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NEW YORK (UPI) -- You probably saw the photo. Everybody in the country did it seems. Here was Clete Boyer at home plate minding his own business with a bat in his hands and a look on his kisser that the Chinese would say was worth a million words.
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The girl in front of him had run onto the field a moment before. She had on a mini skirt. She was standing on her tippy toes in her mini skirt to kiss Boyer during the fourth inning of Monday's game between the Cubs and Braves and as she did 33,142 patrons in Atlanta Stadium blinked their eyes and Leo Durocher in the Chicago dugout nearly swallowed his gum.
Quickly, much too quickly as far most of the players were concerned, the girl was hustled off the field but not before Louis Atkins one of UPIs photo staffers got the picture and the sexy-looking interloper in the mini skirt got to kiss Boyer three times.
"I HOPE you washed your face off," Boyer's wife Marilyn greeted her husband when he came home from work that day. "Yeah I did," said Clete, a guy who likes harmony around the house.
Boyer at 32 is still one of the better defensive third basemen in the business. Part of his skill is due to perfect eyesight which enabled him to spot the girl as soon as she came over the fence and onto the field.
"She ran over and hugged me," Boyer says, "Then she started kissing me on the cheek. She kept telling me I was the greatest and I was her idol."
WHAT DID Boyer do all this time?
"What could I do?" he says, "There were over 30-000 people out there".
Clete's only kidding Marilyn. He wouldn't have done a thing if the ball park had been empty.
The episode didn't upset Boyer particularly. He ripped a single off Holtzman immediately after they removed the girl from his line of fire and wound up the game with three hits.
"People are sending me the picture from all over," Clete says. "I called my stockbroker in New York and he said he had seen the picture up there. One of Marilyn's friends told her she had seen the picture on the Johnny Carson show."
CARSON displayed copies of the photo as carried by the New York Times and the New York Daily News. The Times felt the girl in the mini mini was standing a wee bit too tippy tippy and lengthened her dress a bit so she wouldn't catch cold. The News didn't touch her dress. Even if she did catch cold.
Later, it developed the girl was a stripper in an Atlanta nightspot. She even took out an ad in the paper proclaiming she was the one who jumped over the fence, kissed Clete Boyer and he then got three hits.
"She's just looking for publicity," Boyer now says drumming her out of his fan club.
Still the eye-popping reception she gave him was the most unusual thing ever to happen to Boyer on the field in his 15 years of playing pro ball. It was even more unusual than his being lifted for a pinch hitter by Casey Stengel in the second inning of a World Series game in 1960 when he was still with the Yankees.
"That was the biggest shock ever," Boyer says "until this."
There's really nothing for Clete to be disturbed about though. His wife says everything's fine as long as he washed his face.
