with a sketch in which he played, in the other sense of the word, a fish.

Mrs. Lance Rentzel, who is still more widely known as Joey Heatherton, dropped by the Cowboys' training camp recently and reported on her progress with the names of pro football players. She does recognize No. 19 on the Cowboys (Rentzel) "and," she added, "Joe Namath and the one they call The Scrambler, with the girl's name."

Teddy Tinling, England's fashionable designer of tennis clothes (SI, July 7), is taking his first holiday in years, and he is to be found not on the tennis courts of Monte Carlo but in the bowling alleys of Shaker Heights, Ohio. Bowling, the 59-year-old Tinling reports, has replaced tennis in his life. "In London I bowl four and sometimes five nights a week," he says. "I find that bowling for two hours gives me about a quarter of the exercise that tennis used to. I must be involved in a sport that doesn't take account of the weather, and bowling is a re-vitalization for me at my age." Tinling is involved indeed. In addition to bowling he sponsors a team, the t.t.'s, which won the Surrey Comet League Championship in 1966 and 1968 and was runner-up in 1967 and 1969, and he is chairman of the selection committee of the British Ten Pin Bowling Association. "I can tell winners from losers in any game," says Tinling.

Oregon Basketball Coach Steve Belko is known for his snappy repartee, and during the question period following a lecture at a boys' camp he reeled off answers for nearly two hours—until, that is, one boy asked, "Why did you have to come during swimming period?"

"For my little boy," is a standard explanation of a request for an autograph, but Frank Gifford, at the Firestone Country Club in Akron, was told, "It's for the belly dancer from Yanko's. She was too embarrassed to come in and ask you herself."

"I'll take a lie detector test on this," says Pete Perreault, a former Cincinnati Bengal lineman now with the Jets. "We found out about an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant outside of Cincinnati, the Imperial House, and Steve Chomyszak [a 280-pound defensive tackle] ate 15 whole lobsters, eight dozen shrimp, a platter of every kind of fish they had, another platter of roast beef, two bottles of wine and two whole pies. John Matlock [a center] was with us, and he got so embarrassed that he went out in the lobby and waited for us. The maitre d' came over to the table three times. The third time he asked Steve please to leave. He said he didn't even have to pay anything if he'd just leave." Chomyszak did. As Perreault explains, "He was finishing his second pie anyway, so he didn't mind."

"When I made the list of top 10 hitters," observes Lou Piniella of the Kansas City Royals, "I started getting a lot of mail, mostly from bill collectors." At least the bill collectors spelled his name right. The letter of congratulation he received from Governor Claude Kirk of Florida was addressed to Lou Pinezca.

TWO PHOTOS