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SCORECARD

IRONIC FOOTNOTE
Sport buffs who seek the ultimate in Olympic memorabilia should pick up a pair of the athletic shoes that the Hanover chain now sells under the brand name "Pony." On the underside of the tongue of many of Hanover's Ponies is a label that reads "Official Shoe of the Canadian Olympic Team." The inside of the heel is stamped "Made in Taiwan."

PRUDE JUDGMENT

Nudism has suffered another setback. A week before Nude Beach Day was celebrated throughout the land, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston upheld Federal Judge Frank Freedman, who earlier had sustained the Department of Interior's ban on skinny-dipping and basking in the buff at Cape Cod National Seashore Park. In their ruling the three judges opined that the liberties preserved under the Constitution "do not encompass the right to bathe nude."

In this day when nudity so clutters newsstands that it is hard to find a copy of Outdoor Life or Mechanix Illustrated, it would seem that this judgment is well behind the times. Although in spirit we dissent, in strict interpretation of the Constitution we find the decision without fault. The Constitution explicitly guarantees all people the right to bare arms, but it says nothing about the torso.

MAN'S SECOND-BEST FRIEND

The dog, commonly touted as man's best friend, is giving ground to the pig in Southern California. Under a five-year grant, Drs. Colin Bloor and T. M. Sanders of the University of California at San Diego are running pigs on treadmills to help assess the value of jogging to healthy humans as well as to postcardiac cases. Two groups of pigs are being tested, one perfectly sound and another in which heart damage has been induced. Although not much on speed (7:30 for the mile is tops), the short-legged porkers plug along, doing seven consecutive 12-minute miles in their hardest workouts. As controls in the test there are two comparable groups of pigs that simply lounge around, eating when they want. Although the testing is far from over, Bloor and Sanders have found that the damaged heart of a running pig can be restored to greater capacity than that of a healthy, indolent one.

Why test pigs? Why not dogs, since they easily adapt to treadmills? Because in several important ways pigs are more like people, or vice versa. Whereas in proportion to body weight the vital capacity of a house dog well exceeds that of man, the pig's is about equal, and its heart is similar. Dogs are essentially carnivores, while as Frank White, research assistant on the project, puts it, "The eating habits of pigs and men are much alike." Furthermore, dogs are by nature runners; pigs and men are not. "Take a dog to the beach, and he will run and run," White points out, "but I haven't found a pig yet that will run on a beach, and I've tried running with a few."

ENTER THE D.S.M.
Just when all the baseball gags about designated hitters, designated bullpen catchers, designated managers and designated wives on road trips seem to be dying away, the Southern League has fashioned out of living flesh an even more fanciful creature: the designated substitute manager. Before each game now, to speed up play, Southern League teams must designate the eligible player, coach or player-coach who will take charge in the event the real manager is thumbed out.

MONEY IN THE AMATEUR

In the record field of 2,655 golfers who this weekend will be trying to qualify for 189 places in the U.S. Amateur Championship there are some interesting names from other games: Joel Horlen, former White Sox pitcher; Bob Falkenburg, 1948 Wimbledon champion; Jerry West of the Lakers; John Brodie of the '49ers. West and Falkenburg will have a rough time because they are competing against 104 other golfers for seven places in the Greater Los Angeles area. The best bet of the stars is probably Brodie, a reinstated amateur who once toured as a pro. He will be one of 73 trying for five spots in Monterey, Calif.

Despite the presence of stars like West and Brodie, hunch players who bet on names are apt to be more attracted to an unsung 21-year-old entrant who will be trying to qualify at Solana Beach near San Diego. Teeing off at about 15-to-1 odds is an amateur named Monte Carlo Money. Honest. And he comes from Las Vegas.

ASHES TO ASHES

In the 21 Olympiads of the modern era there have been many unforgettable moments but few that have provoked more than a smile. If you think about it, there has not been an honest-to-God belly laugh in 80 years. We nominate herewith as the brightest sparks of all the Olympic flames those larky English sailors, Alan Warren and David Hunt, who after doing wretchedly in the Tempest class in the Games just past, burned their boat on Lake Ontario.

Although Warren, the skipper of the luckless craft, is an undertaker by trade (in his own words, "a practitioner of the art of reducing solids to ashes"), he maintained at first that he had no hand in the burning. He claimed the fire started when his crewman, Hunt, a sparmaker, dropped a cigarette. Since the final, fateful race was sailed in 17-knot winds on slop-chop seas, there is no way the small, soaking-wet hull manned by Warren and Hunt could have burned to the waterline without prolonged exposure to a blow torch or some other elaborate assist. When the press twisted his arm and otherwise tried to wring the truth out of him, Skipper Warren confessed that the burning had been a deliberate coup de gr√¢ce.

Their Tempest hull was the oldest in the Games, the first to come off the mold of a now bankrupt English company eight years ago. Because they got their boat secondhand for a song, Warren and Hunt called her Gift 'Orse, and to goad her to glory, they glued a facsimile of a horsefly on her rear end. In the 1972 Olympics, Warren and Hunt won the silver medal aboard Gift 'Orse. This year, standing almost last with one race to go, they decided Gift 'Orse's time had come.

