Focus on Phelps

Fifty-four years old, yet still gliding through the pool with grace.

“If I had the encouragement to break records, why would I want to deny that for somebody else?” he says.

Gray hair, stiff gait, but still a smooth stroke.

“It’s a great opportunity for swimming.... I’m excited about coming and watching,” he says.

Mark Spitz emerged from his quiet Westside life Tuesday to talk graciously about a kid who wants to rewrite the words that have defined Spitz’s life.

A kid who has made no effort to meet Spitz.

A kid who, three years ago, had never even heard of him.

A kid who refers to him only by his last name.

The kid is Michael Phelps, he’s 19, he’s the best swimmer in the world, and he has been commissioned to equal Spitz’s record seven gold medals in Athens next month.

All while ignoring him.

Talk about chlorine in your eyes.

Spitz nonetheless showed up on the eve of the Olympic trials in Long Beach with weathered palms outstretched.

“I have a feeling of empathy,” he said of Phelps’ record attempt. “I hope he does. This doesn’t take away a thing I had accomplished. He knows what he’s doing.”

Not always.

While Phelps and his handlers have carefully planned an attack on the record and its $1-million bounty, they have done so without paying even chapped lip service to the most famous swimmer in the world.

Imagine a young Tiger Woods never bothering to meet Jack Nicklaus.

Young pitchers from many teams have long flocked around Sandy Koufax each spring.

Amazing, indeed, that one month until they could be forever linked in Olympic lore, while achieving the same feat for the same country, Spitz and Phelps have never shaken hands.

Even more amazing is that Tuesday they spoke at separate news conferences at the same place fewer than three hours apart, and still never met.

“I actually thought about coming to listen to his press conference,” said Spitz. “The problem was, it would have interfered with what he had to say.”

Spitz smiled. “That would have been interesting, let’s put it that way.”

The shaggy-haired Phelps politely brushed aside questions about meeting Spitz as if he were being asked to meet the cousin of a friend of a friend.

It doesn’t appear to be personal. It doesn’t appear to be strategy. It doesn’t appear to be anything.

When asked what he would discuss with Spitz if they did meet, Phelps had no answer.

“I don’t know, I guess I never really thought about it that much,” he said.

When asked about his chances of tying the record, Phelps did give an indication that he had finally heard of the legend.

“I don’t think I would say it’s impossible,” he said. “Spitz did it.”

That’s Mr. Spitz to you.

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Spitz remembers whom he wanted to meet.

It was Don Schollander, a four-time gold medal winner during Spitz’s youth.

“I met him when I was just 14. I was on the same swimming team, I remember looking under the water at him with my goggles,” Spitz said. “I was trying to figure out what stroke was he doing that makes him so different.”

Spitz credited this sort of influence with his later stardom.

“That was the secret, I surrounded myself with greatness,” he said. “That’s why I got great.”

Spitz, married for 31 years, with two children and a private life filled with business ventures and motivational speeches, acknowledges that things are more hectic now.

“He has a lot more on his shoulders,” he said of Phelps, later adding, “To try to win the gold medal is like being the CEO of a corporation. He doesn’t have a lot of time to waste. He doesn’t need to talk to some past CEO of a corporation that’s been out of business for 31 years.”

But what about the grind? Couldn’t Spitz give Phelps advice about how to handle the physical grind of attempting to be the best in the world nearly every day for two weeks?

What about the tricks? Surely Spitz could pass along tricks he used to spin opponents in their bathing caps?

If nothing else, silly or not, he could tell Phelps the story about Munich and the mustache.

“Most of the conversation there, to be honest with you, was about my mustache,” he remembered. “People marveled at the fact that I had a bushy-haired mustache. I guess that was a statement that I didn’t care what people thought.”

He said he was going to shave his mustache before the 1972 Games.

“But there was so much focus on this mustache that, if they were thinking about this mustache, they weren’t thinking about their game,” he said. “I didn’t have to deal with talking about swimming events, about my strategy. I could talk about the mustache.”

Spitz will be giving out the medal Saturday in the 200 butterfly, an event that Phelps could win, so they could meet.

“Seven gold medals is not an event, it was the journey of my career,” Spitz said. “Now we’ll get a chance to watch the journey of his career.”

A journey that could start with a single conversation.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Spitz’s Seven

Mark Spitz won all four of his races in the 1972 Olympic swim trials, then won the same races at the Olympics in world-record time. He also participated in three gold-medal winning relay races, giving him seven for the Games:

*--* Race Trials Olympics 100 freestyle 51.91 51.22 100 butterfly 54.56 54.27 200 freestyle 1:53.58 1:52.78 200 butterfly 2:01.53 2:00.70

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*--* OLYMPIC RELAY RACES 400 freestyle relay 3:26.42 800 freestyle relay 7:35.78 400 medley relay 3:48.16

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