Aging Mark Spitz Eyes Renewed Olympic Glory

The afternoon sun no longer covered Lane 8 of the UCLA pool when Mark Spitz, three days past 40, jumped in to swim. It was cold and dark in his column of water, not a particularly good day for swimming, or dreaming.

Spitz put in 40 minutes, which is a fine workout for a man nearing middle age, but a little on the light side for a future Olympian. Then he laid his head back as if the water were his pillow, slowly closed his eyes and puffed out his cheeks. Moments later, his eyes blinked open to see two people standing on the deck, peering down at him.

“My arms,” he said, “feel like lead.”

He puttered around another moment or two, then made up his mind that the 1992 Summer Olympics were far enough away that on this day in February 1990, he could afford to get out of the water. “Well, I’ve got 862 days left,” he said, finally managing a smile, and the workout was over.

Coming back to the water after 17 years on land is not easy, Mark Spitz is learning.

Last summer Spitz--America’s most famous swimmer and the not-altogether beloved winner of seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics--decided he wanted to become a member of the 1992 U.S. Olympic team in Barcelona. Last September word got out, and a giddy sense of anticipation enveloped the swimming world. Spitz swam for an hour; granted an interview for an hour. Swam another hour, granted another interview. And so forth.

It’s been a heady time, but it’s also sobering. Spitz injured his chronically bad back, spent several weeks recuperating at home and about six weeks out of the water. “Too much too soon,” he said. As he talked, his hands tried to coax the pain out of his left hamstring. He isn’t even attempting to swim his chosen Olympic stroke, the butterfly, for a few more weeks.

It’s all such a chore that, with a chuckle, he said the most difficult part is leaving himself enough energy for the 10-minute walk home, through the UCLA campus to his single-level, four-bedroom brick home in plush Holmby Hills.

And yet Spitz is undaunted. He said he most definitely will get back into shape after doing little more than walking the dog and sailing for the better part of two decades; he believes he can swim as fast as he did in 1972, when he set the world record in the 100-meter butterfly (as well as three other individual events); he believes he can make an Olympic team full of swimmers half his age; and he is not going to give up, come what may.

“I want this,” he said in an interview before a recent practice. “As a kid, I ended up in the sport of swimming through osmosis. I went out, sort of swam, was on a team, I got better, I got good, I got great, then I held world records. I never had a chance to sit back and reflect: What would I be doing if I wasn’t doing this?

“Now, I’ve elected to actually do it. There’s a difference. When you want to do something, you want it more. Not that I didn’t want it then. But now I want it even more.”

When he announced his intention to make the Olympic team at age 42, the pictures that went with all the stories showed a bronzed, sculpted Spitz, jet-black hair slicked back by the water, a man unchanged by time (except for the mustache, which is long gone). In reality, there’s gray in that black hair, quite a bit of it.

For a 40-year-old, Spitz is in wonderful shape and still possesses the great swimmer’s body, arms that go on forever attached to a torso so long his head hits the roof when he sits in the car, making it appear he is 6 feet 4, not a generous 6-1.

But when he walks out of the locker room in his swimming suit, after all the UCLA swimmers have passed by, it’s evident time takes its toll on everybody.

“He looks a little thick, doesn’t he?” said Mark Wallace, one of Spitz’s best friends from their Indiana University days, who was sitting by the pool.

“We’ll move that weight around,” said UCLA swimming coach Ron Ballatore, who has mixed Spitz into his practices and is one of the truest believers in the Spitz camp.

“I’m not toned,” said Spitz, who weighs 185 pounds, 10 more than in Munich. “In six months I will be.”

The fact that Spitz is more like one of us now than he was when he was 22 makes his “quest,” to use his word, all the more enchanting. He isn’t an untouchable god; he used to be, but not anymore. Now he’s a husband and the father of an 8-year-old boy who’d rather play baseball than swim.

Spitz runs his own real-estate-development business and never became a dentist, despite what people remember. He walks the UCLA campus in baggy sweats, slouched over, as is his way, and no one pays attention to him.

