By John Gregg Watsonville, CA. (December 15, 2007) — It should be a very Merry Christmas around both of the LaPoint and Fitzgerald households this holiday season. Two of the very best water skiers in the world, Kris LaPoint and Marsha Fitzgerald were recently selected to be inducted to into the AWSEF Water Ski Hall of Fame in Florida next spring.
Kris LaPoint joins his younger brother Bob as yet another family duo to be elected to the Hall of Fame, while Marsha Fitzgerald becomes the very first female water ski racer to represent the very best in the sport of water skiing.
Fitzgerald lives in Concord, North Carolina with her husband Paul and their sixteen-year-old daughter Tayler. Marsha first started skiing in Lake Elsinore, California, but then moved back to North Carolina fourteen years ago where she now works as an accountant for a construction company in Charlotte.
Fitzgerald, is one of the most decorated female water ski racers of all time, capturing the 1989 women’s world water ski racing title and the 1986 Catalina Ski Race. Marsha was the bronze medallist at the 1985 and 1987 Water Ski Racing World Championships, and she was a nine-time national champion. Fitzgerald was elated when she got the news that she would be honored by the Hall of Fame.
“I was at work and Carol Lowe called and I sat there in shock and the girls in my office were coming in and it was, ‘did you make it, did you make it?” Fitzgerald recalled. “It was very exciting and I don’t know if my sister [Debbie] has quit crying yet. Through all of my competition and all of my skiing and everything she was probably my biggest fan.”
 The 54-year-old LaPoint, DeLeon Springs, Florida is widely recognized as one of the greatest slalom skiers in the history of the sport. He is a nine-time National slalom champion, a seven-time U.S. Masters Slalom Champion and over a career that goes back to the 1960’s, he scored a remarkable 13 wins in major championships. Along the way, the extremely gifted LaPoint captured IWSF World Championship victories in 1977, 1979, 1983, 1985, 1987.
One of the keys to Kris’s success was that he trained and competed with his younger brother Bob LaPoint, who entered the Hall of Fame in 2007.
“It is pretty cool but it is also a testament to our sport because there are other siblings Camille and Sammy Duvall, the Osborns from the ‘60’s and Carl Roberge and his sister Karin Roberge,” LaPoint said. “It is a family sport and having someone to train with and the drive you and to compete with is key like it is in a lot of other sports. But it is very unique to our sport and there are so many people from different families that have been successful.”
Family is the overriding theme for both of the newest members of the Hall of Fame and it remains the centerpiece to all of the success they have had on the water.
“We moved to California when I was seven and I was actually born in Alabama,” Marsha Fitzgerald explained, who first competed under her maiden name of Hill. “My father had two brothers that lived in California and we came out on vacation one year and never went home. My uncle’s wife’s parents lived in Lake Elsinore and they had a boat and we went to the lake with them one weekend and my uncle taught me how to ski. There were some people that trained on the lake and I would always see them and my father had always been involved in motor sports back in Alabama, racing and building motors. They had a local race at Lake Elsinore when I was 13 and I signed up for the women’s novice and I won it and I was hooked.”
The list of Fitzgerald’s accomplishments is somewhat staggering given that she was the 1984 U.S Women’s Open National Champion Runner Up, 1986 U.S. Women’s Open National Champion,
1987 U.S. Women’s Open National Champion and 1988 U.S. Women’s Open National Champion, while sweeping both rounds.
However, Fitzgerald’s greatest success came on the International stage winning Gold medals not only for this country but also individual Gold as a world champion. She was the dominant female water skier racer throughout the 1980’s and captured a number of world championship medals. Marsha was the 1985 World Team Gold Medallist, 1985 Women’s World Bronze Medallist, 1988 World Team Silver Medallist, 1988 Women’s World Bronze Medallist, 1989 World Team Gold Medallist and in 1989 the Women’s World Champion.
“The individual gold medals are probably what I’m most proud of,” Fitzgerald confided. “I mean Catalina is an accomplishment, just to finish Catalina. But I really feel that the gold medals and to go overseas and be in unfamiliar territory and to achieve success under those elements you can’t beat that.”
