Brenner Giving His Best Shot for the USA

Lots of things that used to be uniquely American aren’t anymore. The two-door sedan, the 10 cigar, the clock-radio, the TV set, tires, steel, oil. Shoot! We don’t even own parts of our own cities anymore. You half expect them to have to start importing apple pie any day now.

And while we’re on the subject, what ever happened to us in the shotput? This used to be the most genuinely American specialty this side of cowboy movies. We might occasionally lose even the 100-meter dash in the Olympics but never the shot.

We won the first six Olympics in the shot, then 9 out of the next 10.

But, we haven’t won it since. Not since Randy Matson in 1968 have the Americans won the shotput in the Games.

This, in the event that spawned the great Parry O’Brien, Bud Houser, Ralph Rose, Bill Nieder, Dallas Long, Matson. We didn’t even win it last time when the weight-conscious Soviet Bloc whales didn’t show up. An Italian won it. For the first time ever. Americans couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d won a chili cook-off.

It all began to go bad for the U.S. in 1972, when the Polish giant, Wladyslaw Komar, took the gold medal with a heave of 69 feet 6 inches. American George Woods apparently tied it when he hit the tab marking it, but the officials ruled that his iron had stopped half an inch short.

We’ve never come that close since. At Montreal in ‘76, we dropped all the way to fourth when Al Feuerbach could manage only 67-5, while the East German, Udo Beyer, was putting the steel 69- 3/4, beating two Russians, one of them wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

We didn’t go to Moscow, where the Russian winner, Vladimir Kiselyev, had the first 70-foot put in Olympic history--15 years after America’s Matson had thrown the first 70-footer ever.

In 1984, the Italian, Alessandro Andrei, was nearly seven inches ahead of our best, football player Michael Carter, now of the San Francisco 49ers.

What has happened? Don’t we have any strong men anymore? Isn’t the shot partly a speed event? And don’t we have a monopoly on the world’s speed? We’ve never had to import that before.

I put the problem to the most logical person I know to answer--John Brenner, the only American weight man seriously considered a menace to the Europeans.

John didn’t even make the ’84 Games in L.A. because a hand injury shuffled him back to fourth in the trials. But in the last two weeks, he has electrified the little world of track and field, and shaken up the East Germans particularly, by twice breaking the American record in the shot.

First, he put the shot out there 73- 1/2 in a dual meet at UCLA. A week later, at Mt. SAC, he flung it more than 10 inches farther, 73-10 3/4, a stunning improvement and the fourth-best throw in shotput history.

It put Brenner within 4 3/4 inches of Udo Beyer’s world record and encouraged the promoters of the Pepsi meet at UCLA May 16 to seek out the great Parry O’Brien, and Dr. Dallas Long, to pose with him in a nostalgic photo evocative of the great days of U.S. shotputting.

Can John Brenner bring them back? If you can get a price, it may be worth a small bet.

The day has long since past, Brenner and his coach, Art Venegas, feel, when a shotputter could drive out to a field, take his coat and tie off, put down his briefcase, and put the shot out there a foot or so beyond anybody else in the world.

“In Europe, they train all year,” notes Venegas. “They treat their athletes like race horses. They get them trainers, they get them coaches, they get them doctors, they get them hypnotists. Like horses, they have to be coddled, they have to be rubbed down, they have to go in a pool. In this country, we say, well, here’s your cannonball. Go get those guys.”

Common opinion is that Europeans excel in technique. Brenner and Venegas don’t necessarily hold that to be true.

“I have had John studying films of the old-time putters--the Charlie Fonvilles, Ralph Roses, Jim Fuchses, Moose Thompsons,” Venegas says. “You say, ‘What do you study those old grainy films for?’ Well, these guys were throwing it out there 58 feet with no technique. I always figured if a guy could put it out there 60 feet from a stand position, you should be getting 10 to 12 feet more with technique. Today, they can put it 66-68 feet from a stand and the record should be 78-80 feet, by rights.”

O’Brien was the first to generate speed and movement in the circle, turning his back to the target and holding onto the shot a longer time but old-timers were long mystified as to how Fonville, a mere 190-pounder, could produce the distance he could--58 feet in 1948.

Brenner hopes to gather himself for an assault on Beyer’s world record next week at UCLA, and thinks he is in a groove that he hopes will last till the ’88 Olympics in Seoul.

The co-owner of an earth-moving business with his brother, Hoby Brenner, a tight end for the New Orleans Saints, John thinks a shotputter needs another partner--Uncle Sam.

“You have to have a support system,” he says. “You have to have a 12-month program.”

You can’t win the Kentucky Derby leading an Indian pony up to the line at post time, you have to have a conditioning program, Brenner and Venegas insist.

It’s like making cars. The whole country has to chip in. Otherwise, we’re going to start having to get our shotputters the way we get most other things--off the docks. At least the shotput record should be stamped “Made in U.S.A.” again.