“I owe it to myself, I owe it to my sport, I owe it to my generation, I think, to find out what it’s all about,” Spitz said. “I really preserved myself. I was Mr. Joe Straight Arrow. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs. What does it take to get a body back in shape? We’ll all find out.”

But Spitz is coming back for reasons more profound than this. If he simply wanted to find out how fast he could swim, for swimming’s sake, he would join a masters club and compete against men his age. Although he’s not doing that, it was a friend in masters swimming that gave him the idea to try for one more Olympics.

Last spring Spitz ran into Lance Larson, a member of the 1960 Olympic team who is swimming masters and going faster than he did 30 years ago. He suggested Spitz could do that, too.

“That’s ridiculous,” Spitz said.

Wallace, meanwhile, was taking another tack. With Spitz’s 1972 times firmly in mind, he loved to calculate where his buddy would have placed had he swum that time in a certain event. Just last spring, at the NCAA championships, he looked at the scoreboard after the 100 butterfly, turned toward a woman in the stands and held up an open hand. “Fifth,” he thought.

The woman nodded and smiled back. She was Marge Counsilman, wife of Spitz’s coach at Indiana, the legendary Doc Counsilman.

“Think about that,” Wallace said. “His world record would have been good for fifth place 17 years later.”

And that, eventually, was what got to Spitz. He set a world record in Munich with a time of 54.27 seconds in the 100 butterfly. The current world record is 52.84, set by Pablo Morales of the United States. All of Spitz’s other world records have been lowered by three or five seconds. But not this one. His butterfly time would have placed eighth at the 1988 Olympics.

Spitz started to wonder if he might not be able to swim that time again--or go even faster, as those in masters swimming were doing. He would have to train for one event--not seven, as he did in 1972. He could test new coaching techniques with new coaches. He could regain his eligibility because of new rules allowing professionalism in swimming. He could try to do the impossible.

“The only reason I’m in this is because of what swimmers in the 100 butterfly didn’t do in the last 17 to 18 years,” he said. “They didn’t improve my time by that much.”

It’s also interesting to note Spitz’s 54.27 might not have been the best he could have swum in the late summer of 1972. For one, he was involved in “all those damn events” and was conserving energy any time he got ahead in a race. He also was not pushed in the 100 fly in Munich; Bruce Robertson of Canada won the silver in 55.56. That’s a significant difference in swimming.

“If I just do my same time, it’s competitive,” he said. “If I improve my time, we’re talking about possibly breaking the world record. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ll go in three stages: get into shape as a 22-year-old, which I’ll do in the next six months; go fast enough to make the Olympic team in the trials in 1992; and then go to the Olympics and see what I get.”

To ask a question is to burst the bubble, but an observer must do it:

“How do you get back into the shape of a 22-year-old when you’re 40?”

Spitz: “I’m asking myself that same question. But there are guys who are 50 who are swimming faster than when they were 20. Their times are slower than mine, but the analogy still works.”

Another question: “But didn’t they have more to improve upon than you, who was in peak condition at 22?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Spitz said. “Maybe that’s a factor. I don’t know. . . . The safe thing to say is I won’t make it. That’s more logical.”

Spitz would prefer not to think of all this, at least not now.

“I have one great ray of hope. In 1988, Pablo was the world-record holder and Pablo didn’t make the Olympic team. They didn’t break his world record, either. I was the world-record holder in 1968 and I lost (by finishing second). I don’t have to be the best before the Olympics to get to the Olympics.”

The path to the Olympics begins sometime late this summer, when Spitz said he will compete in his first race. It probably will not be part of a conventional meet. At least two TV networks have expressed interest in being there when he first steps onto the blocks, and it’s likely the event will be built around Spitz.

Until then, he is swimming simply to prepare. After a morning of business calls, Spitz makes his 10-minute walk from home to pool for his 3:30 p.m. workout with the UCLA team. Although Ballatore is more engrossed with his dozen collegians, he keeps a watchful eye on Spitz, who is working himself back into shape after the injury by swimming 2,000 to 3,000 yards a day, six days a week.

