PEOPLE

There's this quick-witted fox in Berkeley, England who heads straight for the Plume of Feathers pub when the local hunt club hounds him. Foxy then gives the dogs the brush-off and the hunters a headache by vanishing into a disused drainpipe. Plume of Feathers Owner Phil Hodgkinson is not entirely unhappy over this. "The fox nips into the drain and the hounds can't get him, so the members of the hunt come in to drown their sorrows," he piped up. "It has happened twice this season already. I haven't trained the fox, but he is very good for business."

Appearing on a halftime radio show, University of Delaware scout Jim Grube aptly compared the Blue Hen football team to a Volkswagen. "We've stuck with the same model and made only minor modifications over the years," he said, with evident satisfaction. Grube wondered why the announcer blanched, then turned a trifle pale himself seconds later when he discovered the broadcast was being sponsored by Dodge.

Bob Blanchard, a good junior offensive guard for North Carolina State, 1) enjoys pain and hates girls, 2) likes to dangle from his dorm windowsill four stories up, 3) has tattooed himself to commemorate his worst disappointments and 4) looks forward to not growing old. "Anybody can be normal," he says. "It takes a rare individual to be really sick." Blanchard smashes against walls to test his toughness and believes that football becomes real only when a player has something to overcome—like being hurt. "I feel guilty when the game's over and I don't have any blood on me." As for aging, Blanchard thinks it is undignified. "I don't want to sit around watching myself grow old," he says. "If I do enough crazy things—and I really do—chances are pretty good I'll be under the ground before 30. Line Coach [Larry] Beightol tries to straighten up my mind, but I figure that I'll have him converted first."

It pays to advertise. Disturbed by the deficiencies of his centers, if not by Bob Blanchard, N.C. State's Head Coach Lou Holtz announced his phone number at a postgame interview and said, "If anyone wants to snap for us, give me a call." Tom Christopher, a State freshman, was one of 30 people responding, and, against Maryland, he centered the ball perfectly to kicker Allen White eight times. That helped White average 45.6 yards per punt, and State edge Maryland 24-22. Now here's the kicker. Maryland lost because its regular center, Marion Koprowski, made a terrible snap on an attempted field goal with 13 seconds left to go in the game.

But sometimes advertising does not pay. When Long Beach State Coach Jim Stangeland ran his want ads for running backs in the local papers, the applicants included an Arab; Stangeland's secretary, Julie Johnson, whom he didn't recognize right away because she walked into his office in a football uniform, complete with helmet; a young man whose afternoons were free because he had been cut from the Long Beach band; a 25-year-old father of four whose nickname was Crash because, as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, he hadn't been too skillful.

Kim McKenzie, a 21-year-old golden-haired beach girl from Mooloolaba, is not exactly out on a shark lark. She helps her father man the official shark patrol along the southern Queensland coast from Bribie Island to Noosa Heads. The Australian women's surfing champion. Miss McKenzie takes along her board so that she can surf when the seas are clear and the work is light.

O.K., that's Russian gymnast Ludmila Turishcheva on the left and Olga Korbut on the right, but who is that in the middle? Well, she's one of 13 security guards assigned to protect Olga and other gymnasts competing in the women's European championships last week at Wembley. Seems everyone was worried about Olga's safety: the British, and the International Gymnastics Federation, which was considering banning some of her more spectacular routines on the grounds that they are too dangerous. Maybe they have something there. Miss Korbut had to withdraw from the competition after the vault because she aggravated a strained ankle.

It was because of a couple of dyed-in-the-wool fans that Dallas folks got to see the Cowboy-Giant game on television. To assure a sellout, Paul Vickery of Dallas and Paul Roughand of New York bought the last 303 tickets at Texas Stadium. The cash did indeed come from colored wool: Roughand is president of a carpet manufacturing company and Vickery owns a carpet distributorship.

The Buffalo Sabres recently made a move that should have been a sportswriter's dream. TITANIC GOES DOWN, the headline could have read, because he did. Morris Titanic, the Sabres' No. 1 amateur draft pick, was sent down on loan to the Cincinnati farm team.

TWO PHOTOS