He Couldn’t Mail in Victory, So He Did the Next Best Thing

The PGA is being played this week on the Inverness course in Toledo, and players may complain about the speed of the greens, but they probably won’t be as swift as they were in 1920 for the U.S. Open.

That was the year that Ted Ray, the Englishman who won the championship, allegedly pasted a one-cent stamp to the face of his putter to deaden his stroke.

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More Inverness: It was also in 1920 that the Inverness club for the first time permitted golf professionals to enter the clubhouse and use the locker room. Before that, they were barred from using clubhouse facilities at tournaments, and had to change their shoes in the parking lot.

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Trivia time: Which teams played in the first football game at the Coliseum?

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Teen-age terror: Joe DiMaggio is renowned for his 56-game hitting streak, a major league record, with the New York Yankees in 1941. However, Dwight Chapin of the San Francisco Examiner recalls that he had a longer hitting streak earlier in his career.

DiMaggio, 18 and playing for the San Francisco Seals in 1933, set a Pacific Coast League record by hitting in 61 consecutive games.

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Fast start: Since 1978, of the 195 NFL teams that won their opening game, 102 went to the playoffs and 63 won divisional titles. Of the 195 that lost, 43 reached the playoffs and 20 won division championships.

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Number switch: Joe Montana wore No. 16 for the San Francisco 49ers, but when he went to the Kansas City Chiefs he found that number had been retired. It had been Len Dawson’s, so Montana took No. 19, the number he wore on a midget league team in 1968.

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Washed up: Joe Donnelly of Newsday notes: “Bret Saberhagen didn’t experience any difficulty as he threw a Super Soaker water gun against a bathroom wall with prime time velocity in the New York Mets’ clubhouse, but he came up ailing when it was his turn to throw a baseball the next day.”

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Just asking: Frank Orr of the Toronto Sun asks: “If the North American Free Trade Agreement goes into effect, does that mean Canadian football teams will have to have four players from Mexico on their roster?

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Way to go, Carl: Nearly 3,000 track and field athletes are in Stuttgart, Germany, for the World Championships that open tonight, and most of them will live in the athletes’ village at Nellingen, a wooded area of former U.S. military barracks left empty by the drawdown from Europe.

Two years ago, in the World Championships at Tokyo, the athletes were housed in a five-star hotel. For some, though, there will be no change. Carl Lewis, for example, is living in a suite in a Stuttgart hotel.

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Trivia answer: USC defeated Pomona College, 23-7, on Oct. 6, 1923.

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Quotebook: The late coach Dan McGugin, to his Vanderbilt players on the eve of a football game with Michigan: “You are going against Yankees, some of whose grandfathers tried to kill your grandfathers in the Civil War.”