New Yorker takes the Travers...Winter League game stopped cold...Say it ain't so, Treboh Joe

Stormed
Past the field in the Travers Stakes at Saratoga, 7-1 shot Thunder Rumble. The 3-year-old colt, who didn't run in any of the Triple Crown races, pulled away down the stretch to defeat Devil His Due by 4½ lengths. Thunder Rumble is the first New York-bred colt to win the Travers since 1867. If Kentucky is the Ritz of breeding, New York is a Motel 6. That helps explain why Thunder Rumble got away as the fifth choice in the betting even though he was coming off a win in the Jim Dandy, Saratoga's most important Travers prep. His time of 2:00[4/5] for the mile and a quarter tied for third-fastest in the race's 123-year history.

Whited Out
A Pioneer League baseball game in Butte, Mont., between the hometown Copper Kings and the Idaho Falls Gems, by a summer snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains. The Saturday-night rookie league game was suspended in the seventh inning after several inches of snow fell on the diamond. "It was 88 degrees yesterday, so I'd say yes, this is unusual," said Butte general manager Mark Ruckwardt. "Just another crazy day in minor league baseball. It'll be Chapter 5 in my book someday." The teams planned to complete the game, which Idaho Falls led 4-3, in Butte on Monday night.

Splashed
Into showbiz, swimmer Summer Sanders, who won four medals at the Barcelona Olympics and will play herself in the Sept. 4 episode of the soap opera All My Children. Sanders got the cameo role after admitting in an interview that her two favorite vices were cheesecake and All My Children. Says Sanders, who will be a junior at Stanford this fall, "I guess, being at Stanford, people expect us to be smart all the time, but I'm really protective of my All My Kids time."

Perplexed
The guests of boxing promoter Don King at his 61st-birthday party, in New York City, by the birthday boy. After blowing out the candles on his cake, King said, "My wish is that we love one another, that we put aside hostility." King then announced that he was suing heavyweight Razor Ruddock for $35 million.

Robbed
Of his affection for the motherland and of a bunch of pricey loot, six-time Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Vitaly Scherbo, following his return to Minsk, Belarus. Thieves broke down Scherbo's apartment door but couldn't find the medals, which he had stored at his mother's home. Instead, the perpetrators pinched a cassette player, a VCR, jewelry and over $20,000 in cash. Said a disillusioned Scherbo, "I am now going abroad in search of big money."

Trotted
To a record-tying 166th straight defeat in a harness race, Treboh Joe, who finished seventh in an eight-horse field last Friday night at Pocono Downs in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. With the loss Treboh Joe matched the futility record set by New Express, who never won between 1977 and '84. Said Treboh Joe's owner-trainer-driver Willie Mitchell Jr., "Joe was raring to go in the starting gate, but by the time we reached the first turn, I knew we had the record."

PHOTO

MANNY MILLAN

Thunder Rumble reigned at Saratoga.