Word: skier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Unlike the pianists who open doors with their elbows, Michelangeli is not one to pamper his "strangler's hands." He is an avid skier, mountain climber and high-speed sports-car enthusiast (as a prewar professional driver, he once won the Mille Miglia). As a result he cannot find an insurance company that will insure his hands. Or his future. Even his manager, marveling at Michelangeli's "sudden return to the world," openly wonders: "How long will it continue?" Hopefully until next January, when the reluctant master is scheduled to perform in the U.S. for the first time...
...Slim") Maxwell, 52, who opened the desert water-skiing center last week, got the idea one hot afternoon when he saw a pickup truck towing an indomitable water skier along a 6-ft.-wide irrigation ditch. He was working on a commercial adaptation of boatless skiing when a friend wrote to him about one that had already been developed by a Swiss trolley-car company, and Maxwell wrote at once to get the first U.S. franchise, which may soon put water skiing on a nationwide basis...
...pool, paddle-tennis courts, refreshment stands and palm trees. The 250-ft.-wide ski course runs beneath four towers that support an overhead steel cable, powered by a 74-h.p. diesel engine. At ten-second intervals it carries 77-ft. tow ropes past a carpeted dock, from which the skier launches himself to whoosh around the rectangular track at about 25 m.p.h. (for experts the speed can be upped to 38 m.p.h...
...turns are arm-wrenching-especially if the skier comes into one from the inside of the channel-and the fixed route may seem a bit monotonous to those accustomed to figure-eighting ad lib in the great wet open spaces. But for beginners, there are certain advantages in water skiing desert-style. It is relatively cheap; Maxwell sells three turns around the slightly more than half-mile course for 50?, versus about $15 an hour for a motorboat and driver. There is no speedboat wake to cope with. And after a spill it is only a short wade to shore...
...downhill, while U.S. skiers soared birdlike off the bumps, provoking "ahs" from fans (and losing time), the Austrians kept their skis in the snow. Heini Messner, an auto mechanic from Gries am Brenner, won the race - with three other Austrians and a Frenchman strung out behind. The star of the meet was France's Jean Claude Killy, 21, who showed why he is the best slalom skier in the world: cutting the gates so close that his sweater brushed the poles, Killy won both the special slalom and the giant slalom. The best the U.S. could do was third...