 Water skiing, and family has always been first and foremost for Fitzgerald but Marsha has also known her share of tragedy, however, her dedication to the sport also gave her great solace.
“It was a family sport and we did it and actually I skied all the time and as long as I got good grades and did well in school, my father let me ski as much as I wanted to,” Fitzgerald recalled. “I loved it and it became part of life. To be honest with you, I married my high school sweetheart when I was 21 and he was killed 2 ½ years later in a boating accident. When he was killed I had made the US World team for the first time two months prior to that and that kind of kept me going and I just dedicated all my time to training. Once I started doing it on a world class level that was first in my life and then everything else came behind that. It got me through some pretty rough times.”
Marsha won a number of marathon titles, however, one of the most enduring occurred in 1986, when she was the Women’s World Cup Champion. Fitzgerald became the first and only American woman to capture the World Cup of Water Ski Racing comprised of the Catalina Ski Race in Long Beach, California, the Giro Del Lario Race on Lake Como, Italy and the Botany Bay World Series Races in Sydney, Australia
“I have made great friends and been on great teams. My dad [John Hill] was actually my trainer and he had a boat just like the one I competed behind and we lived on the lake at Elsinore and it was pretty much at my beckoned call. I could train anytime that I wanted to and that was one of the things that made me as good as I was.”
Kris LaPoint’s lasting legacy has been his remarkable consistency and his ability to compete at the very top of such a demanding sport for such a long period of time. He was winning championships when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House and yet he was still competiting and nailing down victories when George Bush II came around and started calling the shots.
“I would say that I have been competitive basically for 40 years,” LaPoint said with pride. “I set my first slalom record in 1966 and I skied in pro events in 2006 and I was pretty competitive in 2005 but I was banged up in ’06 and in ’07. I had foot surgery in the fall of ’06 and I’m 13 months into it. I’m about 80 percent after having my foot rebuilt and that’s why you didn’t see me in pro tournaments this year.”
Another one of the factors in his remarkable career is that LaPoint is 6-time slalom world record holder and that he set his first world record at age 13. Amazingly during 1992 in San Diego, LaPoint became the oldest man to win a pro tour stop. That’s a lot of water and rooster tails but part of his greatness can be traced to his ability to embrace change and the new technology that helped to revolutionize his sport.
“I tend to remember some of the first things I did and some of the last things. Maybe in a nutshell was that I was competitive and set records for a really long time,” LaPoint said. “I was able to do that because I was always involved in design work along with teaching and it kept me on top of the evolution of the sport and the evolution of the equipment. Because what happens with today’s equipment was that the techniques that we learned basically in the ‘60’s isn’t optimum for today’s equipment. As the equipment evolved we could see that we had to make some changes to take advantage of the newer equipment. That has been a real challenge but the example that everyone could talk about is Tiger Woods and he is still working on his swing. It is similar in that you have to improve your technique and change your technique to take advantage of the technology of the changes”
Kris will be joined at the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies along with his wife Jennifer, formerly Jennifer Leachman, a world class women’s slalom skier and their 13-year-old daughter Taylor. You guess it; Taylor is also a water skier that in 2008 just might be in the hunt for getting a medal in Girls II. Which is fitting, given that the tradition of water skiing in the LaPoint family goes back a long way to growing up in California.
“My dad’s uncle, I guess my great uncle bought a boat when he was like 62-years-old and said, ‘hey, I want to learn how to water ski.’ The two of them learned how to ski together and then a few years later Bob and I learned how to ski,” Kris recalled. “The roots to our sport are definitely family oriented and I think that is really good because when we got started and even when we were becoming world class you get in it and you get to travel a little bit. Then when it is time to go off to college you go on with the rest of your life but it has been a long career for both of us. Our very first tournament was a ski club tournament and it couldn’t have been more entry level but you get out there and you get a ribbon and somebody says you’re the winner and that kind of starts the whole ball rolling.”
There should be a great deal of singing and laughing this Christmas in both of the LaPoint and Fitzgerald homes. However, you can expect more than a few tears when they honor two of water skiing's true heroes next spring in Florida.
Photos courtesy of USA Water Ski |
