Worth the weight

By JOHN C. COTEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 30, 2000

Andy Tysz enjoyed his master's work. Enjoyed teaching. Had plans for the future.

Just not very thrilling ones.

"I figured I'd get my master's degree and then get a job coaching in college somewhere, wherever it was," he said. "But was that thrilling to me? No."

It was clear to Tysz that something was missing.

Tysz (pronounced Tish) left New Port Richey many years before, as a star football player and one of the school's best athletes. His mom thought he might be a good enough kicker to play somewhere professionally, though his skills as a fullback and linebacker had gotten him a scholarship.

So more than a decade later, 28 years old and with his football days well behind him, he couldn't put the fire out.

So instead, amid clanking steel, a puff of chalk and a bucket of sweat, Tysz stoked the fire.

"I needed to compete," he said. "I found that in weightlifting."

These days, Tysz is a nationally-ranked weightlifter. In just four years, he has become one of the country's best, an Olympic hopeful for 2004 and a resident of the United States Olympic Training Center.

For those who remember Tysz as a 5-foot-11, 170-pound Ridgewood football, soccer and track athlete, this will come as a surprise. For those who remember Tysz as a hard-nosed, hard-working hardhead, determined to do whatever it was he wanted, it only seems natural.

"I remember he was one tough son of a gun," said Wesley Chapel football coach John Castelamare, who then was the coach at Ridgewood. "If every team had 11 Andy Tyszes on it, you'd win a state championship every year. I'm from Jersey, and we had to walk down the streets of Newark and if there was anyone I would want watching my back it was him."

Tysz, who now weights 230 pounds, was a member of Ridgewood's first senior class, but a latecomer to football and weightlifting, his two loves. It was at the suggestion of Wayne Parzik, the current Ridgewood head coach and then an assistant, that Tysz took to pumping iron. He did so to be a better football player, to be stronger.

Years later, after a half dozen career changes, Tysz would remember those times with Parzik, and it would ultimately point him in the right direction.

At 32 and a relative neophyte to his sport, Tysz is the oldest and least experienced weightlifter at the Olympic training facility, a quirk that only adds charm to his accomplishments.

Despite the late start, he will be the 11th-ranked lifter in the country when the next rankings come out, and continues to improve at every meet.

Last week at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Westwego, La., with his mother, Barbara, and a handful of family members from Spring Hill, Floral City and Brooksville watching, Tysz impressively broke through both his personal bests. In the snatch, he lifted 155 kilograms (341 pounds), and clean-and-jerked 205 kilograms (451 pounds). Only super heavyweights Shane Hamman and Matt Thompson lifted more.

Tysz, whose father, Robert, still lives in New Port Richey, won his weight class (105 kg), but because scoring is based on the percentage of the qualifying weight you lift, his overall finish was 11th. Still, that will earn Tysz an additional monthly stipend of $100 (he already has free housing and meals in Colorado Springs) and moves him closer to the top eight, considered elite status.

"It was a real, real long shot for me to make the Olympic team," Tysz said."

Most important, the finish provided just another dose of inspiration for the easy-going, confident Tysz as he begins shooting for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

"He really seems to like it," said Barbara Tysz, who initially was against her son lifting because she wanted him to finish his master's degree. "As long as he's doing well, I'm happy. I have nothing to back this up, but the story is my great uncle was supposedly at one point in the early 1920s the strongest man in Westchester County (N.Y.), and I think Andy has always had it in the back of his mind that he comes from a long line of strong, healthy fellows."

While Tysz won the national championships a few months earlier in Maryland (the first meet both his parents ever attended), it paled in comparison to the Trials. He hopes it won't be his last. Though he'll be 36 at the time, he has his sights set on Athens.

One would need an AAA Trip Tick to navigate the road to this point in Tysz's life.

He's been to five different colleges in five different states, starting at Davidson (N.C.) in 1987.

