Philadelphia, Jan. 23 -- Nick Skorich, the line coach for the football champion Philadelphia Eagles, was elevated today to head coach. Skorich received a three-year contract at a salary believed to be between $20,000 and $25,000 a year. He succeeds Buck Shaw, who retired at the end of last season. The appointment was announced at a news conference at which Skorich said he would retain two members of Shaw's staff -- Jerry Williams and Charlie Gauer. Williams is a defensive coach. Gauer works with the ends. Choice was expected The selection had been expected. Skorich was considered the logical choice after the club gave Norm Van Brocklin permission to seek the head coaching job with the Minnesota Vikings, the newest National Football League entry. Van Brocklin, the quarterback who led the Eagles to the title, was signed by the Vikings last Wednesday. Philadelphia permitted him to seek a better connection after he had refused to reconsider his decision to end his career as a player. With Skorich at the helm, the Eagles are expected to put more emphasis on running, rather than passing. In the past the club depended largely on Van Brocklin's aerials. Skorich, however, is a strong advocate of a balanced attack -- split between running and passing. Coach played 3 years Skorich, who is 39 years old, played football at Cincinnati University and then had a three-year professional career as a lineman under Jock Sutherland with the Pittsburgh Steelers. An injury forced Skorich to quit after the 1948 season. He began his coaching career at Pittsburgh Central Catholic High School in 1949. He remained there for four years before moving to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N. Y. He was there one season before rejoining the Steelers as an assistant coach. Four years later he resigned to take a similar job with the Green Bay Packers. The Eagles signed him for Shaw's staff in 1959. Skorich began his new job auspiciously today. At a ceremony in the reception room of Mayor Richardson Dilworth, the Eagles were honored for winning the championship. Shaw and Skorich headed a group of players, coaches and team officials who received an engrossed copy of an official city citation and a pair of silver cufflinks shaped like a football. With the announcement of a "special achievement award" to William A. (( Bill) Shea, the awards list was completed yesterday for Sunday night's thirty-eighth annual dinner and show of the New York Chapter, Baseball Writers' Association of America, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Shea, the chairman of Mayor Wagner's Baseball Committee, will be joined on the dais by Warren Spahn, the southpaw pitching ace of the Milwaukee Braves; Frank Graham, the Journal-American sports columnist; Bill Mazeroski, the World Series hero of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Casey Stengel, the former manager of the Yankees. Stengel will receive the Ben Epstein Good Guy Award. Mazeroski, whose homer beat the Yankees in the final series game, will receive the Babe Ruth Award as the outstanding player in the 1960 world series. Graham will be recognized for his meritorious service to baseball and will get the William J. Slocum Memorial Award. To Spahn will go the Sid Mercer Memorial Award as the chapter's player of the year. Show follows ceremonies A crowd of 1,400 is expected for the ceremonies, which will be followed by the show in which the writers will lampoon baseball personalities in skit, dance and song. The 53-year-old Shea, a prominent corporation lawyer with a sports background, is generally recognized as the man most responsible for the imminent return of a National League club to New York. Named by Mayor Wagner three years ago to head a committee that included James A. Farley, Bernard Gimbel and Clint Blume, Shea worked relentlessly. His goal was to obtain a National League team for this city. The departure of the Giants and the Dodgers to California left New York with only the Yankees. Despite countless barriers and disappointments, Shea moved forward. When he was unable to bring about immediate expansion, he sought to convince another National League club to move here. When that failed, he enlisted Branch Rickey's aid in the formation of a third major league, the Continental, with New York as the key franchise. The Continental League never got off the ground, but after two years it forced the existing majors to expand. Flushing stadium in works The New York franchise is headed by Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson. A big-league municipal stadium at Flushing Meadow Park is in the works, and once the lease is signed the local club will be formally recognized by Commissioner Ford C. Frick. Shea's efforts figure prominently in the new stadium. Shea and his wife, Nori, make their home at Sands Point, L. I. Bill Jr., 20, Kathy, 15, and Patricia, 9, round out the Shea family. Shea was born in Manhattan. He attended New York University before switching to Georgetown University in Washington. He played basketball there while working toward a law degree. Later, Shea owned and operated the Long Island Indians, a minor league professional football team. He was the lawyer for Ted Collins' old Boston Yankees in the National Football League. All was quiet in the office of the Yankees and the local National Leaguers yesterday. On Friday, Roger Maris, the Yankee outfielder and winner of the American League's most-valuable-player award, will meet with Roy Hamey, the general manager. Maris is in line for a big raise. Arnold Palmer and Sam Snead will be among those honored at the national awards dinner of the Metropolitan Golf Writers Association tonight. The dinner will be held at the Hotel Pierre. Palmer, golf's leading money-winner in 1960, and Snead will be saluted as the winning team in the Canada Cup matches last June in Dublin. Deane Beman, the National Amateur champion, and all the metropolitan district champions, including Bob Gardner, the amateur