Scorecard

At any rate, Boemer allows that the most action-packed fight on his tape is one in 1979 between Bob Nystrom of the Islanders and Dave Hoyda of the Flyers. "They just dropped their gloves and whaled away at each other for about a minute—straight rights and stuff," he says admiringly. Please understand that Boemer is merely calling this the best fight. Whether it follows that Nystrom and Hoyda therefore also had the most frustrations to release is a question we'll leave for the NHL to answer.

HOT INFO
The Phoenix team in the Major Indoor Soccer League announced on July 14 that it was changing its name from the Inferno to the Pride. Though club officials no doubt had persuasive reasons for making the change, it wasn't quite clear why they chose to break the news about dropping the name Inferno on a day that the temperature in Phoenix hit 111�.

BEYOND A SHRINE'S PURVIEW

The National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame last week canceled its scheduled induction in December of former LSU star Billy Cannon because of his guilty plea in a counterfeiting scheme (SI, July 25). The decision to bar Cannon was in keeping with the foundation's practice of going beyond football credentials in considering candidates for induction. Vincent Draddy, the foundation's chairman, said that inductees must be "great football players, but also good citizens, and must have succeeded in the world after football, in business or law or medicine or the military or something."

Though being in favor of good citizenship is a commendable thing, it's by no means certain that a football shrine ought to be concerning itself with such matters. The foundation, whose leaders have spent as much time over the years delivering paeans to "the American way of life" as to outstanding football exploits, has inducted some players whose main achievement was that they later enriched themselves in their business dealings. At the same time, it has failed to induct, besides Cannon, such outstanding players as Paul Robeson, Joe Namath, Paul Hornung and Jim Brown.

Robeson, a two-time All-America at Rutgers and the most celebrated end of the World War I era, was rejected, says Draddy, "because he was a Communist, and the Hall of Fame doesn't take Communists." That explanation implies that the hall routinely screens the political persuasions of candidates and has approved the beliefs of those who have been inducted, a wholly repugnant thought. Although Draddy attributes Namath's exclusion to the fact that he wasn't a first-team All-America, there are, in fact, quite a few inductees who didn't make All-America. The late Chester LaRoche, for many years the foundation's prime mover, was on record as calling Namath unacceptable because "he hangs around saloons." The likeliest explanation for Hornung's and Brown's continued exclusion is that their post-college activities—a one-year suspension by the NFL for gambling in Hornung's case, a show-biz career and a couple of brushes with the law in Brown's—are being held against them.

It's odd that the foundation gives so much weight to away-from-the-game activities while apparently overlooking the on-field misconduct of the sort committed by Woody Hayes, who ended his coaching career in disgrace after punching an opposing team's player. Hayes will be inducted into the hall at the dinner in New York at which Cannon was supposed to have been honored.

The hall has also found it convenient, on occasion, to forget about the very post-football considerations it professes to take into account. Draddy's claim that success after football is a prerequisite to induction is belied by inclusion in the shrine of Jim Thorpe, who had severe drinking and financial problems in his later years. And some inductees, including George Gipp of Notre Dame, Nile Kinnick and Calvin Jones of Iowa and Ernie Davis of Syracuse, didn't live long enough—all died in their 20s—to succeed in business.

The Hall of Fame was understandably embarrassed by the Cannon case. However, it might have been better able to handle this embarrassment if it had steered clear of citizenship questions with which it's clearly not competent to deal. It could then have, without fanfare, entered Cannon's name on its rolls in recognition of his football deeds while leaving it to the courts to dispense punishment for what happened later.

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