Word: spitz
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...seat at last week's National A.A.U. championships in Lincoln, Neb., where tads the size of his beloved Cheetah smashed five world and eleven meet records. And when they did not break records, they logged times that would have crushed Johnny at his best. Like Mark Spitz, 18, who splashed off with the 100-meter freestyle...
Since he is only a high school senior, Mark Spitz was not eligible to compete in the N.C.A.A. meet, a fact that certainly saved the older boys a good deal of embarrassment. At 18, Spitz is recognized as the world's No' 1 swimmer, and the closest thing to a one-man team the sport has ever known...
Over the past two years, Spitz has won 22 national and international titles, broken ten world records and 28 U.S. marks. He is the current world record holder in both the 100-meter butterfly (55.7 sec.) and the 200-meter butterfly (2 min. 5.7 sec.), needs only to pare a total of seven seconds off his best times to set records in the 100-meter, 200-meter and 400-meter freestyle and the 200-meter individual medley (breast stroke, backstroke and crawl). At last year's Pan American games in Winnipeg, he won five gold medals. The only...
...George Do It. Lean and lanky at 5 ft. 11 in. and 160 Ibs., Spitz has been a water baby since he was two, when his father, a steel-company executive, was transferred from Modesto, Calif., to Honolulu. "We went to Waikiki every day," recalls Mark's mother. 'You should have seen that little boy dash into the ocean. He'd run like he was trying to commit suicide." After four years in Hawaii, the Spitz family moved to Sacramento, Calif., where Mark got his first competitive instruction at a local Y.M.C.A. By the time...
Mark swims for three hours every day, will increase that to four hours a day when school lets out this summer. "I have," he says, "a high definition of hurt"-meaning threshold of pain-and his philosophy in practice is "Always go farther than you think you can." Spitz's dedication to swimming does not keep him from being a serious student: he gets Bs, has applied for entrance to Stanford, plans to study dentistry. "I wonder," he says, "how it will be when I'm Mark Spitz, just one of a million dentists, after all the travel...