Scorecard

BAD IDEA IN MEMPHIS

Last week's refusal by the sponsors of the Memphis Open golf tournament to release Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Stan Leonard for participation in the 34-nation Canada Cup matches is selfish and obtuse. The Professional Golfers' Association tournament committee has backed up Memphis by threatening that if any of the three skips Memphis without a release and plays in the Canada Cup he will be fined $500 and suspended for six months.

Probably the soundest statement on the whole affair came from Loren Tibbals, the chairman of last year's PGA Championship and tournament director for this year's American Golf Classic in Akron. " Memphis," said Tibbals, "has a problem in staging its tournament without Palmer, Player and Leonard, but it seems to me that the international Canada Cup matches in Puerto Rico are of far greater importance than just another weekend tournament." We agree.

PEACE PLAY

President Kennedy's Peace Corps will have plenty of muscle for its job. Those who have already volunteered to help the underdeveloped are highly developed in physical training. IBM machines recently processed 4,000 application forms, and a partial breakdown discloses that 1,928 checked swimming as the sport in which they participated; 1,373 said camping; 792 hunting; 711 football; 574 track; 363 mountain climbing.

Final selection of the first Peace Corps cadres will not begin until mid-June, with more testing and training to follow before they take off for foreign places. After they do get going, however, the cold war may be won on the playing fields of Tanganyika and Colombia, with the Peace Corps teaching the natives not only how to rotate crops and control trachoma, but also how to play baseball and basketball.

LOVE AMONG THE VEGETARIANS

A year ago some money-mad square in New Jersey filled a breakaway bottle with a bubbly, nonstaining chemical and sold it to the people for boat christenings. To hell with him. Since then someone else has put the whole of The Great Gatsby on an LP record sequence.

Well, there is no use getting too morose about these things, because they are gauged for the adult mind, i.e., one that has already atrophied. However, something should be said about the latest beach toy for children. This is a set of plastic castle molds. When the little boy arrives at the beach he fills the mold with wet sand and then goes klumph with it upside down and he has himself a castle.

It would be better to drown the child than to see him start off like this, grow up on a diet of reclaimed algae, marry a fiber-glass girl and grow old listening to The Great Gatsby on hi-fi.