Events & Discoveries

Frontier Justice

The effigies of losing football coaches are being strung up quicker these days than horse thieves on TV westerns. But nowhere did range justice come quicker than at Duquesne University where Phi Kappa Theta fraternity happily "lynched" its coach, David Durr, an English instructor, after the team lost only one game.

"He had it coming. If he wasn't so conservative we would still be undefeated," said one enraged student. "Undefeated?" snorted Coach Durr. "They only played one other game and won that by a forfeit."

Diplomat Dick

A high-level authority who may well have played the game with both parties concerned confided recently that Richard Milhous Nixon is a better golfer than Dwight David Eisenhower. Any evidence to the contrary, it was suggested, is just the normal camouflage of a discreet junior executive keeping his links talent hidden from a golfing boss.

Well, last week a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED correspondent followed Dick Nixon around 18 holes, at Los Angeles' posh Hillcrest Country Club, and found the Veep—if golf is any indication—at his discreet and diplomatic best.

On the very first tee Dick snatched his club up too quickly, then flung it down violently toward the ball, which scooted 100 yards down the fairway like a destructed rocket.

Partners Danny Kaye (9 handicap), Danny Thomas (12) and Bernard Weinberg (13), the club president, tried to cheer him up. "You get a Mulligan, a Ginsberg and a Maloney on this tee," said Thomas. Nixon (17 handicap) accepted the offer, hit all three extra shots. The Mulligan soared high in the air, landed behind what might have been second base. The Ginsberg hooked far toward a distant oil well. The Maloney was down the middle, 225 yards, and the nervous Veep felt better.

Almost sprinting down the fairway toward Maloney, Mr. Nixon observed, a trifle less diplomatically perhaps, "I never use a cart. It defeats the whole purpose of the game," and recalled a Washington man of 70 who refuses to use even bridges across gullies because he wants the exercise of walking the slopes. He hit a fine nine-iron to the green and three-putted for what his partners insisted was a five.

Then, using the slightly stilted swing of a man who learned the game late, but a swing showing the concentration which deserted him on the first hole, the Vice-president began to improve.