Fast Break

GOLF

102-year-old woman nets hole-in-one

Elsie McLean thought she might have lost her ball on the par-3, 100-yard fourth hole at Bidwell Park.

Instead, the 102-year-old Chico, Calif., woman became the oldest golfer ever to make a hole-in-one on a regulation course.

Because of the slope of the green, McLean and her partners couldn’t see where her ball landed after she teed off.

“Where’s my ball?” McLean asked.

Her friends, Elizabeth Rake and Kathy Crowder, found it in the cup.

“I said, ‘Oh, my Lord. It can’t be true. It can’t be true.’ I was so excited. And the girls were absolutely overcome,” McLean said.

It was McLean’s first ace.

“Well everybody wants a hole-in-one, and I said, ‘Why can’t I have a hole-in-one?’ I came within inches once,” McLean told television station KNVN.

McLean, who used a driver, broke the age record of 101 set by Harold Stilson in 2001 at Deerfield Country Club in Florida.

McLean, who has been featured in golf magazines before, will appear on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” on April 24 to celebrate her accomplishment.

“For an old lady,” she said, “I still hit the ball pretty good.”

COLLEGES

Debating nature of championships

Florida became the first team to win national football and men’s basketball titles in the same school year.

Is it true?

Let the spinning begin.

Reader Ward D. Skinner noted that, “USC football won a share of the national football title in 1939 (Dickinson) which is recognized by the university. The basketball team in 1940 (the same school year) lost in the semifinals of the very young NCAA tournament. What is interesting is that the basketball team was voted a share of the national title by the Helms (Athletic) Foundation.”

Of course, on the court Indiana won the title, after USC was beaten by Kansas in the semifinals. But details, details. It was one of only four times that the now-defunct Helms Poll disagreed with the actual NCAA tournament results.

Kentucky can also boast about winning both titles in 1950-51, but only because the Sagarin Poll anointed the Wildcats’ football team as champions many years later.

POLITICS

Rights, and lefts, of Spring

Will Durst, comedian and long-suffering San Francisco Giants fan, trotted out his national pastime take on the national obsession – politics.

“The World Series of presidential politics may be 19 months down the road, but the players are already lacing up their cleats and playing pepper with fungo bats on the sandlots of Iowa and New Hampshire. Yes, my friends, it’s spring training for the presidency. A spring training where fundraising takes the place of calisthenics. And batting clinics are supplanted by fundraising. And the closet full of Ace bandages is now packed with envelopes earmarked for … you got it, fundraising.”