Scorecard

BAD WORDS, BAD LAW

Frank Deford reports from the U.S. Open: John McEnroe worried out loud Saturday night that he would be a candidate for "crucifixion" in the press because of the unbelievably filthy language he shouted at Richard Ings, the chair umpire, and at a TV technician during his match against Slobodan Zivojinovic. Well, don't you worry your fretful little head about us, Junior. Instead we salute you for getting away with what is surely the vilest verbal exhibition in sports history.

McEnroe not only assaulted two perfectly decent men with gutter language of the worst sort, but he also did it in a crowded public arena, and over the air. CBS mercifully had cut away for a commercial in the U.S. at the time, but no one knows how many millions of people heard the outburst around the world over the network's international feed.

In any other sport, McEnroe would have been thrown out of the game and then suspended for a significant period of time. Instead he was only assessed a one-game penalty on the court, and then later fined $17,500 and suspended for two months by the Men's International Professional Tennis Council (MIPTC). The money is chicken feed to McEnroe, and the two months off—probably starting around the end of this month—will come during a downtime in tennis. Even the one-game penalty was a big, fat nothing, inasmuch as Zivojinovic, a superb server, was at the top of his form and would surely have held serve.

The umpire, Ings, is only 22; still, he's one of the five regular MIPTC chair officials. But did he dare pull the plug on the U.S. Open's favorite American drawing card? And McEnroe knows just how far this celebrity license goes. Once he had taken Ings to the brink, he never uttered another of his (as he primly calls them) "bad words." "I'm an old pro in that situation," he boasted afterward.

At least there are now some long-term teeth in tennis discipline. The next time McEnroe accumulates $7,500 in fines in any 12-month period, his suspension will be for 4 months—and the time after that, 6 months. But the punishment should be more appropriate to the crime. If the chair umpires are afraid to default a box-office star from a televised Grand Slam tournament, then the MIPTC should not merely suspend him from two months of bush-league activity; it should hold him out of comparable future tournaments—say, next year's Wimbledon in this case.

And let's have some sense of proportion in the financial penalty. Mats Wilander, the most gentle of sportsmen, faces a possible fine of $60,000 for—get this—missing a press conference that was scheduled to hype a tournament. The message is clear in men's tennis. An assault on decency is a mere faux pas, but it's a mortal sin to cross anybody with a wallet in a business suit.

HAMMERED
Henry Aaron, look out. Mashin' Mike Macenko (SCORECARD, July 20), the slugging second baseman for those behemoths of softball, Steele's Sports, has passed Hammerin' Hank's record of 755 home runs ... and he did it in one season. On Aug. 23 in Terre Haute, Ind., Macenko hit Nos. 755, 756, 757, 758, 759, 760, 761 and 762 in 57-7 and 55-3 wins over Yogi's and the Glenn Center All-Stars, respectively. About the only real goal left for Macenko, who had a .751 BA and 1,422 RBIs with three weeks left in the season, was to hit that toll-free number—800.

MR. POTATO DEAD

It was the 137th game of a 140-game season, and Dave Bresnahan, the catcher for the Williams-port (Pa.) Bills, was feeling bored. The Bills, a Cleveland Indians farm team, were in seventh place in the Class AA Eastern League, 26 games out of first, and Bresnahan had decided to shake things up a little bit. He ended up getting a lot more than he bargained for.