Scorecard

"Mediocre tennis player wants better player to rally twice a week, $2.50/hour."

RENT-A-CAT

A classified ad in the latest issue of the Orleans, Mass. Oracle reads, "Cats for rent. A few choice solids and popular patterns still available. Don't be without a pet on your vacation. 25� first week, 10� a week thereafter. The Oldest Cat Rental Agency on Cape Cod...."

The oldest what?! A child's enterprise? An adult's joke? A multimillion-dollar cat-renting empire? Nope. It seems that two Sundays ago a young woman who lives year-round on the Cape was out driving with her husband, and they were remarking upon the number of flags displayed by summer people. The couple mused that human beings enjoy ritual and tradition but find time for them only on holiday. It was too bad, they thought, that there should be no place for vacationers to rent appropriately large shaggy dogs to go with summer houses, and from this whimsy all it took was one mighty, inspirational leap to arrive at the Oldest Cat Rental Agency on Cape Cod—now, in fact, exactly two weeks old.

"We have eight cats, and we don't need eight cats," the wife explained. "Two or three are fine—they're nice to have purring around—but our cats have had kittens." Unwilling to give them away or sell them—vacationers are too apt to abandon kittens when the trip back to the city looms—it occurred to her that if she rented kittens, come summer's end people would feel perfectly free to return them. Thus if a kitten renter said he wanted to keep the kitten, one could be assured he was going to keep it. Eureka! But how's business? "Our first customer is coming this afternoon," she replied. "A man called and wants a calico for two weeks. He has field mice."

Next question. Why does this unknown man with field mice have to have a calico cat to chase them?

THE UNFIT GLOVE

As devotees of a game that defies perfection, golfers buy all sorts of gimmicks to improve their play—only the game is then no longer golf. For instance, a few years ago ads appeared heralding atomic golf balls that were mysteriously irradiated with cobalt at Oak Ridge, Tenn. and were alleged to travel considerably farther than unexposed golf balls. Next thing you know, they will dispense with clubs and shoot the balls out of guns. Meanwhile, Rod Campbell, a driving-range pro from Bala-Cynwyd, Pa. and Dr. Stanley K. Herberts, a Philadelphia optometrist. guarantee a golfer up to 75 more yards off the tee with a simple flick of the left wrist. It's not in the ball. It's not in the club. Where is it? It's in the glove!

Campbell and Herberts are marketing a little item called the Miracle Golf Glove, which is loaded with four ounces of metal pellets. These, sewn into the back of the glove, add weight to help pull the hands into the ball faster. Additional hand speed results in longer drives.

"I think this glove will have the same effect on golf that fiber glass had on pole-vaulting." Campbell says. What the USGA would think is something else. Campbell, prudently, hasn't asked.