"We'll employ the Agnew hook," said Arizona's Morris Udall, co-captain of the Democrats' congressional basketball team. "This ploy," he explained, involves "intimidating scowls and feigned throws at the press table, followed by a wild charge to the south end of the court while shouting slogans, epithets and five-syllable words. While the ball occasionally ends up in my mouth, 65% of the fans who have watched this maneuver approve of it." Another Udall tactic was "the Haynsworth-Carswell shuffle--sending in a series of second and third stringers, one after another, until one of them scores." Neither Udall's wit nor his jump shot--he was a basketball star at the University of Arizona--could stop the Republicans. Thanks largely to California Congressman Bob Mathias, former Olympic decathlon champ, the G.O.P. took the 24-minute exhibition 13-12.

Rock Guitarist Eric Clapton, 25, son of a bricklayer, may soon marry Alice Ormsby Gore, 17, daughter of former British Ambassador to the U.S. Lord Harlech--with her father's blessing. "She has gone to see him in New York," said Harlech, "and if they want to get married it is entirely their own affair. They are old friends, and I know Eric very well." Mod Londoners may feel the honor is all Harlech's. A rock-magazine poll named Clapton, formerly of Cream and Blind Faith, the world's top musician.

A visit to Mme. Tussaud's wax museum, an American ambassador once observed, "is just like an ordinary English evening party." Last week, as Mme. Tussaud's celebrated its 200th anniversary in London, the company was a bit more animated. At a dinner in Tussaud's halls, with the likenesses of Mao and Churchill staring eerily on, Earl Mountbatten examined himself and said: "Every few years they bring you up to date--take out a few hairs, add a wrinkle." Perhaps the only personage whose image had improved was Mary Queen of Scots. Her biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser, posed before a replica of the Queen's executioner in a duplicate of the costume that the waxen Mary wears in the museum.

Senator Edward Kennedy got the good word from his niece Kathleen, 18, the moment he stepped off his plane from Ireland. "We found Freckles!" she shouted. Answering the call of the wild, the late Robert Kennedy's favorite spaniel had taken to the woods near the family estate in McLean, Va. A reward was offered, search parties combed the area, all to no avail. After a two-day dog hunt, Freckles slouched home on his own, muddy but unbowed.

The jazzman has this thing with the fuzz. Last October, Brooklyn patrolmen arrived to help him out after someone creased his hip with a bullet and ended up arresting him for possessing pot. This time Manhattan cops just wanted to see his driver's license. As Trumpeter Miles Davis rummaged through a bag looking for the license, out fell a pair of brass knuckles. Though it is a felony to carry knucks in New York, the judge let Davis off with a $100 fine for driving without a license.

The formal manners of international diplomacy must have come easily to U.N. Secretary-General U Thant. A Burmese youth is taught to show respect for parents and elders by prostrating himself when he leaves their presence. And a son is never too old or too important to kowtow to his mother, as the 61-year-old statesman demonstrated last week at the Rangoon home of Daw Nan Thaung, 87.

Dropping in on a class in the Eskimo language at Rankin Inlet, Northwest Territories, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau learned one phrase --possibly the only one a visitor needs in that bleak settlement. The word is takva oost, and it means goodbye.

"I'd hate to see them get too long," said Adlai Stevenson III. "Generally, I am happier when they are short," pronounced John D. Rockefeller IV. Sideburns? Speeches? Novels? Contempt sentences? What the two young politicians were discussing was hemlines. The subject heated up as a result of Mme. Georges Pompidou's triumphant American tour with those calf-clutching Longuettes from Paris. In women's eyes, at least, Mme. Pompidou just may have tipped the scales in the year's mini-midi-maxi skirmish. In the front line of the battle, Los Angeles-based James Galanos became the first American designer to drop all hemlines below the knee; Paris' Bernard Lanvin is scraping ankles. Manhattan's Geoffrey Beene alone seems determined to keep the knee in the public domain.

In his debut as a rodeo rider, Monty Milhous, 19, was ignominiously tossed by a Brahma bull called Old Brindle. Earlier in the Fresno, Calif., show President Nixon's second cousin had another brief tangle--five seconds of the required eight-second ride--with a mean old mule named Khrushchev.

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