It was not an easy end. When Hunt ignited the charge of paint thinner they had planted in Gift 'Orse's forward buoyancy cell, it exploded violently, doing little damage. The second charge in the aft compartment in no time at all was putting out a massive plume of black, petro-chemical smoke, but still Gift 'Orse did not sink until the Canadian Coast Guard rammed her. "She was a great horse," Skipper Warren said in eulogy, "but old and very lame, so we had no choice but to put her down."

CHANGE OF VENUE

On July 14 Ogden Mills (Dinny) Phipps was named chairman of the board of the New York Racing Association at the age of 35. As if to celebrate the appointment, that afternoon his 2-year-old filly Squander won the $38,625 Astoria Stakes at Aqueduct—but that was about the end of it for Phipps on home ground. Over the next 23 days horses owned by Phipps or members of his family won five stakes, but at Hollywood, Monmouth and Arlington Parks, none of which are under Dinny's jurisdiction.

Last Saturday Phipps' Majestic Light won the $100,000 Monmouth Invitational in New Jersey and a few minutes later his Effervescing took the $97,500 Round Table at Chicago's Arlington Park. But in New York, where Dinny's Intrepid Nero was entered in the $81,375 Whitney Stakes at Saratoga, it rained and the horse was scratched.

Majestic Light is now the late-developing star of the 3-year-old season, having won $250,000 since late June, but of his six 1976 wins only one has been in New York. The moral of all this seems to be that a man who is without profit in his own camp should definitely try elsewhere. Phipps, however, is undeterred by the trend. Indeed, he will buck it by sending Majestic Light off in Saratoga's $100,000 Travers a week hence.

TESTING 1-2-3...

Spectators on the NASCAR circuit have come to expect a heady mix of the inevitable, the improbable and the impossible. In the Purolator 500 at Pocono Raceway two weeks ago they got it all in spades. King Richard Petty won as he so often does, and as it often has, the yellow caution flag came in and out like a frenetic marigold. Betwixt the yellow and the green Petty and seven rivals traded the lead a record 48 times. In the process of finishing 24th and 25th (in itself unusual) Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough set records that would be hard to beat if anyone cared to try.

When Yarborough blew an engine, his pit crew changed it in a NASCAR-record 33 minutes, 10 seconds. As for Allison and the Penske team for which he drives, they treated the crowd to a show that will be hard to match without resurrecting the Three Stooges. After pitting on the 45th lap for what seemed a routine change of the two outside tires, Allison bolted away under a yellow caution. As he came out of the first turn, boiling along at a mere 90 mph, the two inside wheels, which had not been changed, rolled off the car.

Allison had been done in by technology. Whereas in olden times drivers got their signals from pit boards, Allison had been told by malfunctioning radio to come in for a tire change. While two crewmen changed the right side, another had taken the lug nuts off the other wheels. But having failed to get the radio message, and thinking it was only a two-wheel change, when the jack lowered the right side of the car, Allison took off. In the Penske pit hereafter, you can bet your boots there will be a fallible human who waves his hand to send the driver off.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Borrowing heavily on what he teaches, five years ago Dr. Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at San Francisco State, invented a parlor game in which players try to break corporate strangleholds and restore competition in an imaginary market. It sounds too complicated to be fun, but then who ever thought that Monopoly, the game where people spend phony money to build small wooden hotels in Atlantic City, would last as it has? In trial runs the only thing that proved confusing about Anspach's little game was its name: Bust the Trust: the Anti-Monopoly Game. Too many folks, forgetting what they had learned as kids about Teddy Roosevelt and the Robber Barons, thought busting trusts had something to do with bank heists.

After reversing the name to read, Anti-Monopoly: the Bust the Trust Game, Anspach sold 74,000 sets in 1974 and 200,000 last year, and that brought him face to face with a corporate giant, General Mills. Although better known for its Wheaties and Bisquick, General Mills also owns Monopoly, which is still a hot-selling parlor game. Although the games are not much alike, General Mills thought—and still thinks—the name Anspach chose infringed on its Monopoly trademark. After a little preliminary sparring, Anspach led off by charging General Mills with conspiracy to suppress competition. General Mills then socked Anspach with a suit claiming trademark infringement. Anspach countered with a suit denying infringemnent and challenging General Mills' right to the trademark in the first place.

Because Anspach is an expert on monopolies, it would seem the fight is right up his alley, but he has found that in a rough scrap against a talented superheavy like General Mills a man needs a lot more than a choice of alleys. Anti-Monopoly is selling better than ever this year, but Anspach's legal fees are eating up the profits. He expects to win and extract one lasting benefit. "I am learning facts in real life," he says, "that will be very helpful in the classroom."

ILLUSTRATION

THEY SAID IT

•Bob Lilly, former Cowboy lineman, discussing the mystique of Coach Tom Landry: "Tom's coaching isn't so hard to learn. What's hard is to believe it."

•Bill Veeck, White Sox owner, describing Dodger Owner Walter O'Malley: "He's the only man I know Dale Carnegie would hit in the mouth."

•Bob Newhart, the comedian, remembering his high school football: "I wasn't much good. When I went into the line on a fake, I would holler, 'I don't have it.' "