Lawrence High junior Blake Hocking prepares for a throw during the finals of the boys shot put event of the Kansas Relays on April 22 by Memorial Stadium. In his next meet, Hocking set the 59-year-old school record.

The world’s biggest sponge — measured at 6-foot-3, weighing 260 pounds and made of rock-solid muscle — can be found at Lawrence High.

Blake Hocking, a junior who recently broke a school record set before Bill Walton was born, did so with the help of the man whose mark stood for 59 years.

Bill Nieder, who would go on to win a silver medal in the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, and a gold in the 1960 Games in Rome, Italy, was more than happy to help via telephone from his California home when Hocking sought pointers last summer.

“I talked to him probably for 45 minutes,” Hocking said. “He asked me how my training was going, how far I threw at the time and talked about one day getting his record, but at that time it was not as realistic.”

Not long after that conversation, Hocking began to draw steadily closer to the record until breaking it April 29 with a mark of 62 feet, 9 inches, beating Nieder’s record of 60 feet, 93?8 inches set in 1952. Hocking sent some of the credit the way of Nieder for tips he applied.

“He told me to keep up the good work and do some fingertip pushups,” Hocking said.

He incorporated those into his offseason workouts and said those were a factor in the two extra feet he has attained from flipping the shot.

“I didn’t do that last year,” he said. “I just shoved it. Now I shove it and flip it. It spins it. I had heard of finger-tip pushups, but I never thought they were that great until he stressed them.”

Hocking said Nieder told him, “The record stood for too long and he hoped someone would break it before he died. He was real down-to-earth. He didn’t talk about how he was the greatest ever. I appreciated that a lot.”

The fingertips tip wasn’t the only one he received from the Lawrence legend.

“He said he had a 42-inch vertical, so I did a vertical-jump training program, and that definitely helped my leg strength,” said Hocking, who found a training DVD on the internet. “There is a lot of explosion because you jump up when you throw it. There’s a lot of lift involved. I probably added five inches to my vertical.”

He said he hadn’t talked to Nieder since breaking his record, but when he does, “thanks for the advice” will rank high on his list of things to say. Hocking’s quest for more knowledge spans the generations. He attended the Kansas Relays downtown shot put and met two of the competitors, Reese Hoffa and Adam Nelson.

“That was really exciting,” Hocking said.

Naturally, he was there as more than just another spectator having a good time in the sun. The world’s biggest sponge was there as a student of the shot put.

He said he asked for their best marks as high school shot putters and was told by Hoffa that his was 58-8, and Nelson said his was “55 or 56.”

Hocking’s first teacher was his father. Michael Hocking put the shot 56 feet, according to his son, as a high school athlete in St. Joseph, Mo., and competed for one year at Missouri State, then known as Southwest Missouri State.

Hocking, 17, surpassed his father’s mark for the first time when he pulled off an upset and won the AAU Nationals in Norfolk, Va., last summer.

Having a father knowledgeable in his passion was Hocking’s first break. His second: Lawrence High track and field coach Jack Hood’s area of expertise happens to be the throwing events.

“That’s very helpful,” Hocking said. “He’s a great technician.”

Hood also has helped Hocking fortify his academic transcript by convincing him to take an advanced-placement history class he teaches, which Hocking said requires at least one hour of studying, seven nights a week.

Former LHS thrower Scott Penny, now a medical student throwing the hammer for Kansas University after a three-year career at Oregon, also took the class.

Said Hood: “I told them both, ‘You’re big-time athletes who are going to be recruited by big-time schools, and you better be prepared when you get there.’ It’s the hardest class I’ve ever had to prepare for, and for the students it’s as challenging as anything they’ll do in high school.”

During the summer, Hocking and his father traveled as far east as Virginia, as far west as Washington, plus to nearby states Oklahoma, Missouri and Iowa during a summer devoted to weight training, attending clinics and meets, all for the purpose of becoming a better shot putter.

Predicted to finish second in the state meet last year, he placed sixth.

“That’s been a huge motivator,” he said.

The first thing he did was switch his technique from gliding, a more forgiving method, to spinning, which allows for a higher ceiling but is more difficult to execute consistently.

He hit the weights harder than ever.

“A lot of the season is already won based on the offseason,” Hocking said.

He also knows college coaches dangling scholarships look at more than results: “Do kids look at how they did last year and think they’re going to do better just by sitting around the couch, or do they work hard and get in the weight room when everybody else is at movies or living the good life?”

Hocking’s version of living the good life is setting the goal of competing in the Olympics, a la Nieder, and doing everything within his power to make that goal seem more realistic all the time.