Life With The Jax Pack

The rest of Hanson's team is flexible, and all sorts of celebrities get to play, a few of whom are Anthony Franciosa, Peter Falk, Bobby Darin, Mark Goddard, Michael Callan, Ryan O'Neal, Peter Stone and Tom Stern, who is better known at present as Samantha Eggar's husband. Samantha often leads The Daisy cheering section, and is joined by Anne Francis, Suzanne Pleshette and Nancy Sinatra. The closest that one team ever came to sabotaging the other was when Jimmy Harris, who used to date Nancy Sinatra, advised her not to make a recording titled These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. "That's the kind of intuition they're up against," says Harris.

The games proceed smoothly enough, and are generally won by such scores as 19-3, 28-27, 12-10. Every now and then, however, a special Sunday comes along, like the one when the television crews showed up to make some shots for local viewing. The players were very excited. Most of them had been in front of cameras all of their lives but not, of course, as athletes. Jack Hanson made certain a larger number of dream girls named Annette and Jocelyn were on hand, and his whole stable of players in their freshly laundered red-and-white shirts with The Daisy inscribed on them.

As the first inning was about to begin, the Raiders were all swinging their bats with a venom, and, out on the mound, Aaron Spelling, the producer, was taking serious windups and delivering his rainbow pitches. The girls on the sidelines were posing casually on the lawn, all in Jax pants, their serious hair billowing just right. The cameras were in position. Just then Jack Hanson saw something wrong, and went to the mound.

What he did was, he yanked Aaron Spelling before the game even started and put in Tony Curtis to pitch. Better for the show, he said.

Only Jack Hanson could have subbed an actor for a producer. Only he, only now, and only in his beautiful world. Can anybody in southern California imagine a world without Jack Hanson?