People: Jan. 31, 1983

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Tapping golf balls across a green a couple of years back, Jim Flood, 49, flipped his putter around, swung a few times and achieved pleasant results. The president and chief tinkerer of a San Diego-based golf-equipment firm retired to his shop and emerged with the Basakwerd, a putter with a head that points toward the body. It demands a square stroke of the ball that literally forces the player to use a textbook swing. Or so the theory goes. Golfers, of course, will try anything short of pool cues or ball-peen hammers to improve their putting game. Arnold Palmer, 53, gave it a swing, and at the Los Angeles Open earlier this month Johnny Miller, 35, and three other pros were all Basakwerders, at least on a few greens. Says Gene Littler, 52, who has been using the putter the longest: "It makes you laugh when you see it, but use it and you'll stop laughing." Littler has. He boasts the lowest average number of strokes per round on the pro tour for the past month.

Within the troubled mind of Sara Jane Moore, 52, there lies a dichotomy. As a radical marching to her own confused manifesto, she was sentenced to life for trying to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975. But there is also apparently Sara Jane Moore, the needlepoint-loving homebody. Securely imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pleasanton, Calif., she seems to be the model of middle-aged matronliness. Says Moore: "I'm just a typical little old lady in her fifties." And in her jail cell.

—By E. Graydon Carter