Word: shotput
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...Shotput...
...decided to accept a football scholarship at U.S.C. (major: business administration), where he got standard financial aid: tuition plus $75 a month for doing a job little more demanding than checking each morning to see that the 50-yd. line was still there. (Later, when he switched to shotputting, Parry's duties consisted of taking care of the shotput ring...
...Black Jack' Smith then. He taught football like it was war. Jeff Cravath was varsity coach. Between the two of them, I about lost interest in the game." Another man who helped ease Parry out of his football pads was Wilbur ("Moose") Thompson, U.S.C.'s 1948 Olympic shotput winner, who had watched the blond, well-larded freshman working out with the track team, and as soon as he got a chance, talked O'Brien into dropping all else for the shot...
Approach Gingerly. Even as a tubby kid enduring the snickering nickname "Podge," Parry O'Brien had always organized his life with a kind of compulsive neatness. Now he rearranged it methodically around an iron ball. Fraternity brothers in Phi Kappa Psi remember how he painted a shotput circle in the alley outside the fraternity house, to practice his technique-even at night. "You had to approach O'Brien gingerly," recalls one brother. "The thing was, you never knew whether he had just let go of the shot and it was headed in your direction...
Secret of the Universe. Back in the U.S. at last, Parry reported in to Travis Air Force Base, near Sacramento. But neither married life (sans children) nor the Air Force itself was going to interfere with his quest for the supreme shotput. "They acted like they felt I could work out satisfactorily from 12 midnight to 8 in the morning," he recalls with indignation. "So I wrote to Washington and got transferred over to Special Services." There Parry's job was to arrange movies at the base theater-a task only slightly more complicated than taking care...