What he would have wanted to know was wrong with the old kit of scarlet

What, he would have wanted to know, was wrong with the old kit of scarlet jersey, white shorts and scarlet stockings? But most of all he would have been disappointed with the rugby O my Gerald and my Mervyn long ago!. ALTHOUGH THE National Basketball Association season was originally scheduled to begin in north America tonight, the only action taking place this week will be in a law firm boardroom or hotel conference room while owners and players attempt to bring to an end to the lock-out which has lasted 126 days so far and led to the first month of the season being lost. League and union lawyers were due to meet late last night, with the full negotiating teams due to meet tomorrow. "This thing is pretty much in David Stern's hands, and I'm not unduly optimistic," said agent Steve Kaufman, a member of the union's agents advisory committee "To me, there's two windows to get it done. One is right now and you get the season started by 1 December. If it's not done in the next week to 10 days, you're looking at Christmas or New Year for starting the season," Kaufman said.Among the issues separating owners and players are conduct and discipline issues, salary cap calculations and licensing agreements. The biggest hurdle is an agreement on what percentage of revenues will be devoted to salaries by the time the new system has been in place a few years.

The owners want to pay 50 per cent ( backing off from their previous demand for 48) and the players want to receive 60 per cent (a move from 63 per cent).. COLIN MONTGOMERIE is not the only player in the history of the European Tour to win the order of merit six times. A measure of his achievement in completing the feat in the minimum time possible is that it took Seve Ballesteros 16 years to set the record. The first three may have taken three years but the last three took 13 as the tour the Spaniard helped create developed into an exhausting, fiercely competitive nine-month marathon.

Major champions such as Nick Faldo, Ian Woosnam and Bernhard Langer have only won the money list twice each and Jose Maria Olazabal not at all. In his premium strength six-pack, Montgomerie has seen off first all the old stars of the tour and now the new ones. Darren Clarke's impressive victory on Sunday at Montecastillo in the Volvo Masters, the season's finale, was good enough to leapfrog Lee Westwood into second place on the order of merit, but not to dislodge Monty as the king of the castle. "This is a very proud moment for me and my family," said Montgomerie "Darren and Lee are world-class players. Their time will come.""Lee and I did our best to beat Monty but it was not good enough," Clarke said.

"We tried to beat him this year and now we know how difficult it is to win the order of merit once. To win it six times is an amazing feat."The irony is that the trophy handed out to the leading money winner every season is named after Harry Vardon, a man commemorated for winning the Open Championship six times. Perhaps it is because of the fact he has not yet triumphed in the greatest of championships that Montgomerie finds the annual money race such a motivating factor. He is unique in never having taken a backward step on the order of merit in his 11 seasons on tour.As you would expect, and reasonably enough, the 35-year-old Scot rejects the notion that sight of the same man being crowned Europe's No 1 - in a season when that was well down his list of priorities and when he has been far from his best at times - shows up a weakness in the strength of the tour."It's getting closer," he said. "It didn't come down to the last putt like it did against Sam Torrance in 1995 but at the same time the standard is improving, as I have said many times before. And I have had to improve along with it."There are a lot of players coming through.