Scorecard

According to his close friend, Igor Ter-Ovanesyan , a rundown of Brumel's best marks in decathlon events adds up to 8,414 points, only 269 short of Rafer Johnson 's world record of 8,683. Although Brumel's best times and distances were not recorded under the demanding decathlon schedule—10 events in two days—at least they show remarkable promise. A little practice in some of his weak events, for example, would surely add hundreds of points to Brumel's total. His best 110-meter hurdles time, for instance, is 16.2 seconds, but experts believe that with two weeks' practice he could bring it down to 14.9 or better, adding 283 points to his total.

Brumel starts the decathlon with the enormous advantage of a virtually sure 1,500 points for a high jump of 7 feet � inch, a height he has cleared more than a hundred times in competition.

The outlook: Brumel could hit 9,000 points or better in less than a year. Footnote: C. K. Yang of Formosa and UCLA hopes to make the magic 9,000 points first.

ROCK OF AGES

Somewhere between 12,000 and a million years ago, a massive tongue of Puget Glacier, advancing down into Washington State from Canada , gouged huge boulders out of the Fraser River bed and shoved them south as far as the foothills of Mount Rainier . When the glacier receded it dropped the boulders in a long string up and down the Puget Sound area. The most impressive, a haystack-sized rock, came to rest precariously on a South Bellingham hillside. In the past 100 years the 600-ton giant has become the subject of legend, has given sport to thousands and has provided from its summit a most exhilarating view. Now the State Department of Highways has put it down as an "obstruction" to the freeway it is pushing from Seattle to Vancouver , B.C. , and has marked it for destruction.

Well, that has been tried before. It has been tried by Irish miners, Swedish loggers and the WPA, none of whom ever made a dent in it or budged it an inch. So impervious has it been, turning aside steel drills like matchsticks, that the city fathers of Bellingham were forced to split Donovan Street around both its sides, with the rock in the center like the pit in a cherry.

Though generations of kids have found it ideal for playing king-of-the-mountain, the miners and loggers have had the most fun with it. Miners and loggers cannot exist in the same saloon without an argument, and the argument, 70 years ago, used to be whether miners or loggers would be the first to send the rock toppling down the hillside, unconcerned about the fate of farmhouses in the valley. So out they would troop from Mike Slattery's saloon and charge up the hill, the miners laden with picks and drills and blasting powder, the loggers toting axes with which to chop down trees to be used as levers, both taking the precaution to haul along a barrel of beer. The miners would ruin their drills and explode their charges harmlessly. The loggers would place a log against the upper side of the rock, lever a plank as pry across it and, with mighty, roaring heavehos, try 20-strong to jolt the rock from out of its bed. Eventually the beer would run out.

It may run out for the highway department, too, and we hope it does.

REPEAL OF THE UNWRITTEN LAW

Back in 1956, riled by the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision, Mississippi State University withdrew its basketball team from the Evansville, Ind. invitational basketball tournament. It became unwritten law that MSU would play in no tournament that included desegregated teams. It was a most unpopular law with players, students, sports fans and most Mississippi sports-writers, who clamored for its repeal. The clamor became uproarious last week. Students circulated petitions that the basketball team (21 victories, 5 defeats), Southeastern Conference champions, be sent to the NCAA basketball tournament at East Lansing , Mich. , where its opponent would be Loyola of Chicago . The Loyola first string: four Negroes, one white player. M. M. Roberts, one state college board member, howled that such a game would be "the greatest challenge to our way of life since the Reconstruction."