Young Pros

Some of the best college football players in the U.S. clambered onto the field at Mobile, Ala. last week to play their first football for pay, the North-South Senior Bowl game. Few were really interested in the score or even the salary ($400 each for the losers, $500 for the winners). They were there to win the attention of a score of National Football League scouts in the stands.

The scouts, too, were interested not in the score--21-7 for the South--but in the talent arrayed before them. Some of the best college seniors were absent, or already drafted for the pros, or both. Alabama's stubborn refusal to let a Negro play with white men cheated the spectators out of a chance to see jolting Jim Brown, who had looked magnificent in Syracuse's 28-27 loss to T.C.U. in the Cotton Bowl, but Brown had already been drafted by Cleveland. Iowa's Kenny Ploen, star of the Hawkeyes' 35-19 win over Oregon State in the Rose Bowl, refused to appear because he wants to keep his amateur status and play college baseball this spring.

But there was more than enough talent to keep the scouts alert. Scout Steve Owen, representing the Philadelphia Eagles, watched Purdue's Len Dawson loft his soft, leading passes and murmured, "What a ball that man throws." He watched big (265 lbs.) Don Owens of little Mississippi Southern play an abso lutely immovable defensive tackle and groaned to think that Don had already been drafted by Pittsburgh. The South's Coach Paul Brown, of the Cleveland Browns, was frankly amazed at the rugged agility of Florida Guard John Barrow. No pro team had yet drafted Barrow, but there he was, tearing up the middle of the line, opening holes for the breakneck charges of Miami's Don Bosseler. Said Brown: "I want him."

Best of all was compact (6 ft. 1 in., 205 lbs.) Don Bosseler. All afternoon he sprayed Northerners about the landscape, and in 28 tries logged 189 yards from scrimmage--a performance that gave Losing Coach Joe Kuharich considerable consolation. For Bosseler, the man who beat him, had already been drafted by Kuharich's Washington Redskins.

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