By E. Graydon Carter

Italy 3, West Germany 1. It was the single most significant soccer score in 44 years for the Italians, whose team had just won its first World Cup since 1938. But the victory was surely sweetest of all for the club's champion striker, Paolo Rossi, 25. He had returned to the sport just two months earlier, after a two-year suspension when he was implicated in a betting scandal. Scoring six goals, Rossi displayed an almost mystical artistry with foot and ball that belied earlier fears. "I'd been morally depressed for so long," he said. "Yet everyone expected miracles from me." And got them.

It's the same old story: older woman in a mauve Lycra ski suit falls in love with young medical student with a full head of hair on the slopes near Lake Tahoe. In Forbidden Love, a CBS-TV movie to be aired next season, Yvette Mimieux, 39, fits the role of the older woman with nearly the same aplomb that she fits the Suzy Chapstick getup. "It's an outfit that I thought would appeal to a student of anatomy," says Mimieux. Or for that matter, a student of architecture, a student of air-conditioner repair, a student of...

With the summer recess only weeks away, three Democratic members of Congress from Connecticut got a jump on the opposition last week, with an old schoolyard activity, double dutch. (You know, when the two ropes are going in opposite directions.) Congressman William Ratchford, 48, tried his hand, er, feet, while colleagues Samuel Gejdenson, 34, and Barbara Kennedy, 46, waited their turns. "I could practice for the next 40 years and not be able to double jump," says Ratchford, who had difficulty with but one rope. It's safer inside the halls of Congress where the risks of getting tripped up are considerably less.

He got a lot of upward stares when he toured the sights of China, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 35 and 7 ft. 2 in., was even more the center of attraction on the basketball court. To the members of the Chinese national basketball team, Jabbar and the other visiting U.S. pros must have looked like a Western version of the Great Wall. "They are the world's best," says Chinese Center Han Pengshan, 20, something of a tourist attraction himself at 7 ft. 3 in. "They have springs on their feet."

Just 41/2 years after a little matter of embezzlement cost him the top job at Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, 60, is out of a job again, fired as chairman of United Artists. Of the 24 films he initiated, eleven have been released. Only one, Poltergeist, is a major hit (box office grosses of $48 million to date). Meanwhile, there is the imminent publication of Indecent Exposure, a meticulous recounting of the embezzlement scandal. But Author David McCintick, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, does not think his book had much to do with Begelman's latest downfall. "There is only one law of the Hollywood jungle," says McClintick, "and it is box office. Begelman made a string of flop motion pictures." And that is that, until, as many expect, some new company produces The Return of Begelman II.

--By E. Graydon Carter

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