He Was Always a Player of Some Note

In honor of his last appearance as a professional golfer in the British Open, Jack Nicklaus will be featured on a five-pound note issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland.

He is only the third living person to have an image on the bank’s five-pound note, joining the Queen Mother and the Queen of England.

Nicklaus, on HBO’s “Costas Now,” said it was a pretty nice compliment. But he wondered about “people walking into a pub and saying, ‘Hey, give me four beers and hand me a Jack Nicklaus.’ ”

Comedian Alex Kaseberg, in an e-mail, said, “In a related story, they are going to put John Daly on the 336-pound note.”

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Trivia time: Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of Mickey Mantle’s death. In Mantle’s first 14 years with the New York Yankees, how many times did the team make it to the World Series?

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Pen man: Bernard Hopkins, profiled on tonight’s edition of “Beyond the Glory” on FSN, talks about doing time for armed robbery in Philadelphia’s Graterford Penitentiary in the early 1980s.

“I wasn’t near the baddest guy in Graterford out of 3-4,000 inmates,” Hopkins says. “Compared to the guys that were in there, I was a church mouse.”

Also from Hopkins: “Never cry. It’s a sign of weakness. You can’t cry in jail. There’s no crying in baseball and there’s damn sure no crying in the penitentiary.”

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Cereal comic: Wheaties has a new commercial featuring two softball teams that is a take-off on Kirk Gibson’s home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. Apparently, Wheaties are for home-run hitters and Cocoa Krispies for shortstops.

Jack Wilson of the Pittsburgh Pirates told Dan Patrick in ESPN the Magazine: “I don’t know about that whole ‘Eat your Wheaties’ thing. I’d rather have Cocoa Krispies and go 0 for 4 than eat Wheaties and go two for four.”

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Unification matches: A North Korean boxing promoter, Park Sang-kwon, says he believes female fisticuffs might be one way for North and South Korea to reconcile their differences.

Promoter Rick Kulis of Palos Verdes, the guru of women’s boxing, has been promoting female fights in South Korea for four years. Now Sang-kwon is scheduling fights between female boxers from North and South Korea.

“This is the power for sports, bringing the North and South closer,” he said in a fax to Associated Press.

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Looking back: On this day in 1934, Carl Hubbell of the New York Giants struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin in succession, but the American League won the All-Star game, 9-7, at the Polo Grounds.

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Trivia answer: 12, with the Yankees winning seven times.

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And finally: “I saw where NASA scientists took a big wild swing and, unbelievably, hit a moving object 83 million miles away,” Channel 9’s Alan Massengale said. “The only human I know who could pull that off would be the Angels’ Vladimir Guerrero.”

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Larry Stewart can be reached at [email protected].