Scorecard

The clownish insolence of the self-styled Muhammad Ali, n� Cassius Marcellus Clay, has become a bore. It is time that he changed his act. He is well on his way to becoming the most unpopular heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson.

He has never been so tasteless as on his visit to the training camp of Floyd Patterson, whom he taunted, without a shred of cause, as an "Uncle Tom Negro," as vicious an insult as one Negro can hurl at another.

After winning the championship, Clay announced that he would conduct himself with dignity, asserting that his loudmouth antics were designed solely to win him a title shot and build up a gate. Apparently he overestimated himself.

WING DING

To measure the annual duck harvest, the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife used to rely heavily on questionnaires sent to hunters. But these turned up several kinds of bias (like bragging) and failure to identify species correctly. In recent years, therefore, the bureau has been sending thousands of big envelopes to selected hunters with a request that they mail back a wing from each duck they kill, along with details as to time and place. This past season 28,000 of these envelopes from all parts of the central flyway accumulated in a freezer in Fort Collins, Colo., there to be sorted by 40 identification experts from the bureau and seven state game departments.

Among their discoveries: several wings from coots, which are not ducks, and one from a turkey, which is not a duck either.

THE WAY IT WAS

As played today, according to Luther Hodges, retired Secretary of Commerce, basketball is sissy stuff compared to what it was like when he was just out of the University of North Carolina.

"Back then [it was 1920]," he said, "they blew the whistle when you began to bleed." He remembered a game he played on a YMCA team against his alma mater. An elbow caught him in the mouth and knocked out a front tooth.

"The whistle didn't blow," he said. "I picked up the tooth off the floor, and the whistle didn't blow. I walked over to the bench and gave it to the one extra player we had, and the whistle didn't blow. It never blew and I had the tooth put back in that night in Durham."