Scorecard

John Madden , coach of the Oakland Raiders , was among those asking for a stricter rule. "What I am asking," said Madden , "is that officials give the quarterback, who is so vulnerable to injury, more protection once he has released the ball. Something like the protection given the punter. My God, a quarterback has to almost be killed before anyone gets penalized for hitting him. Remember Terry Bradshaw in the Super Bowl? He hit Lynn Swann with the winning touchdown pass and doesn't even remember it. He never saw the ball caught because he was flat on his butt."

Madden said he was not trying to keep linemen away from a quarterback when he is preparing to throw, or when he is rolling out or running with the ball.

"My only thought is to protect him after he has released the ball," the Oakland coach said. "That's when he is most vulnerable to injury. He has no protection when he is all stretched out in the throwing position. It's terrible. You always see the poor guy lying there looking at the game through the earhole in his helmet."

Repeat: the National Football League has declined to make the rules protecting quarterbacks more stringent, declaring that films showing quarterbacks being injured reveal no infractions of current regulations....

MULISH

One peculiar strain of the virus known as Bicentennial fever provokes its victims into attempting all sorts of cross-country endeavors—running, bike riding, maybe even pushing a peanut by nose from coast to coast. President Ford has suggested no vaccine to cope with it, so we might as well report on The Great American Horse Race, in which some 150 riders will leave Saratoga Springs , N.Y. on Memorial Day and race more than 3,000 miles across the U.S. to Sacramento , arriving in September.

One of the entrants in the $50,000 race is Eva Taylor of Discovery Bay, Wash., who is in the contest to win and to promote mules. Eva proposes to ride a mule—or, really, two mules, since each rider is allowed two mounts. Her favorite is Hugo, with whom she has won endurance races against horses. Eva says mules have harder feet than horses, can cope with heat better and are generally tougher. The standard gait in endurance races is a trot, and Eva's "seat" for this gait is odd. She stands up in the stirrups for 10 to 12 miles at a stretch. "If anything gets blisters," she explains, "it'll be the balls of my feet."

CAN'T MISS
The youngest person to make a hole in one in 1975 was 8-year-old Bradley Johnson, a talented youngster from Dayton , Ohio who stroked the ball into the cup on the eighth hole at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Bradley got his name in the papers (got it in some magazines, too, obviously), which isn't surprising, since most people who shoot a hole in one are written up somewhere. What is surprising is that a hole in one is still an occasion for surprise and comment. Golf Digest , which keeps track of this sort of thing, reports that in 1975 there were 26,267 of them. That works out to about 505 a week, 72 a day. If you figure that golf can be played only about 12 hours a day in most places, that means there is an ace somewhere every 10 minutes. What else is news?

EIGHT-HAND EXERCISE

Along the coast of eastern Africa some adventurous divers like to hunt out octopuses. They sometimes subdue the creature by reaching into its mantle and pulling it inside out—with a whomp. Scuba divers in the American Northwest also consider it sport to wrestle octopuses, which can weigh up to 100 pounds. The divers lure their well-armed opponents from crannies with chemicals that sometimes kill.