Scorecard

An exhaustive check of the archives reveals that the green banana reference is by now pretty ripe, with such noted old-timers as Milton Berle and George Burns getting off their own variations of the line in recent years. The earliest sports usage we could find was from another aging golfer, and it was also British Open-related. At Muirfield in 1987, Lee Trevino, then 47, was asked what his plans were for the coming year. Said Trevino, "At my age, I don't even buy green bananas."

Still Got a Shot

Margaret White, who lives in the Oklahoma panhandle town of Turpin, would seem to be perfectly comfortable filling her larder with unripe fruit. She's 100 but in such fine fettle that she put the shot during the Sooner State Games in Oklahoma City on Sunday, setting an age-group record with a throw of 11'4" as the only entrant in the 100-104 division.

Her son Wendell Palmer, 62, is a senior-circuit athlete too—a shot-putter, discus thrower, and sprinter. But, his mother says, "Wendell is getting of an age that I don't think he ought to do it much longer."

Carr 46, Where Are You?

It evidently has been a long, strange trip. On Jan. 21 basketball Hall of Famer and world's tallest Grateful Dead fan Bill Walton worked as a color commentator on NBC's telecast of a game between Notre Dame and Xavier. The visit was Walton's first to South Bend since Jan. 19, 1974, when the Irish upset his UCLA team 71-70 to end the Bruins' record 88-game winning streak, and unpleasant memories inevitably came up. "I don't have to go back to feel it," Walton told the Associated Press. "That's one of the most disappointing days of my life. They scored the last 12 points of the game. Austin Carr had 46 points. Darn it, darn it, darn it. It never goes away."

Maybe not away, but evidently awry. Carr did score 46 points for Notre Dame against UCLA, but in 1971, when Walton was on the Bruin freshman team. By '74 Carr was doing his scoring for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Darn it, Bill, didn't the Dead ever cover Memories?