Soundtrack

Decibels

Across the land, small-town bands tootled baseball's annual recessional; Dusty Rhodes (see page 21) and fellow heroes were homeward bound. The sound had scarcely died away before there was fresh bugling:

?The new college football season produced more big crowds; 76,204 fans saw the nation's No. 1 team, Oklahoma, beat Texas 14-7 and 69,607 turned out to see Michigan hand Iowa its first defeat, 14-13.

?The hockey season promptly got underway for its long, six-month grind, with the Detroit Red Wings beating Toronto, 2-1: It looked like a flying start in Detroit's bid for a seventh straight National Hockey League title (see page 60).

?Cheers went up in racing for 80-year-old Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, dean of trainers. Sunny Jim realized a lifetime ambition when the Fitzsimmons-trained Nashua, Eddie Arcaro up, won the 65th running of the Belmont Futurity (see page 26).

?History was made in trotting as Scott Frost became the first two-year-old in the history of trot and pace gaited horses to turn in a two-minute mile in a scheduled race.

?Two fathers, an ocean apart, took steps to see that their young sons got off to proper starts. In London, the Duke of Edinburgh, who has been giving boxing lessons to Prince Charles, decided that the boy (six next month) is ready for a sparring partner closer to his weight division. Selected to trade punches with the Prince: Stephen Rutter, a 45-pounder of the same age, son of a U.S. Embassy official.

At the same time, a surf caster named Wallace Pinkham, registered as a contestant in the Martha's Vineyard (Mass.) Striped Bass Derby, decided to take his 12-year-old son, Wallace Jr., out with him and "teach him how to catch a bass." The boy, paying close attention, watched his father cast and promptly reel in a 55-pound, 9-ounce striper, largest in derby history.

Snavely in paradise

A lot of people in the big time go around protesting that they hate it all and would really prefer the peace and quiet of the small time. Very few of them ever get around to making the break and those who do sometimes discover that they miss the rat race they have left behind. Last week seemed a proper time to check up on a big timer who went small time and has stuck with it. This would be Carl Snavely, for a quarter of a century the feared and respected "Grey Fox" of the big-time college gridirons, now in his second season of conducting low-pressure football exercises at Washington University in St. Louis. How goes it with Snavely? Well, by his own telling of the tale, the Fox has found himself a sort of small-time paradise.