Water Baby to Beat

If there is one Olympic sport in which U.S. supremacy is secure, it is swimming. That was clear two weeks ago when the nation's top collegiate swimmers, led by U.C.L.A.'s Zac Zorn and Mike Burton, rewrote the record book at the N.C.A.A. indoor championships in Hanover, N.H.-- smashing no fewer than twelve U.S. and N.C.A.A. marks Zorn clocked a phenomenal 45.3 sec in the 100-yd. freestyle, and Burton became the first man ever to crack 16 mm. in the 1,650-yd. freestyle. Yet even those performances may pale this week when the A.A.U. short-course championships get under way in Greenville N.C., and a teen-ager from Santa Clara' Calif., hits the water.

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 way anybody is likely to keep his score that low in next fall's Mexico City Olympics is by scheduling events simultaneously.

Let 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 he was ten, the youngster held 17 national age-group swimming records, and when he was 14, his father took him aside. "We have to do something now--or nothing," said Papa Spitz. "We can 1 live here and you can forget about competitive swimming. Or we can go to Santa Clara and turn you over to George Haines"--coach of the famed Santa Clara Swim Club and of the 1968 U.S. Olympic swimming team. Mark opted for Santa Clara and the Spitzes moved, a decision that now forces Mr. Spitz to commute 100 miles each day to work.

The keys to Mark's success are outsized, scooplike hands and a curious ability to flex his legs slightly forward at the knee--which allows him to kick anywhere from 6 in. to 12 in. deeper than his competitors. "Mark's whole body ls so flexible," says his father that the water just seems to slip past him. That flexibility also gives him an abnormally long stroke; in the butterfly he can swim the length of a 25-yd pool with only 13 strokes, while most swimmers require 15 or 16. "I'm slower but I'm faster," he explains. "I mean that I stroke slower--but I get there faster."

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 and attention I've had as a kid."

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