At 71, He Has His Good Points

When Joe Sweeney went back to college, he wanted to make the tennis team, but he didn’t want to stint on his full-time studies, his weekly hockey matches, his sailing, piano practice, swimming and diving. After all, he’d already given up football, which, at Sweeney’s tender age of 71, was just too punishing. Sweeney did make the team, and the Salem State College sophomore now may be the oldest varsity player in the nation. Sweeney, a retired cost estimator for a defense contractor, lost his three singles matches in his debut season but fared better with his doubles partner, finishing with a 2-1 record. It may be 50 years of accumulated savvy in the sport that give him an edge. “Joe is a student of the game, so he knows what to do, when to do it and why,” said Grant Longley, coach at the Massachusetts school. “He’s the first one at practice, he’s the last to leave. He takes the ball machine up to the courts if there’s nobody to hit with.” Many of Sweeney’s opponents, while surprised at his age, have respected his playing. Except once, when an opponent yelled, “Lucky,” when Sweeney hit a cross-court winner. “A little later, I hit the same ball and put it in the same place--and he didn’t say ‘lucky’ that time,” Sweeney said.

--The one present that Mstislav Rostropovich truly desired for his birthday was a visit from his sister. But, when he wrote to the Soviet Union asking that Veronika Leopoldovna Rostropovich, a retired violinist, and her husband, Mikhail Tomashevsky, an economist, be allowed to visit for his 60th birthday on March 27, he got no reply. Rostropovich, the Soviet-born musical director of Washington’s National Symphony, then took his request to First Lady Nancy Reagan, and President Reagan took a copy of Rostropovich’s letter to Iceland for the summit meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. “The question was resolved positively,” Rostropovich said. Rostropovich has not seen his sister since he defected in 1974.

--Queen Elizabeth II wound up a tour of Hong Kong with a day at the races and a fireworks extravaganza that attracted an audience of more than 600,000, with the queen and her husband, Prince Philip, watching the display from aboard the royal yacht Britannia in the colony’s Victoria Harbor. The queen, who came to Hong Kong after a historic six-day tour of China, spent much of the afternoon at the Shatin horse-racing track, where 64,000 fans watched her present the Queen’s Cup to the winner of the feature race. Earlier in the day, the queen, who was scheduled to fly to England today, toured a shopping mall and sipped tea in a housing project where, in a rare break with protocol, she gave a 9-year-old boy her autograph.