He thought initially he might be a football player. His mom, the protective sort, was thinking placekicker because of his soccer skills. Tysz was thinking something more physical.

At Ridgewood he was a fullback and a linebacker, rushing for 620 yards and compiling 101 tackles as a senior, both team highs. He figured he was pretty good at running over people, or stopping them from doing the same.

So good, in fact, that when Davidson dropped down a class following his sophomore year, he transferred to East Tennessee State "because I didn't want to play Division III football." After one semester, he was transferring again, this time to South Florida.

Some kids change majors; Tysz changed states.

"That worried my mom a little bit, I think," Tysz said.

While his football playing days ended during a sour stay at ETSU, his career as a javelin thrower was just starting. In 1992, Tysz won the Metro Conference championship for USF in the javelin, and then competed the next year unattached while earning his degree.

At that point, Tysz hit a wall.

"I was fried," he said. "I was just frying myself trying to do so much."

So he did a little, working a "regular Joe job" with a delivery company for nine months, kicking back and waiting for the next challenge.

Eventually, he landed graduate assistant jobs at Eastern Kentucky and Humboldt (Calif.) State.

By the time Tysz landed on the West Coast in 1995, he had lost his edge, felt he had let himself become weak, and started lifting weights seriously.

"I remembered back to high school when I was teaching myself the snatch, and the power clean, which Parzik taught me," Tysz said. "I remembered how to do those and how I used to like that a lot, and said "you know, I think I'll start doing that.' I started getting strong again. And of course, I always had the urge to compete."

Tysz essentially trained himself, won his first meet, and was hooked. He enlisted the help of Bob Takano, a Van Nuys High School teacher and coach who since 1980 has sent at least one lifter to every Olympic Trials but one.

"He was very strong," Takano recalled. "He didn't have the best technique, but it was passable. And he was not as quick as he would become later on."

In other words, Tysz did not have future national champion written on him. But what he lacked in technique and skill he made up for with smarts and determination. And he has finally found his calling.

Tysz did not get to Colorado Springs by conventional methods, on many different levels.

His start came years after most weightlifters start. While he competed, and bombed, at the Florida high school state meet, he did not become serious about the sport until he was 28. Many of those he competes against started when they were at least 10 years younger.

And few, if any of the residents at Colorado Springs, get to the Olympic Training Facility by asking. In the spring, Tysz actually wrote a letter to the United States Weightlifting Federation requesting that he be accepted into the program, whereas generally the federation will do the asking.

He wasn't a complete unknown: Tysz had won some top meets, and even represented the United States at an international meet in El Salvador, placing third. He was ever-improving, and was regarded as one of the sport's hardest workers.

That was enough to get a positive response to his letter.

Takano was not surprised.

"He was on their radar," Takano said. "He was one of those guys that just keeps improving and improving. The potential was not immediately visible, but I'll take on anyone willing to work hard. And Andy is among the two or three of the hardest workers I ever coached. He just grabbed on and wouldn't let go. When it started getting tough, he wouldn't drop the weight and wouldn't quit."

Don't mistake toughness and stubbornness, though, for a lack of athleticism, Takano warns. Weightlifting requires flexibility, mobility, good motor learning skills and quickness. Tysz's experience as a football and soccer player, as well as his track experience, has served him well.

"I've enjoyed it," Tysz said. "You can't help but see instant progression, and when I see progression it's so gratifying I can't stay from it. I've always had an obsession with being big. I always wanted to be bigger than I was. I was never big enough. I still look at myself in mirror and am not happy."

Though the Athens games seem so far away, to Tysz they are just right around the corner.

Four more years? Not a problem.

"I never saw an end of the road for me and I still don't," Tysz said. "I'm convinced I can still get better. My goal was never to make the 2000 Olympic team. That would basically have been a pipe dream because when I got into the sport I was so far behind with four years to go. But when I started having the success, and kept improving ... I started to think. I think that I can make the 2004 team."

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