IN basketball and in football, it is good practice to "double-team" a formidable opponent. In the less violent game of journalism, we often find it advantageous to double-team in covering the big stories of the week.

The cover story on Congressman Wilbur Mills, which William Bowen wrote, is an example of how we work. Mills is a familiar figure to our two congressional reporters, Neil MacNeil and Loye Miller. The problem was not the usual congressional one of trying to stop the fellow from talking or getting a simple answer to a simple question; it was one of getting much at all from a reticent man who will speak candidly about taxes but doesn't enjoy talking about himself. Furthermore, Mills is a discreet politician, not given to describing how he intends to play his hand.

MacNeil has known Mills for seven years, and so well that when he went around to interview one Congressman he was told, "What are you asking me about him for? You know him better than I do." MacNeil, who has just finished a book about the House of Representatives and has worked on ten cover stories for TIME, provided most of the material on the power structure of the House and Mills's role in it.

It was Loye Miller who dug into the soil of Mills's Arkansas, who interviewed Mills's family and friends, looked over the Mills store, house and bank, and provided most of the biographical material. Miller's last cover assignment was closer to home: gathering material for the Harry Byrd cover. Both reporters are second-generation journalists: MacNeil's father was assistant managing editor of the New York Times, Miller's the editor of the Knoxville News-Sentinel.

ANOTHER case of double-teaming is our coverage of the Congo.

Correspondent Bill Smith journeyed from Kenya to Tshombe's capitulating capital of Elisabethville to cover the U.N. armed operations there, to undergo the hospitality of the Leopold II (which he nominates as the hotel most in need of improvement in 1963), and to get out the news as best he could, sometimes by U.N. radio. Since the U.N. itself in New York was complaining that its own knowledge of what was going on was often twelve hours behind, it wasn't easy. The embattled correspondents in Elisabethville at one point formally protested against the "censorship and duplicity" of the U.N. operation. On the other side of the Congo, Jon Randal covered events in the Congolese capital of Leopoldville, and was only in brief contact with Smith once, before a weak radio signal flickered out.

Such double-teaming was essential, because the Congo reality was rarely what it was being proclaimed elsewhere by interested parties.

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