Scorecard

Piranhas are easy to come by in the pet shops of New York, where they are not banned, and that seems to be where the Florida fish sellers get them. What is needed, most likely, is federal legislation banning piranhas from the entire United States. Who needs them?

A PLEA FOR EQUITY
The tough Southeastern Conference has recruited a remarkable number of super-tall basketball players in recent seasons and this has set Jeff Beard, Auburn University's director of athletics, to thinking, sort of. After considerable intellectual travail, Beard has come up with a suggestion that we think is jim-dandy. He proposes that the NCAA permit colleges to recruit their basketball players by the linear foot—limiting each school to so many feet of players per year. This, he says, would be more equitable than charging each school with one recruitment for each player with a scholarship, regardless of his size. Under the Beard system, he points out solemnly, a school would be permitted to recruit, say, 120 feet of basketball players. A coach might then choose to bring in 20 6-footers or, if he liked, 40 3-footers.

GLORY! GLORY!
Those exquisite moments of imaginary triumph that are essential to a normal boyhood have been depicted superbly by William Steig in a series of drawings he called Dreams of Glory. And now, it seems, they can come true. Tommy Watson, a Kansas City 14-year-old, will assure you of that. During a recent round of golf at the Kansas City Country Club, Tom played his father, Ray Watson, one of Missouri's best amateurs, Jim Sallee, Tom's school golf coach, and Club Pro Stan Thirsk, who was good enough to qualify for a sectional round of this year's National Open. When it was over Ray Watson had a 78, Sallee a 74, Thirsk a 70. Tommy shot a three-under-par 67 and birdied the last two holes.

ROOM AT THE TOP
A cloud even smaller than a preteen-ager's bra looms on the sports fashion horizon. Currently exciting the swimsuit buyers is a topless bathing suit for women—the very one that Rudi Gernreich predicted in our Bold American issue (Dec. 24, 1962). Naturally, Gernreich is the designer, and the suit has aroused the interest of Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. At Saks Fifth Avenue a cool buyer said: "It's certainly a suit for the individual." From the Southampton Bath and Tennis Club: "I don't think we'd allow it."

SEA-LAWYER SQUABBLE

The rugged lifeboat and the dainty racing shell are vastly dissimilar vessels, but until the other day they had one thing in common. The crews who raced in either of them were assumed to be purely amateur. This was true of the crews on the Charles and the Thames and it was true of the seamen who annually, since 1927, except for World War II years, raced in lifeboats in New York Harbor, cheered by hundreds watching from pleasure craft and the shore. This year the lifeboat races were canceled and, unfortunately, charges of professionalism lay behind the cancellation.

Crews representing Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Norwegian Merchant Marine have dominated the race in recent years. Esso won the last two races, and the Norwegians took the event in the five previous years. This year only these two crews showed any interest in competing.

A spokesman for the disillusioned dropouts explained that "the race long ago ceased to be an amateur event, a race to show the prowess of the ordinary seamen taken from their ship and put into 2,600-pound lifeboats." The Norwegians and the Standard Oil people, he went on, kept crews ashore for extensive training and put rowing equipment on their ships for training at sea. Other merchant lines did not want to spend the money or time in port required to do that.

Loren F. Kahle of Standard Oil, chairman of the race committee for the past two years, said he thought the charges of professionalism were unfair. It strikes us that way, too. It is well-known that training a Harvard eight costs money and no one thinks of the Harvards as anything but simon-pure. Furthermore, well-trained lifeboat crews are an asset worth having, and the merchant lines could do worse than invest in them.

SPELLING BEE