PEOPLE

"I left my heart in San Francisco," croons Golfter Tony Jacklin on his new Columbia album, Tony Jacklin Swings Into. As the latest in a series of athletes (Joe Frazier, George Blanda, Bud Harrelson, Gary Player) who have tried the singing game, Jacklin is pursuing a desire "to try and emulate the great Sinatra," says the album blurb. But, while one critic conceded that the choice of material was Sinatrian (Come Fly with Me, The Nearness of You), the voice was still a drive and a three-wood away.

Charles O. Finley has tangled with all sorts of people over the years—players, fans, his fellow club owners—but he has yet to cross swords with environmentalists. Well, a puckish sports-writer in San Francisco almost corrected that oversight. He reported that Finley's California Golden Seals hockey players would start wearing skates made from the hides of polar bears, an endangered species. Club officials had to explain quickly that the boots were made from the hides of that scarcely endangered old favorite, the common cow.

James W. Wyly, a 240-pound former University of Texas student, is not entitled to collect $13,000 in damages for injuries he suffered while a contestant in a national lap-sitting contest. Wyly should have known, ruled the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, that with 14 coeds perched on his lap, the wooden chair he was sitting on would collapse. He probably never gave it a thought.

During the television coverage of the Buffalo Braves-Cincinnati Royals basketball game on Buffalo's WBEN-TV Jan. 8, CBS (or somebody) pulled a Heidi. Right in the middle of the first half, fans were suddenly confronted by that week's episode of All in the Family. The show ran its half-hour course, and then WBEN returned to the second half of the Braves-Royals contest. Buffalo won, 97-87, which was fine. But, as Archie Bunker might have said, TV ought to learn to stifle itself.

Mark Harmon, son of Michigan's Tom Harmon, and a standout quarterback for Pierce Junior College, has decided not to spend his last two college years at his dad's alma mater, but at UCLA. Bruin Athletic Director J.D. Morgan ought to be pleased to be getting Mark's services. In fact, if Mark is half the player Old 98 was, he's a cinch to be great. And guess which jersey he gets if that proves the case? Sure, Old 49.

Johnny Rodgers, the Nebraska flanker back and punt returner who won All-America honors for heroics like running kicks back for touchdowns against Oklahoma and Alabama, entered a hospital in Omaha after the Orange Bowl to have what he called a few minor ailments checked out. These include injured ligaments and tendons, arthritis, an ulcer and bronchitis. Otherwise, Johnny says he is fine—"except that sometimes my asthma bothers me."

Denmark's new monarch, 31-year-old Queen Margrethe II, is blonde, blue-eyed, tall and athletic as all get out. At school she was adept at the high jump and amiably lists a few of her other interests: riding, tennis, skiing, swimming and running. Fortunately, since she is more symbol than ruler, the lively Queen won't have to run the court; she can just take a few laps around it.

Word is just coming through from the Antarctic that yet another football bowl has been emptied. The Pole Bowl at South Pole Station, which was played New Year's Day in 20-below-zero weather, was won by the Summer Support crew, which beat the Winter Over crew when Pete Kron threw a 35-yard touchdown pass to Lee Mattis in the fifth quarter of a scoreless tie. Guess they don't play sudden-death overtimes down there—just chilled fifths.

Massachusetts state legislator Jon Rotenberg. perhaps recalling the exploits of Yankee sailors in Southern waters during the Revolutionary War, initiated a brief action with the Coast Guard off Key Biscayne last month. It seems that Rotenberg and a party of revelers aboard his 39-foot yacht Named After You twice violated the security zone around President Nixon's private beach—mostly, says Rotenberg, because nobody aboard was a very good sailor. On the second intrusion the Coast Guard put a man aboard to make sure the boat left the quarantined area. The Coast Guardsman said Rotenberg's guests mocked and abused him, and disobeyed his instructions to stop taking pictures of the Presidential compound. Rotenberg called it a misunderstanding, but last week the Coast Guard impounded the $19,000 vessel, which Rotenberg had owned for just a week before the Battle of Key Biscayne.

Britain's top soccer player, George Best, whose highly publicized escapades have earned him the sobriquet "the Joe Namath of soccer," went on a caper last week that made Joe look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. First, with his Manchester United team facing a key game, George forgot to show up. Then the long-haired British sex symbol was tracked down in the wee hours with girl friend Carolyn Moore, the current Miss Great Britain, at a London nightspot. Manager Frank O'Farrell quickly fined Georgie two weeks' pay (about $1,000) and ordered him to move into a boardinghouse run by a "motherly landlady." Miss Great Britain observed, "This will restrict his courting." Not if we know Joe...uh, George.

It will probably never hit the bestseller list, but every long-suffering football fan would no doubt profit from a paper written by H.T.E. Hertzberg of the Air Force's Medical Research Laboratory. Its title: The Human Buttocks in Sitting Pressures.

TWO PHOTOS