25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports 06.21.12
June 4, 1987
The old men beat the young ones, and also the 90-degree heat in Saturday’s 5K Race Against Drug Abuse in Sag Harbor. Ted Haiman, 44, a part-time Amagansett resident who holds the masters record of 4 minutes and 22 seconds in the Fifth Avenue Mile, was the winner in 16:23.
“I wanted to relax in a low-key race,” Haiman said afterward, “but then I saw Cliff Clark and Kevin Barry. . . . But, on the other hand, that legitimized the race for me.”
. . . He came close to making a couple of wrong turns on the final leg down Route 114. “Once,” said Haiman, “I almost ran into a driveway, and another time, as I was about to make a turn, I heard somebody from a car scream, ‘No! No!’ ”
Bunny O’Brien of Water Mill, the race director, was probably that person. “He was running so fast,” she said, “and right down the middle of 114. We couldn’t get him to go over on the shoulder. He was in his own world, I guess.”
. . . It was the first time that Clark, whose own Shelter Island 10K will be run Saturday, has been beaten by a fellow masters (over-40) runner. “I didn’t want to see him now,” said Clark. “Maybe in four to six weeks.”
Haiman is second-seeded in Shelter Island’s masters field.
A cacophony of children, whose number was estimated at about 200, converged on Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park Saturday morning where the avid contestants successively ran, biked, and wriggled over a balloon-festooned mini triathlon course with maximum enjoyment and minimum incident.
Duane Bock, an East Hampton High School senior, was the runner-up to Westhampton’s Brian Soldon in the Suffolk County golf tournament played May 27 at the Rock Hill Golf and Country Club in Manorville.
Soldon, Bock, and eight other Suffolk qualifiers will play in the New York State championships at Cornell University this weekend.
The big news in the East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league this week was the ouster of the “strike mat,” a means by which ball-and-strike calls were rendered virtually automatic. Last Thursday, following a two-week trial period, the league’s managers decided by an 11-1 vote to throw the mat out, thus putting the ball-and-strike calls back in the hands of the umpires.
. . . The mat, which was the width of home plate and fit snugly behind it, resulted in flatter and more grooved pitches. The league’s hurlers, with a few exceptions, found the small mat hard to hit with a high-arc ball, and, as a consequence, many more walks were issued than in the past, and playing times were extended to well over two hours.
Paul Annacone, the East Hampton touring tennis professional, lost in the second round of the French Open on Friday to Mats Wilander, the fourth seed, 6-3, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4.
Hans Finne, the first mate on the dragger Atlantis, which towed for fluke on Friday, said that fishing for one species was rare today, but common in the past. “You used to find a spot and fish. . . . Fishermen didn’t always talk so much.”
New equipment and talkativeness are part of what Finne calls the “theatrics” of fishing. He also applied the term to political grandstanding about fishery conservation.
He shares with many longtime fishermen the belief that the industry left alone manages itself. That is, a species will be hard-hit until stocks dwindle to the point of diminishing returns. Fishermen are then forced from the fishery allowing the species to recover. Against the drone of the diesel, the mate told how fishing as a lifelong occupation was disappearing.
“Real fishermen often can’t take the gaff,” the gaff in this instance being the business of society at large. He said local baymen now seemed like Indians consigned to a reservation by a new society. — Russell Drumm