25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports: 09.14.17

September 3, 1992

Fred’s Big Guns came out smoking in the first game of the best-of-five East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league championship series Monday night as Stoney (WAD!) Notel blasted Ken Weldon’s first pitch in the bottom of the seventh inning over the left field fence, triggering a raucous victory celebration.

Pat Galbraith, the 10th-ranked doubles player in the world, who’ll play this week in the U.S. Open, and Pem Guerry, of Chattanooga, Tenn., his “amateur” partner, on Sunday won the eighth Huggy Bear tennis tournament, a Calcutta-type fund-raising extravaganza played host to by the Forstmann family, of Water Mill and Southampton.

. . . Following the awards ceremonies, Galbraith said, in parting, that he had won $60,000. Guerry, once he had recounted the news enthusiastically over the phone, said he had won $38,000.

“Four years ago,” Guerry said, when asked how their prizes stacked up against major events on the pro tour, “the winning doubles team at the Open split $80,000. It’s probably around $100,000 now.”

Despite the fact that Robert Rubin, owner of the Bridgehampton Race Circuit, has filed a development plan with the Southampton Town Planning Board to subdivide the 516-acre tract into 114 house lots, racing enthusiasts who lease the property said they are hopeful “The Bridge” will continue to function in the near future as a racetrack.

Dennis Macchio, the president of Hot Shoe Racing, and Clay Mears, the track’s marketing director, charted plans for an expanded and somewhat remodeled facility at a press conference Monday. The occasion was the news that Hot Shoe had signed a three-year lease with Rubin, ensuring racing at the Noyac site until 1995.

“We are taking a calculated risk,” Macchio said. “We are gambling that racing has a future here.”

Usually the Hampton Classic grand prix jump-off is decided by the clock; it is rare that only one rider in it goes clean, with no penalty points assessed. Yet on Sunday, Jeffrey Welles knew, once he had cleared “the bogey fence,” the 5-foot Harper’s Bazaar wall, which was the fourth of the jump-off’s nine obstacles, that time was on his side. Thus he and his 12-year-old German-bred mare, Serengeti, took their time, and, for the first time, the 30-year-old rider from Newtown, Conn., came away with the Crown Royal $30,000 top prize.

Serengeti tipped the wall’s top rail, but a backward glance by Welles revealed that it had not toppled, as had been the case with five of the jump-off’s nine riders, including the four — Anthony D’Ambrosio, Katie Prudent, Andre Dignelli, and Debbie Schaffner — who immediately preceded him.

. . . In other action on Sunday, McLain Ward, the 16-year-old son of Barney Ward, a veteran grand prix rider, won the Calvin Klein Show Jumping Derby for junior and amateur-owner riders, for the third straight year. The younger Ward also was one of the 35 contestants in the grand prix, having qualified on Friday.

“I guess you could say he’s the Jennifer Capriati of our circuit,” Marty Bauman, the show’s public relations director, said. “Usually, riders don’t come on the circuit until they’re 20 or 22. McLain’s been jumping in these events since his junior year of high school.”

September 10, 1992

Tim Egan, of East Hampton, won the 220-to-242-pound heavyweight national arm wrestling championship at McLean, Va., on Aug. 29.

. . . While he’s won state championships in Connecticut and New York, Egan, who is a meat cutter at the Montauk I.G.A. supermarket, had never won a national title before. 

. . . Asked if meat cutting were good practice for arm wrestling, the titleholder said no, though he allowed as how one of his former pursuits, tonging for clams, “might have helped.”

For his win — there was no cash prize, as in some regional tournaments — Egan will travel with the U.S. team to the world championships in Geneva in early November.

John Kenney, of New York City and Shelter Island, won Monday’s 10-kilometer Great Bonac Foot Race in Springs, besting a field of 200 in 32 minutes and 3 seconds.

“Pretty good, don’t you think, for a father of three,” said Kenney, who, at 36, is “no spring chicken.” Ed Stern, a Central Park Track Club teammate of Kenney’s, was the runner-up, in 33:02. 

Kenney, who set a course record of 31:41 in 1987 that was broken by Kevin Corliss’s 31:27 last year, led from the beginning. Stern broke away from a pack that included Sag Harbor’s Kevin Barry and Rich Webber after the first mile mark. Barry, a former two-time Bonac 10K winner, finished fifth, in 34:21, and Webber was seventh, in 35:04. Barbara Gubbins, of Southampton, who did not race last year, equaled her course-record time of 35:40, which she first posted in 1990.