PEOPLE

Here is what happens when you let Russians, even Russian chess grand masters, loose in France. Some 19-year-old blonde with marron eyes comes along, and the grand masters get these extremely silly bourgeois looks and forget all about Nice's Chess Olympiad, even though Mile. Michele Cabrielle, a niçoise, had been selected Miss Chess. Back to the boring draws, Boris Spas-sky and Anatoly Karpov.

Catfish Hunter of the Oakland Athletics wants to make a commercial. "Not any old commercial," says Catfish. "A dog-food endorsement. Back home in Hertford, N.C. I have 30 beagles and two bird dogs and I buy a ton of dried dog food for them every seven weeks. I don't want any money for the commercial. I'll take it in dog food."

Duffy Daugherty provides an example of why his brief stint as a color man on college football telecasts was kind of pallid. "The action in college football is so fast that sometimes you can't get in a story between plays," Daugherty says. "I was telling one about Bear Bryant dunking his head in a bucket of water. By the time I finished the story three plays later, Bear would have drowned."

A couple of generations ago, down in Arkansas, a man named Dave Hawkins had a problem. Another Dave Hawkins lived up the road a piece, and the least of the trouble was that they were always getting each other's mail. Determined that his children wouldn't have the same problem, Hawkins named one son Falstaff and another Budweiser. Budweiser Hawkins upheld tradition by naming his sons Falstaff, Budweiser, Ricardo Ron Rico and Jose Cuervo. A daughter was named, naturally, Virginia Dare. Young Falstaff Hawkins played last season for the Santa Monica City College basketball team, and his brother Bud played at nearby Pepper-dine.

"Our father thought it would be a good idea for us to stay together," Falstaff says. It's an odd case all 'round.

Wimbledon champion Jimmy Connors was all alone in London after his future bride, Chris Evert, flew home to the United States following their tennis victories. But strolling through Green Park, Jimmy made some new friends and learned a new sport. He happened upon a group of boys playing cricket and, borrowing 7-year-old Shakel Nasim's bat and pads, took a stab at the game. "Do I use the flat side?" he asked, wielding the bat baseball-style, to the merriment of the boys. After a little technical advice from the small fry, he hit a creditable er, uh, forehand smash.

There is a new television program called Fantasies Fulfilled in which people's lifelong dreams are supposed to come true, and one of the first honored guests was actor and reformed gambler Walter Matthau. What do you suppose Walter wanted to do? He hankered to call a horse race at a track. After all those years of compulsively betting on losing nags, Matthau wanted to be able to focus on the front end of the field instead of the back end. But he didn't quite make it as an announcer at Santa Anita. In a race that lasted a little over a minute, he twice lost the field in his binoculars. As Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times. noted, "There are people in that crowd who still don't know who won the race. One of them is Walter Matthau." Rising to his own defense, Matthau retorted, "The habits of a lifetime are hard to break. I had my glasses glued to the horse running sixth."

Tommy Heinsohn, coach of the world champion Boston Celtics, has returned from Italy, where he saw some pretty fair players on a scouting tour of industrial teams. Bill Bradley, for instance. Bradley was playing for a team in Chieti, and naturally enough Heinsohn wanted to know why. Bradley's Italian career started when he married a German-born girl last year. "He promised his in-laws tickets for the World Cup soccer games," Heinsohn explains. "Bill thought it would be easy to get them through Madison Square Garden. It wasn't." Bradley then sought tickets through other means. Some Italian ticket types promised him World Cup ducats worth $2,000, according to them, if he would agree to play a few games for the industrial basketball league. It was an offer Bradley couldn't refuse.

A cattle roper all his life, and a sometime participant in rodeos, Tommy Barris of Atoka, Okla. used his skill with a lasso to save a co-worker who had been knocked for a loop by a high-voltage power line. An Atoka County road crew of which Barris was a member was clearing brush and limbs away from a county road when a falling tree brought down a 7,200-volt line, which fell across the grader Lee Roy Tigert was driving. The shock knocked Tigert under the machine, where he could not be reached without touching the electrified grader. Summoned from several miles down the road, Barris lassoed Tigert's legs and dragged him to safety.

TWO PHOTOS