Scorecard

I WANT TO HOLD YOUR SONG

Is it possible that Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was just a warmup group for Indiana University's Marching Hundred? Could Lady Madonna have been the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi?

It develops that former Beatle Paul McCartney now owns the publishing rights to some of the best-known and most popular college songs. Standards such as On, Wisconsin!, Buckeye Battlecry, When Vandy Starts to Fight, USC's Fight On and Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech bring in royalties for McCartney whenever they are played.

Three years ago, in a multimillion-dollar deal, McCartney's company, MPL Communications Inc, purchased from
the Edwin H. Morris Company the publishing rights to some 15,000 songs. In addition to such oldies but goodies as Sentimental Journey and Autumn Leaves, MPL got control of some contemporary titles recorded by Willie Nelson and Linda Ronstadt. But the most unlikely part of the acquisition was the catalog of college-oriented songs that the Morris company had controlled since the '20s. McCartney even owns rights to The Official West Point March, Navy Blue and Gold and the Notre Dame Victory March.

Through a licensing arrangement with ASCAP, colleges pay an annual fee of 60 per student enrolled so that their bands can play any ASCAP songs they choose. ASCAP then distributes royalties to songwriters and publishers on the basis of how often their songs are performed in public. What this means is that if Notre Dame has a good season, and the Victory March is played whenever the Irish score, McCartney hears the music along with the gentle clinking of coins. Talk about a rich trip down Penny Lane.

AKII-BUA'S ESCAPE

A sigh of relief went up in the international track and field community last week when word came that Uganda's John Akii-Bua had arrived safely in West Germany. The fate of the 1972 Olympic 400-meter-hurdle champion and former world-record holder had been uncertain since the fall of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in April. Now reunited with his wife, Joyce, and their three children, aged eight, five and 14 months, in Herzogenaurach, Akii-Bua, 29, reflected on his perilous journey to safety.

" Uganda was, in effect, a prison," he said. "Since 1976 there had been a policy under Idi Amin that at first kept me from going abroad to compete, and later allowed me to go only on condition that I'd come back. To make sure I did, Amin kept my wife and children in Uganda. I think he wanted to put me in jail several times [ Amin slaughtered thousands of Akii-Bua's tribesmen], but I guess he didn't do it because I was too prominent a person.

"Since 1975 I had been trying to get out with my family, but there was no way for us to leave together. I had a brother among the Tanzanian liberator forces. He told me to get out of Kampala and go to our home village of Abako, but I knew if we did that Amin's people would get us there. It was better to stay in the big city."

Taking advantage of the confusion that developed as the liberators approached Kampala, Akii-Bua arranged for his family to go to the vicinity of Tororo, near Uganda's border with Kenya, and made plans to join them there on March 30.