Scorecard

According to the bridal gift registry at Macy's in San Francisco, the newly-weds have chosen the following color schemes:

Living room—blue
Dining room—blue
Kitchen—blue
Master bedroom—blue
Master bathroom—blue
Second bedroom—blue
Second bathroom—blue.

AT LAST, THE LAST WORD?

Propelled by a shift in the legal wind, the San Diego Yacht Club (SDYC) won back the America's Cup last week. In what will probably be the binding judgment in the two-year legal battle over the Cup, the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court voted 4-1 to overturn a March 28 decision by New York Supreme Court Judge Carmen Ciparick that had taken the Cup away from the SDYC and awarded it to the Mercury Bay Boating Club of New Zealand.

Ciparick had ruled that the SDYC had violated the Cup's governing document, its Deed of Gift, by using a 60-foot catamaran instead of a mono-hulled vessel to defend the Cup in September 1988. The catamaran, Stars & Stripes, skippered by Dennis Conner, thrashed Mercury Bay's 133-foot, monohulled challenger, New Zealand , two races to none. The SDYC's use of such a radically different boat seemed, at best, unsporting.

In its majority opinion, however, the appeals court held that the deed "does not explicitly bar the use of a multi-hulled vessel or require the trustee to defend in a vessel having the same number of hulls as the challenger." In a concurring opinion, Judge Israel Rubin wrote that the SDYC "should not be deprived of its victory simply because the design of its vessel was more innovative and more successful in achieving its purpose than that of the challenger."

Mercury Bay may appeal the latest decision, but appellate division rulings are rarely overturned. If last week's ruling holds up, the next Cup challenge will probably begin off San Diego in May 1992. Under a widely accepted protocol drawn up shortly after last year's series, the '92 races will be sailed in a new class of boat: 75-foot monohulls with 110-foot masts. To insure that no syndicate challenges for the Cup in a different type of boat, Cup organizers are attempting to get the protocol legally attached to the Deed of Gift.

Last week's ruling is welcome only in that it brings a sorry episode in America's Cup history closer to an end. As longtime SDYC member Gerry Driscoll put it, "It's a hollow victory, and a hollow victory simply isn't worth winning."

A VIOLENT GAME
Last week, at an exhibition hockey game in Moscow between the Washington Capitals and the Moscow Spartak club, half the game program was in Russian and the other half, containing the same material, was in English. Something apparently got lost in the translation. One English section read: "In case of draws, 10-minute sudden-death periods will be played. If no goal is scored in the first 10 minutes, bullets will be shot according to rules of the International Ice Hockey Federation."

FAT, NOT FIT