“He needs to get up to 6,000, and he will,” Ballatore said.

Even so, Spitz will not swim as many miles for this Olympics as others might because he will be so focused on the butterfly. Interestingly, although the butterfly is his stroke, Spitz will swim mostly freestyle until the day of his first race closes in.

“He never did a lot of fly anyway,” Ballatore said.

Earlier in the day Ballatore spoke over the phone with George Haines, who coached Spitz when he was a teenager.

“I think he can do it,” Haines said to Ballatore. “Tell me, how does his freestyle look?”

“It looks great,” Ballatore said.

“Yeah,” Haines replied, “it always looked great.”

To make the team that heads to Barcelona, Spitz will have to finish either first or second in the 100 fly at the trials in March 1992. To get to the trials, he will have to swim a qualifying time sometime the year before. In 1988, the qualifying time was 55.79 seconds, but it will be lower this time.

Matt Biondi won the ’88 trials in 53.09 and took the silver medal in Seoul in 53.01 seconds, 1-100th of a second behind gold medalist Anthony Nesty of Surinam. Biondi had the gold medal in his grasp until he miscalculated the number of strokes it would take to hit the wall; he glided in, and Nesty won when Biondi’s last stroke did not carry him to the finish.

“If that had been Mark, there’s no way he would have lost that race,” said Wallace. “He’s too competitive.”

If Spitz qualifies, he will face about 40 swimmers for those two spots on the Olympic team. Making the team would put him one qualifying heat from the eight-man final in Barcelona. The final would put him within a minute of the most improbable personal story in Olympic history.

Spitz already has a bank vault full of gold medals, nine in all (seven from Munich, two from relays during his disappointing performance at the 1968 Mexico City Games). But he is coming back to earn something worth more than gold to him: the respect and perhaps even the love of Americans who never understood or really cared for him the last time he came around.

Arrogance is a part of the swimming “psych,” the look, the airs, that tell another swimmer you are about to beat them. Spitz was great at walking around the pool as if he owned the place, and he just about did. Asked if he thought he was going to hit it rich after Munich (and he did), his answer, typically, was something like, “Are there stars in the sky?”

“He’s definitely mellowed,” said Wallace. “He’s not as sarcastic as he was. He was very inward-focused then. He really didn’t care what he said or what others said about him. All that mattered to him was what he did in the water.”

Those were strange, terrible times. Soon after his last race in Munich, Spitz, who is Jewish, was whisked out of town when terrorists took 11 Israeli athletes and coaches hostage and later killed them all. Spitz was safe, but he was caught in a whirlwind of emotions that deposited him in a world of endorsements and total isolation.

“I was 22, the press was different, athletics was different,” he said. “I started making money from an amateur sport. There was a little queasiness and uneasy feeling about the fact that I was doing it.

“I was on the scene for 14 years, but the public all of a sudden became aware of me in a one-week period of time, and then I was gone. I wasn’t out to make another touchdown pass like Joe Montana or another Super Bowl championship or whatever.

“Now, it’s not that I want to bask in the glory that I think I was denied, but the fact is, I’m trying to do something that for me is an interesting and exciting challenge. It sort of represents the ideals of the Olympics: It’s the spirit of competing, the attempt.”

Swimming people are intrigued.

“He’s got a lot going against him,” said Biondi, winner of five golds, one silver and one bronze in Seoul. “Age, his time out of swimming and the tremendous amount of motivation needed to smash people like a bug. There are plenty of obstacles, but he definitely has a chance.”

“If anyone can do it,” said Ballatore, “he’s the kind of guy who can.”

But can anyone do it?

“My days are numbered,” Spitz said. “I’ve got 26 months before the Olympic trials. Twenty-six months may seem like a lot to a guy who’s 20, but to a guy who’s now 40, that seems like it’s 26 days. Some days I get frustrated with myself. Other days, I feel great.

“But, what the heck.”