For a ballplayer with a regal nickname and a classic batting and fielding style, Duke Snider appears to be a very average, neutral­shaded personality. His name never has been linked in the gossip columns with Hollywood beauties; he doesn't show a schoolboy's passion for sport by playing stickball in the streets with kids half his age; he never has been accused of scoring heavily on the night‑club circuit at the expense of his batting average. He is a grace­ful, unemotional player on the field and a quiet, sober man away from it.

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She saw herself in the ring, I knew that. When it became extremely hard for Muhammed Ali, when he couldn't get his feet off the floor, the woman in the seat alongside me, Bernadette Devlin, had a ter­ribly bleak and terribly hard ex­pression on her little face. Here in Madison Square Garden in 1971 she was rooting for Ali for reasons beyond a fist fight. To Bernadette Devlin, established authority in Belfast is established authority in Houston. They put her in jail in Belfast for resisting. In Houston, they took away so much of Ali's career because he resisted. So while Muhammed Ali boxed Joe Frazier across 15 rounds, I sat there and merely watched a fighter, Ali, who had lost much of his ability. But in the seat next to me, Bernadette Devlin looked at Muhammed Ali and she saw a hundred nights in Northern Ireland.

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"Why would anyone want to kill you?" For a moment, Joe Frazier was silent. He stared at the television screen where Muhammad Ali was pronouncing him a "tramp" and a "bum," and shrugged his thick shoul­ders: "I don't see no reason. But I'm not afraid. I'm not even worryin' about it." The New York Police Department was worrying. It was 48 hours be­fore Frazier would meet Ali for the world heavyweight championship, and Frazier's life had been threat­ened.

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It was August, 1960, when I first met Cassius Marcellus Clay, when he was 18 years old and brash and wide‑eyed and naive and shrewd, and now more than a decade has elapsed, and John F. Kennedy is dead, and Richard M. Nixon is President, and those two facts, as well as anything, sum up how much everything has changed, how much everything remains the same. It is ridiculous, of course, to link Presidents and prize fighters, yet somehow, in this case, it seems strangely logical. When I think back to the late summer of 1960, my most persistent memories are of the two men who wanted to be President and of the boy who wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world.

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THE DEBRIS of 60,000 contented customers who had watched the 1963 Los Angeles Open had yet to be trucked away when Bob Finkel, producer of the Andy Williams Show on NBC TV, was talking on the phone in his Hollywood office. His secretary announced that an unintelligible voice was calling from somewhere. "Can't make it out," she said. "Sounds like he said the Baltic Sea." "Give me the phone," said Finkel. Across 3000 miles of foul weather came the plaintive voice of Arnold Palmer, who informed Finkel through the static that he was in Baltimore's Friendship Airport, trapped by a blizzard, and was unable to jet west to appear on the Williams show, as scheduled.

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Rocky Graziano, the actor, author, comedian, ex-middleweight champion, night club singer, television panelist and man about town, hated every opponent he ever fought. Just before the fight and during the fight, he hated them with an all consuming, fiery hatred. Chewing his nails, throwing quick, practice rights, and reading comics didn't take the edge off his anger. Essentially, when untroubled, a generous and gentle, if profane, young man, Rocky admits he didn't care how he won, so long as he won.

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FOR the swing around the western half of the league, the Boston Celtics had chartered a Northeast Airlines DC‑3 which, complete with crew and flight agent, would carry us on the whole trip, from Boston to Rochester to Minneapolis to Milwaukee to St. Louis to Fort Wayne and back to Boston. I arrived at Logan Airport in East Boston with a few minutes to spare and hurried aboard the plane. There was a single row of seats on the right and a double row on the left, and everyone seemed pretty well settled when I arrived. Bob Cousy was in the front single seat, busily shuffling a deck of cards. Bill Sharman was directly across the aisle from him, and John­ny Most, who broadcasts the Celtics' games on radio, was on the window seat next to Sharman. Fred Scolari sat right behind Cousy, with Ed Crowley, the radio engineer, and sportswriter Larry Claflin of the Boston American opposite him. The six of them were deep in a card ,game before the engines had begun warming up.

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EAST FLATBUSH, in the fabulous borough of Brooklyn, is like many other suburbs of the great cities of America. Two‑fam­ily brick houses stretch endlessly; housewives perch on porches in the sun, delivery trucks rattle by, and kids play stickball in the streets, their shouts loud and happy, in your ears. We came to a stop on such a street on a late Summer afternoon, in the year 1948. There were five of us in the car‑a ballplayer, his wife, their 17‑months‑old‑son on the lap of his great‑great‑grand­mother, and the reporter. As we got out of the car, a woman sun­ning herself on the porch of a house across the street called to the ball­player.

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