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After retiring from the Oxford rugby team following his marriage last July, Rhodes Scholar Lieut. Pete Dawkins, 23, was cajoled into rejoining the floundering squad at midseason, plunged like a panther into the first "bad show" of his three years in England. Smarting from a series of thumping tackles by an exuberant opponent, West Point's 1958 All-America halfback abandoned pursuit of the ball for pursuit of his tormentor, and vengefully set about choking the aggressiveness out of him. But though spectators decorously booed Dawkins' unsportsmanlike lapse, there was wide rejoicing over the post-match shandy (a concoction of beer and lemonade) that the hitherto irreproachable Yank had at last displayed some evidence of human frailty.
A year that saw the hip little world of Author Norman (The Naked and the Dead) Mailer, 38, go clamorously smash —from last November's stabbing of his wife to his ignominious ouster from a February poetry reading for an alleged "raw recital of filth"—was ending amid the sweet smell of vindication. A Manhattan judge who likes to "gamble on human beings" last week gambled on a suspended sentence for confessed Spouse-Assaulter Mailer. Simultaneously, Mailer's Manhattan publisher, G. P. Putnam's Sons, was venturing a different sort of risk: release of the first collection of Mailer's scatological verse, under the title Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters.
From the best-connected little boy in Hollywood's Rat Pack came a starry-eyed tribute to Patrol Leader Frank Sinatra, 43. After intoning a scoutlike litany of Sinatra's virtues—"energy, imagination, kindness, thoughtfulness, awareness"— Presidential Brother-in-Law Peter Lawford, 36, summed up: "Frank's a giant, a fantastic human. I don't want to sound phony, but I consider it a privilege to live in the same era Frank's in. I do"
The World Champion New York Yankees' strong, silent Roger Maris, 27, who outpoled Teammate Mickey Mantle in home runs, 61-54, during this year's race with the Ruthian record, last week outpolled him among the baseball press, 202-198, to become the American League's most valuable player for the second consecutive year (previous back-to-back winners: Jimmy Foxx, Hal Newhouser, Yogi Berra and Mantle).
Eighteen months after she dropped her 19-year option on ex-Husband Desi Arnaz (but retained half interest in their $20 million Desilu Productions empire), carrot-crested Comedienne Lucille Ball, 50, decided on a second marriage. Her new choice: Bronx-born Gary Morton, 44, a tall, dark nightclub comic whom she met over pizza on a blind date a year ago. Said Lucy, busily making arrangements for a Bergdorf Goodman trousseau, the services of the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, and an Acapulco honeymoon: "I'm looking forward to a nice quiet life."