title-holder, also will receive awards. The writers' Gold Tee Award will go to John McAuliffe of Plainfield, N. J., and Palm Beach, Fla., for his sponsorship of charity tournaments. Horton Smith of Detroit, a former president of the Professional Golfers Association, will receive the Ben Hogan Trophy for his comeback following a recent illness. The principal speaker will be Senator Stuart Symington, Democrat of Missouri. Golf's golden boy Arnold Palmer has been a blazing figure in golf over the past twelve months. He won the Masters, the United States Open and a record $80,738 in prize money. He was heralded as "Sportsman of the Year" by Sports Illustrated, and last night was acclaimed in Rochester as the "Professional Athlete of the Year", a distinction that earned for him the $10,000 diamond-studded Hickok Belt. But he also achieved something that endeared him to every duffer who ever flubbed a shot. A couple of weeks ago, he scored a monstrous 12 on a par-5 hole. It made him human. And it also stayed the hands of thousands of brooding incompetents who were meditating the abandonment of a sport whose frustrations were driving them to despair. If such a paragon of perfection as Palmer could commit such a scoring sacrilege, there was hope left for all. It was neither a spirit of self-sacrifice nor a yen to encourage the downtrodden that motivated Arnold. He merely became victimized by a form of athletics that respects no one and aggravates all. The world's best golfer, shooting below par, came to the last hole of the opening round of the Los Angeles open with every intention of delivering a final crusher. He boomed a 280-yard drive. Then the pixies and the zombies took over while the banshees wailed in the distance. No margin for error On the narrow fairway of a 508-yard hole, Arnold whipped into his second shot. The ball went off in a majestic arc, an out-of-bounds slice. He tried again and once more sliced out of bounds. He hooked the next two out of bounds on the opposite side. "It is possible that I over-corrected", he said ruefully. Each of the four wayward shots cost him two strokes. So he wound up with a dozen. "It was a nice round figure, that 12", he said as he headed for the clubhouse, not too much perturbed. From the standpoint of the army of duffers, however, this was easily the most heartening exhibition they had had since Ben Hogan fell upon evil ways during his heyday and scored an 11 in the Texas open. The idol of the hackers, of course, is Ray Ainsley, who achieved a 19 in the United States Open. Their secondary hero is another pro, Willie Chisholm, who drank his lunch during another Open and tried to blast his way out of a rock-strewn gully. Willie's partner was Long Jim Barnes, who tried to keep count. Stickler for rules "How many is that, Jim"? Asked Willie at one stage of his excavation project. "Thirteen", said Long Jim. "Nae, man", said Willie, "ye must be countin' the echoes". He had a 16. Palmer's dozen were honestly earned. Nor were there any rules to save him. If there had been, he would have found a loophole, because Arnold is one golfer who knows the code as thoroughly as the man who wrote the book. This knowledge has come in handy, too. His first shot in the Open last year landed in a brook that flowed along the right side of the fairway. The ball floated downstream. A spectator picked up the ball and handed it to a small boy, who dropped this suddenly hot potato in a very playable lie. Arnold sent for Joe Dey, the executive secretary of the golf association. Joe naturally ruled that a ball be dropped from alongside the spot where it had originally entered the stream. "I knew it all along", confessed Arnold with a grin, "but I just happened to think how much nicer it would be to drop one way up there". For a serious young man who plays golf with a serious intensity, Palmer has such an inherent sense of humor that it relieves the strain and keeps his nerves from jangling like banjo strings. Yet he remains the fiercest of competitors. He'll even bull head-on into the rules when he is sure he's right. That's how he first won the Masters in 1958. It happened on the twelfth hole, a 155-yarder. Arnold's iron shot from the tee burrowed into the bunker guarding the green, an embankment that had become soft and spongy from the rains, thereby bringing local rules into force. Ruling from on high "I can remove the ball, can't I"? Asked Palmer of an official. "No", said the official. "You must play it where it lies". "You're wrong", said Arnold, a man who knows the rules. "I'll do as you say, but I'll also play a provisional ball and get a ruling". He scored a 4 for the embedded ball, a 3 with the provisional one. The golfing fathers ruled in his favor. So he picked up a stroke with the provisional ball and won the tournament by the margin of that stroke. Until a few weeks ago, however, Arnold Palmer was some god-like creature who had nothing in common with the duffers. But after that 12 at Los Angeles he became one of the boys, a bigger hero than he ever had been before. A formula to supply players for the new Minneapolis Vikings and the problem of increasing the 1961 schedule to fourteen games will be discussed by National Football League owners at a meeting at the Hotel Warwick today. Other items on the agenda during the meetings, which are expected to continue through Saturday, concern television, rules changes, professional football's hall of fame, players' benefits and constitutional amendments. The owners would like each club in the fourteen-team league to play a home-and-home series with teams in its division, plus two games against teams in the other division. However, this would require a lengthening of the season from thirteen to fourteen weeks. Pete Rozelle, the league commissioner, pointed out: "We'll have the problem of baseball at one end and weather at the other". Nine of the league's teams play in baseball parks and therefore face an early-season conflict in dates.