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"Listen," a fellow athlete once told a mountainous young football player named Parry O'Brien. "You can be either an All-American or an Olympic champion. There are at least 33 Ail-Americans every year. But there is only one Olympic champion—every four years." Parry O'Brien thought it over. "I wanted to be able to take the credit or the blame for what I did myself. I always wanted to be a soloist." So Parry became an Olympic champion.
This week, some six years and several world records later. Air Force Lieutenant William Parry O'Brien Jr., a strong and strapping (6 ft. 3 in., 240 Ibs.) giant of 24, walks into the center of Melbourne's main Olympic stadium to defend with his brawny grace his reign as world's champion shotputter.
In the lexicon of track and field, weight men are called "whales," and in this Olympic year, Parry O'Brien is the great white whale of the U.S. team—a Moby Dick whom the Russians and the rest of the athletic world would rejoice to master. In competitive terms, he is the epitome of the spirit of single-minded pursuit of perfection idealized in the Olympic creed, a loner who has consecrated his life to the task of tossing a 16-lb. ball of steel farther than anyone—including Parry O'Brien —has tossed it before. He searches for tricks that help him "dig deep into what you might call an inner reserve of strength," a search that has taken him into studies of physics and aerodynamics, through a canvass of religions and a long flirtation with the postural exercises and "positive thought" notions of Yoga. To warm up for a contest he often uses a sort of self-hypnosis, with tape recordings of his own voice firing himself with hatred for Competitor X or Y, and exhorting himself to greater effort.
There are doubtless other men in Melbourne's Olympic Village who take their talents as seriously. None has been more successful than O'Brien in combining what he calls "M.A." (mental attitude) and "P.A." (physical aptitude). Smooth interaction of the two enabled him to become the first man ever to toss the shot beyond 60 ft.—a feat comparable to the four-minute mile. His farthest throw, of 63 ft. 2 in., is more than 6 ft. farther than his 1952 Olympic record. He is an almost sure bet to win his second Olympic Gold Medal—and ten unofficial points for the U.S.—this week.
Football Was War. It was probably inevitable that O'Brien would become an athlete. His father, a former bush-league ballplayer good enough to earn a tryout with the 1926 Athletics, tried his best to steer his only son toward big-league baseball. But when Parry was not fooling around on the handy home-town beaches of Santa Monica, Calif., he was proving himself one of the best ends in the state on Santa Monica High's championship football team and toying with the 12-lb. shot at high-school meets. He decided to accept a football scholarship at U.S.C. (major: business administration), where he got standard financial aid: tuition plus $75 a month for doing a job little more demanding than checking each morning to see that the 50-yd. line was still there. (Later, when he switched to shotputting, Parry's duties consisted of taking care of the shotput ring.)