This Banquet Turned Into a Real Ball

Lee Primm crashed a party in a most unorthodox way recently. He was trying to hit out of a sand trap onto the ninth green of the Wakefield Valley Course in Westminister, Md.

Instead of making the green, his ball landed on the roof of the clubhouse, where it crashed through a skylight and onto a table during a father-daughter banquet that included about 200 people.

No one was injured, but dinner was delayed while glass was cleared from the table and the hole boarded up.

Primm said he apologized, adding, “But I felt rather conspicuous walking into that room.”

Trivia time: What was unusual about the first men’s basketball competition in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin?

Not so fast: Headlines in the Arizona Republic last Sunday were rather premature with the Phoenix Suns trailing the Chicago Bulls, 3-2, in their NBA championship series. A sampling:

“HOME SWEEP HOME,” and “Suns Have Seized Control.” The Bulls won to wrap up the series in six games.

Boning up: David Segui has a bone to pick--with his bat. The Baltimore Oriole first baseman rubs his bats with a two-foot bone directly from the butcher shop.

“It’s an old trick that hitters have been using for a long time,” Segui said. “It keeps your bat from splintering. You press the bone against the bat and rub it hard along the grain, and it seems to harden it. It packs the wood and makes it real smooth.”

“I got the bone from Pete Rose Jr.,” Segui said. “Boning bats was something his dad did. When Pete was my roommate in (double-A) Frederick, he went home and boiled up one of those good old butcher bones. I have been using it ever since.”

Fly swatter: From Mattew Engel of the Guardian, a London newspaper, on tennis player Andre Agassi: “(Agassi’s) hair still hangs out of the back of his baseball cap disguised as the tail of a particularly mangy pony. Presumably, it helps swish the flies away.”

Rat-a-tat-tat: Boxing promoter Don King told the San Francisco Examiner that the sport suffers from a bad image.

“It has that bad reputation because of racketeering infiltration that has been perpetuated in those B moves of the ‘30s. Like the movie, ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me.’ You know, ‘If you don’t take a dive in five your mother gets it.’ ”

Real pressure: Lowell Cohn of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that codes of behavior in tennis matches are often more rigid than the ones you run up against in church or at funerals.

“I once was at a match at Civic Auditorium and just before the thing got started, the public address announcer said spectators were not allowed to walk around the stands during play.

“Forget about someone who had to go to the bathroom. You had to hold it in so you wouldn’t disturb John McEnroe.”

Trivia answer: Competition was held outdoors in a tennis stadium on courts of clay and sand.

Quotebook: Michael Calvin of the London Telegraph on American tennis writers: “An intense breed who rarely travel without a thesaurus and their analyst’s telephone number.”