Sport: Three Steps Forward

In sport’s headlong flight toward new records, new attendance figures and brave new ideas, the businessmen who pay the salaries and provide the arenas have tailed sluggishly behind. But last week three major sports could report progress toward bigger and better things. ¶ The fledgling American Football League is now solidly stocked with college stars of the past season, expects to be in full flight by this fall in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver, Houston, Buffalo, Boston and Dallas. The money is pledged, and stadiums are available. Relations are raw between the American and the established National Football League, and if open war breaks out, it will be over charges and countercharges of invasion of territorial rights, and the awkward fact that some college players have agreeably signed contracts with teams in both leagues. ¶ Baseball’s Continental League has mixed blessings from the two major leagues, a full roster of cities (Atlanta, Buffalo, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, Toronto), and heady plans to play ball in the 1961 season. Problems: getting new players under contract (no team has any. as yet); working out territorial or minor-league draft arrangements with the existing major leagues; leasing, enlarging or building new stadiums after the first wobbly years. Prospects: still iffy. ¶ Open tennis tournaments appeared a certainty as early as 1961 after the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia last week joined the other two members of tennis’ Big Three (U.S. and Britain) in approving competition between amateur and professional players. Also on the docket at the International Lawn Tennis Federation general meeting this summer in Paris is a French proposal that would set up a new class of “authorized” amateurs who could be allowed unlimited expense money for playing. Chances are it will be vetoed.