June 14, 1992

THE name comes from "General Purpose Vehicle," shortened to "GP" and then to "jeep." Designed for the Army in World War II, it caught on with civilians after the war. No one ever polished a Jeep. You bought it as Army surplus and left itout to rust. But now Jeeps are showing up in places Sergeant Bilko never went: the mall, the suburban train station, the parking lot at the beach.

If Fred Couples wins the 92d United States Open, which begins Thursday at Pebble Beach in California, he will be be completing one of the greatest sustained 12 months of golf in the last 30 years: He would have two major championships, seven North American victories over all, and a run of top-six finishes equal to the most consistent years of Palmer, Nicklaus, Miller and Watson. But no matter what happens at Pebble, Couples, like every significant player, has already contributed the identifying emblem of his swing, a hitting style that will be remembered as raw, electrifying and elegant all at the same time.

Early in "Rising Sun," Michael Crichton's bestselling suspense novel, a Los Angeles police detective is dumbfounded to learn that the Japanese doorman who stands in front of an otherwise ordinary middle-income apartment building is a member of the yakuza, the Japanese mafia. "You must understand," says the detective's older, more worldly partner, a font of wisdom about all things Japanese. "There is a shadow world here -- in Los Angeles, in Honolulu, in New York. Most of the time you're never aware of it. We live in our regular American world, walking our American streets, and we never notice that right alongside our world is a second world . . . a shadow world, available only to the Japanese."

Every day from 4 P.M. to midnight, New York's worst nightmares are beamed to millions of viewers. From a teen-ager charged with trying to murder the wife of her lover to subway slashers to youths shot while using a squirt gun, television news is often sustained by a daily menu of crime and grief.

MAGIC JOHNSON had better get home quick and say hello to his wife and his baby boy, and start training seriously. This may not be any emotional cameo appearance for Magic at the 1992 Summer Games. He may be asked to play major minutes for the United States if Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Clyde Drexler suffer from chronic hoop fatigue syndrome. And why wouldn't they? No matter what they do today, all three Olympians are going to be back in Oregon in exactly two weeks, playing Cuba, a band of desperados fighting for an Olympic berth and the continuance of three training meals a day outside their impoverished island.

AN unusually high number of school superintendents in Westchester and Putnam Counties have left their districts in the last two years. Although a few have moved up to larger districts, more are reacting to the stress of budget cuts and longer hours by retiring earlier. "Historically, it was not uncommon to find superintendents in their 60's working in Westchester County, but now more and more are retiring between 55 and 60," said Dr. Richard Lerer, Superintendent of the Southern Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services.

ON Saturday morning in Bridgehampton, L.I., John E. Toffolon, like a lot of executives in America, is playing golf. Dressed in a white tennis shirt and khaki shorts, not the plaids and pastels that distinguish traditional golf havens and perplex the rest of the world, he addresses the ball on the first tee at the new Atlantic Golf Club. Mr. Toffolon strikes a serious pose, seems to visualize a lesson and swings. Unfortunately, it's a crummy shot, and he utters one of the many expletives often heard on a golf course. Mr. Toffolon, who was the chief financial officer of the First Boston Corporation and is now forming his own investment banking firm, freely admits that he is obsessed with golf, and he is, to be fair, a respectable player, especially considering he has only been at it for three years. (Most of the time, he's a low 90's kind of guy. He'll say he shot an 89, but you know how it is.)

THE cemetery rises like a monolith out of the middle of a manicured, tree-shaded industrial park. You walk about 30 feet up a crumbling wood stairway, past a sign announcing "French-Richards Cemetery -- First Burial 1742," through an opening in a sagging wrought-iron fence and into another world and time. On the right are two tombstones side by side, startlingly alone. One memorializes Robert French, who died in 1830; the other, his wife, Rachel, who died three years earlier.

Less than 24 hours before the end of the Earth Summit, North and South finally compromised today on principles that encourage richer countries to increase aid to the third world, clearing the way for formal approval of the global cleanup plan that is the centerpiece of the conference. After 13 days of negotiations, third-world countries finally abandoned their campaign to extract a specific commitment from the industrialized world to nearly double aid to poorer countries by the year 2000. The money would help guarantee that the third world's development is environmentally sound. The compromise, worked out in a small group and approved in an informal general session this evening, will be formally adopted on Sunday. Accepting U.S. Position Under the compromise, instead of pressing their demands for precise commitments of money, the third-world countries accepted that the United States was unwilling to be bound by a longstanding United Nations goal of raising aid levels to 0.7 percent of a country's economic output and that Britain, Japan, Germany and several other big aid donors refuse to commit themselves to that target by any particular date.

After a turbulent decade with an uncertain future, the 518-acre Bridgehampton Race Circuit speedway is to go on the auction block Tuesday. The 2.85-mile track is on Millstone Road, not far from Little Peconic Bay, on the East End of Long Island. Sotheby's International Realty, which is to conduct the auction, estimated the value of the parcel at between $3.5 million and $5 million. "I think it is a very real possibility that the track will remain open," said Stuart N. Siegel, president and managing director of Sotheby's realty subsidiary. "Another feasible solution is to put in a golf course." The property could be subdivided into 114 residential lots and an application has been submitted to Southampton Town. But Mr. Siegel said that was done more to help buyers assess potential value than to prescribe a course of development.

Sanctions Strain Belgrade Calls for peace are mingled with calls for vengeance as international sanctions bring the effects of war home to the Serbian capital. Page 24. Free Speech, or Just Noise? In a Federal case, street preachers are challenging a Beaufort, S.C., law against "unseemly noise." Page 26. Clinton Rankles Jackson Bill Clinton, speaking to the Rev. Jess Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, received a cool response after he criticized remarks by a rapper. Page 30.

Marlon Riggs, a 35-year-old film maker, now has the unenviable distinction of having come under fierce attack from both sides of the right wing that have made television a primary target. They are the religious right, which pounces on sexual permissiveness, a favorite target being any program that casts gay men or women in a less-than-diabolical light, and the political right, which levels charges of left-wing bias and elitism. And one man's encounters with them are perhaps indicative of the larger spectacle of a quite serious turf war now being waged for nothing less than the whole of American popular culture. Last year, Mr. Riggs's documentary "Tongues Untied," a personal essay about being black and gay, a minority within a minority, was shown on "P.O.V.," a PBS series featuring independently produced films with strong viewpoints. The film unleashed a storm of outrage in powerful right-wing circles, not least in the offices of both Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. The latter went to the trouble of putting together, for circulation in Congress and other power mills, a seven-minute tape of scenes from the film, which, out of context, thoroughly distorted Mr. Riggs's intentions.