The Uncommon Men

Some men satisfy their sporting instincts by chasing golf balls around fairways. Others like to lose themselves in a game of checkers or a televised football match. Then there are the thrill seekers, a wild and often winning lot who delight in doing what has never been done.

Bruce Tulloh, the former British Olympic distance runner, is panting across the plains of Oklahoma in an attempt to run from Los Angeles to New York in a record 66 days. Four of his countrymen are pushing their dog sleds toward Spitsbergen, Norway, in the last days of a 16-month, 2,000-mile trek across the Arctic. This summer, eight men from East Africa will try to follow up their successful ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro (elevation: 19,340 ft.) by climbing Mount Everest (29,028 ft.); all are blind. Stunt Man Evel Knievel plans to race a jet-powered motorcycle down a ramp at 280 m.p.h. and--God and the authorities willing--jump across the Grand Canyon. Last week Henry Carr, Detroit Lions defensive back and former Olympic 200-meter-dash champion, raced a pacer over a 110-yd. course and won by 10 yds. "I never beat the horses at the betting window," he said, "so I wanted to see if I could beat them on the track."

Walk on Water. At sea, the two remaining contestants in the first singlehanded, nonstop sailboat race around the world are trying to better the record of 312 days set last month by Britain's Robin Kriox-Johnston. A onetime big-game hunter and whisky smuggler named John Fairfax is rowing a 22-ft. boat 3,300 miles from the Canary Islands to Florida. Honors for freakish firsts, though, must go to Aleksander Wozniak, a Polish exile and former R.A.F. fighter pilot, who fashioned a pair of 3-ft.-long, canoe-shaped shoes out of wood and walked 33 miles down the Thames from Marlow to Westminster Bridge.

Daring or daffy as these ventures may be, none has attracted a more mixed assortment of self-styled adventurers than last week's transatlantic air race, a circulation-building stunt sponsored by the London Daily Mail. Held in commemoration of the first nonstop crossing of the Atlantic, by two British pilots in a Vickers Vimy biplane in 1919, the race had 390 entrants from ten countries competing for $144,000 in prizes in such bizarre categories as the best performances by a Swiss or a resident of New York State. The contestants included onetime Racing Car Champion Stirling Moss and a chimp named Tina, who was vying for honors as "most meritorious performance by a Commonwealth citizen." For all of them, the hardest part was not the flying but getting to and from the check-in stations atop the Empire State Building in New York and the General Post Office in London. Royal Navy Pilot Peter Goddard, who won $14,400 for the fastest performance (with a time of 5 hr. 11 min. 22 sec.), confessed that things went so smoothly in his F-4K Phantom jet that he got bored and started reading.

To at least one contestant, though, the challenge lay in the flying, not in the frills. Czechoslovak-born Mira Slovak, 39, clocked one of the slowest transatlantic crossing times since Columbus--175 hr. 42 min. 7 sec. --yet still won $2,400 for "the best performance in a plane weighing under 5,000 Ibs." Slovak's aircraft was the smallest ever to cross the Atlantic: an 860-Ib. German-made Fournier RF 4 glider powered only by a 36-h.p. Volkswagen auto engine. Since the plane carried only 46 gallons of fuel, he made frequent stops (longest hop: 1,000 miles from Labrador to Greenland)--but he never cut his power and simply glided. His 6-ft. 1-in., 175-lb. frame scrunched into the cockpit of the toylike craft, he flew as low as 200 ft. to avoid bad weather, encountered such stiff headwinds over Canada that "even the cars on the ground were passing me."

Among the dozens of publicity seekers and assorted kooks in the race, Slovak was one of the very few to whom such adventures are a way of life. A year ago, after picking up a plane in West Germany, he flew it back to the U.S. safely. Then just 19 ft. from the runway of his home field in Santa Paula, Calif., the plane was caught in a strong downdraft and slammed into the ground. Unconscious for the next week, Slovak suffered eleven broken bones in his left arm, a deep head gash, six broken ribs, a collapsed lung and intestinal injuries. While recuperating, he received an invitation to compete in the transatlantic race. "I thought it was a bad joke," he recalls. "But as the wounds healed, the bad feelings disappeared, and then I wanted to try things again."

The Wild Czech. Slovak's first truly memorable adventure occurred in 1953, when, as the youngest captain in the Czechoslovakian Airline, he hijacked a C-47 carrying 25 passengers and flew to West Germany. After eight months of interrogation by the CIA he was allowed to come to the U.S., where he worked for two years as a crop-dusting pilot in the Western states. In 1956, though he had never raced anything faster than a kayak, he took up hydroplane racing. Two years later, the "Wild Czech" was the national champion.

For relaxation, Slovak began stunt flying in World War II fighter planes, doing such tricks as flying upside down just 50 ft. above the ground with his hands dangling down. Soon he was gunning his growling Grumman Bearcat around 50-ft. pylons and, in the suicidal pastime of air racing, flying wing tip to wing tip at 400 m.p.h. In 1964, he became the national champion of that sport also. Cavorting in small planes, says Slovak, "helps me unwind and stop being a part of the computer. It makes me a better pilot when I get back to the big planes." The big planes are the 707 jets he pilots for a national airline whose name, he pleads, must be kept secret. Airline officials are fearful that passengers might feel a little uneasy if they knew that the Wild Czech was at the controls.

Basic Coward. They should not.

Though Slovak has been hospitalized five times in a career that has cost him a broken back, a broken leg, 23 teeth and badly damaged kidneys, he is a stickler for safety. "Basically, I'm a coward. If I thought I would be killed, I wouldn't take on these adventures." Then why flirt with danger in the first place? "I love the challenge," he says. A U.S. citizen since 1960, he adds: "In this country, you can try for anything you want, and what I want is to be an uncommon man."

Crossing the Atlantic is "the most lonely feeling in the world," he says, "but it teaches you a good lesson. If you think you are so great, so untouchable, then you won't feel that way too long when you are out there. It's just a wasteland--water under you and clouds around you, and there you are with your life depending on that little put-put in front. You always remember that feeling. It changes your whole outlook on life." To keep that feeling alive, Slovak will take up yet another uncommon sport after he returns to his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He intends to pilot hot-air balloons.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.