August 4, 1994
Hren’s Nursery was stopped in its tracks by the P.B.A. last week, ending Hren’s five-year reign as the East Hampton Town women’s slow-pitch softball league champion.
The 7-6 and 17-4 wins, the latter last Thursday night, enabled the P.B.A. team, jointly sponsored by the East Hampton Town and Village Police Benevolent Associations, to cop its first playoff championship. The P.B.A. had won the pennant as well, with a 7-2 record.
In what turned out to be the decisive game, the P.B.A. locked up the championship from the beginning, amassing a 7-0 lead before Hren’s got on the scoreboard with two runs in the bottom of the second inning.
. . . A three-run triple by Trish Notel, a bases-loaded single by Doreen Drohan, and an r.b.i. double by Ellamae Gurney were the big blows in the P.B.A.’s seven-run sixth. . . . The P.B.A. banged out 20 hits in all, a number of them extra-base blows, to Hren’s 12, which all were singles.
August 11, 1994
Curiously enough, the only South Fork medal-winners to come back from the recent national lifeguard tournament in Cape May, N.J., were John Ryan Sr. and his youngest daughter, Sue Ann, neither of whom had initially planned to compete.
Sue Ann suffered a compressed disk on July 29 in the national female lifeguards’ tournament at Riis Park in Rockaway, in the beach flags event. But her desire to enter the national competition was stoked, she said later, when she saw “the girl who landed on my shoulder at Rockaway.” Within moments, she had talked her father, the tourney’s Methuselah at 59, into letting her register.
“She said, ‘Next year, it’s going to be in California, Dad,’ ” said Ryan. “I told her she’d have to take it easy. She said she would, but of course she didn’t.”
Beating opponents in races on the sand to grab flags 20 yards away, Sue Ann went on to win the second-place medal.
. . . As for Ryan himself, he entered the 50-and-over beach flags event, not wanting to embarrass himself in a swimming race. He had never competed in the event before, but he needn’t have worried — there were three over-50s in the veterans beach flags, and there were three medals to hand out. He got the third-place one. “My skills have eroded,” he said, “but I’m a survivor.”
August 18, 1994
Bobby Riggs was in fine form Saturday as he regaled an appreciative Green Hollow Tennis Club audience with some salient details of his Hall of Fame tennis career, which, he said, had almost netted him a championship for almost every one of his 76 years, and which, in the case of his famous “Battle of the Sexes” match with Billie Jean King in 1973, yielded a huge payday.
. . . Frankly, said Riggs, King had won the battle of wits on the court, choosing an outdoor carpet surface that proved to be advantageous to her and troublesome to him.
Further, in a surprise move, she moved well up in the court to receive serve, daring him to put one by her. Try as he might, he wasn’t able to get a first serve in during the entire match, and the carpet surface took the bite out of his American twist second serve, which King would chip back, forcing him to send up floaters that she would, time and time again, put away with decisive overheads.
That match, he said, had “put women’s tennis on the map. They should be paying me royalties, for goodness sakes,” he said with a laugh.
. . . His triple crown win at Wimbledon in 1939 — in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles — reportedly yielded more than $100,000 from bets he placed with English bookies.
. . . In taking his leave — a golf tournament at the Piping Rock Club beckoned — Riggs said to the clinic-takers, “Remember this, hit the shots you know, and let your opponents make the mistakes. Keep your eye on the ball and try not to miss anything. Stay in there. And,” he said, pumping the air with a fist, “fight hard!”
August 25, 1994
President Clinton didn’t show for the Artists-Writers Softball Game in East Hampton Saturday, notwithstanding rumors last week that he was going to stay at Billy Joel’s now that Christie Brinkley is in Aspen. Nor did Gov. Mario Cuomo, who if he were not running scared probably would have liked nothing better than kicking some journalists’ butts in the Hamptons on a summer’s day.
But Paul Simon, Roy Scheider (the eventual M.V.P. designee that day), Tony Randall, D.B. Sweeney, Wesley Walker, Mercedes Ruehl, and Lori Singer did, along with scores of others falling into the ever-broadening categories of the arts and letters gathered in antagonistic camps for the occasion.
A crowd estimated at about 3,000, ringing the Herrick Park diamond off Newtown Lane, looked on, mostly with amusement, but at times with admiration as the Artists brushed the Writers off 6-5. The benefit series now stands at 17-9 in the Writers’ favor.