Scorecard

Mickey was not so sure. "I'd love to go on the men's tour," she said. "I'd love to try it for a year. I don't know how much money it would mean, but I think I could make the cut about 50% of the time.

"I'd like to try it because of the superior competition. What a difference that would make in your game! I could—any of the top girls could—play on the men's tour for a year and come back and walk away with the women's tour.

"The only thing, it would have to be that I could sneak on the tour where nobody would know me or bother me—just let me alone. Otherwise, I couldn't stand the pressure."

Well, there goes that experiment. Can you imagine Mickey Wright being mistaken for Billy Casper?

MICKEY MANTLE'S MUSCLES

Pro football trainer Clint Houy of the Dallas Cowboys thinks major league baseball does not condition its athletes properly. He specifically mentions Mickey Mantle, who has been hampered by one injury after another through most of his career.

"Whenever Mantle hurt a leg," Houy said the other day, "he'd rest until it got well, and then he'd go back into the game. Any football trainer knows that after an injury has healed you have to recondition the muscle before you can put a man back into action."

Houy worked with Mantle in Dallas last winter. "When Mickey got here I started him on some leg-weight exercises to rebuild the right leg. He couldn't lift 15 pounds with it. Anybody should lift more than that—his left leg could do 45. We built the right leg until he could lift 75 pounds.

"But his legs have never been taken care of. He's had a Baker's cyst, torn cartilage, strained ligaments, pulled thigh muscle. A muscle tear leaves scar tissue inside, just like a cut leaves a scar outside. Mantle's leg has so much scar tissue that you can see where it lumps up as big as your fist on the back of his thigh.

"Mickey has never taken care of his body the way Stan Musial did. And it doesn't look like anybody ever helped him very much."