A Slight to Inflame the Heart

Mark Spitz may be the most handsome specimen ever to achieve championship status in world athletics. In certain light, he can make Robert Redford look positively grubby.

Spitz has that olive skin, those piercing green eyes. In a film with Omar Sharif, he’d get the girl.

He fairly reeks of health. He’s tall--6-foot-1--and even 13 years after his greatest triumph, there’s hardly an ounce of fat on him. He’s the kind of guy you’d want for your son-in-law.

That’s why the guy who has him for a son-in-law, Herm Weiner, is upset these days over the kind of public view his son-in-law is getting.

Herm is a steel man, best known to the sporting press as one of the big all-time boosters of Cal Berkeley sports, a recruiter of note for its football team, a one-time bidder for an L.A. expansion franchise in the NFL, and a canny observer of the local sports scene.

Herm cannot understand how the world goes into paroxysms of admiration when Carl Lewis wins four gold medals in a single Olympics but seems to shrug over the seven won by Herm’s son-in-law, who set seven world records in the process.

Spitz won nine gold medals altogether in two Olympics. In his sport, many competitors don’t last two Olympics. He also won a bronze and silver. He is the nearest thing to a dolphin this country has ever produced. He made Johnny Weissmuller look like a turtle.

Before the 1984 Olympics here, one of the big guessing games was about who would carry in the torch to ignite the Olympic flame? Speculation turned on figures public and private. Peter Ueberroth, head of the organizing committee, gave no hint.

When Howard Cosell let out the names of the former athletes who would carry the Olympic flag into the Coliseum--divers Sammy Lee and Pat McCormick, swimmer John Naber, track stars Bruce Jenner, Wyomia Tyus, Billy Mills, Mack Robinson, Parry O’Brien and Al Oerter; a fighter named Richard Sandoval, and Bill Thorpe Jr., grandson of Jim Thorpe--a lot of people noticed that Spitz’s name was not on that list and thought: “Aha! Mark lights the torch!”

Spitz himself began to wonder. “My phone began to ring off the hook,” he recalled the other day. “My friends told me to stop being coy.”

The uncertainty persisted right up until the morning of the Opening Ceremony. When his network, ABC, advised him to be on the scene early, Spitz half suspected he would be the mystery guest, tapped at the last minute. It was the kind of gesture Ueberroth seemed to delight in.

But while Spitz was sitting alone in the stands, he suddenly looked up and there was Rafer Johnson suited up for the occasion, along with the granddaughter of the late Jesse Owens.

“I was humiliated. I was stunned. I felt slapped in the face,” Spitz said.

He was not alone. Letters to the editor, calls to talk show hosts, public denunciations of the LAOOC ensued.

Indignation was rife. Explanations were demanded. Anti-Semitism was suspected.

The Spitz supporters were outraged. They had no quarrel with Rafer Johnson as the choice to light the flame, but couldn’t there have been one more flag-carrier?

“Besides, if you could have a second torch bearer in the person of Jesse Owens’ grandchild, why not a third torch bearer, even a fourth?” Spitz himself wondered.

The organizers’ explanations were conflicting. First, they tried to explain that Spitz’s chores as a broadcaster were a conflict of interest. That didn’t wash. Jenner and Naber had broadcasting chores, too.

Then the story was circulated that Spitz had been involved in a lawsuit against the Olympic committee, having to do with T-shirts and the Olympic logo. How could you use a guy who hauled you into court?

Mark Spitz sighed. “Here is what happened:

“I had gone to the committee some years before with an idea for marketing a line of visors. They gave me an application to fill out, but I investigated and found the visor contract had already been let. It was a waste of time.

“I next had an idea for a coloring book. My associate in this was a man named Bart Jacobs, who had a distribution set-up all ready and in place.

“The committee notified me they didn’t deem coloring books a worthy licensing project. OK. Even though I had invested some of my own money in the project, I dropped out. Period.

“Subsequently, Bart Jacobs got involved in a controversy with Levi Strauss over shirt licensing. It was settled out of court, and he was allowed to manufacture certain shirts for airport sale.

“It had nothing to do with me other than that I had been his partner in a previous deal.”

Still, the resultant publicity was not good.

Said father-in-law Weiner: “I had a member of my firm in Japan recently, and he told me the Japanese he spoke to were under the impression Mark had done something criminal to be left off the ceremonial teams.”

“Not only that,” added son-in-law Spitz, “but, in Germany, a story was printed that I had demanded money to be part of the Opening Ceremonies!”

But that’s the bad news. The good news is, Olympian Spitz is finally going to get his chance to light a torch.

Next week, at Tel Aviv, he will be the torch bearer for the Maccabiah Games, the Jewish Olympics, which bring together Jewish athletes from all over the world every four years for a massive sports meet.

For them, his father-in-law suggests, Mark Spitz may be the greatest Jewish athlete since Samson, may even be a direct descendant of Jonah.

For anyone, it’s nice to know a winner of nine gold medals finally will get to carry a flame.