LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Name-Dropping” by Matt G.
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is an American athlete who has won many medals at the Summer Olympics.
Answer: MARK SPITZ, found by 302 solvers, 234 of which were solo solves

Notice that byline: “Matt G.” — highly unusual, but repeated on the copyright so not a mistake. What could it mean? Let’s take a look at our theme entries:

17-A: [Beloved crooner] = TONY BENNETT
24-A: [U.S. president of the 19th century] = JAMES MONROE. A little sus, since that’s a pretty meh way to describe an especially influential U.S. president.
34-A: [Member of the Cars, part of whose name is often seen in crosswords] = BENJAMIN ORR. This one’s pretty specific, on the other hand, that second part really narrowing things down.
44-A: [“thirtysomething” actor] = PETER HORTON. Not a typo on that first letter of the title! It was stylized as all-lowercase.
52-A: [“The Big Lebowski” actor] = JEFF BRIDGES. Everyone has that one famous movie that they’ve never seen and people always go “What?! You’ve never seen [insert title here]?” “The Big Lebowski” is mine. Seen many clips tho.

So what’s going on? Let’s put the two suspicious aspects we’ve run into together: We’ve got “by Matt G.” as the byline and then we’ve got some very vaguely-worded theme clues that could be pointing to a different person than the answer celebrity. The first one that popped out for many solvers was 34-A, since Ric Ocasek was the longtime lead singer of the Cars and his first name is a frequent guest in crosswords.

Give his name the “Matt G.” treatment and you get “Ric O.” — and hey, there’s RICO in the grid at 20-Across. We have caught the rabbit!

The others work the same way:

17-A: [Beloved crooner] could be TONY BENNETT but also MEL TORME, and we have MELT at 36-A
24-A: [U.S. president of the 19th century] could be JAMES MONROE but also ABE LINCOLN, and we have ABEL at 50-A
34-A: The aforementioned [Member of the Cars, part of whose name is often seen in crosswords] = BENJAMIN ORR, but could also be RIC OCASEK, and we have RICO at 20-Across
40-A [“thirtysomething” actor] could be PETER HORTON, but also KEN OLIN, and we have KENO in the grid at 15-A
52-A: [“The Big Lebowski” actor] could be JEFF BRIDGES, but also SAM ELLIOTT, and SAME is in the grid at 22-A

The first letters of those five (MELT/ABEL/RICO/KENO/SAME) spell the word MARKS. What multi-gold-winning U.S. Summer Olympian does that lead to? Repeat the theme trick once more to find contest answer MARK SPITZ, found by 302 solvers.

Meta – World Peace says:

Much as I’d like to give you “full” MARKS this week, Matt, that just seems to go against the spirit of the puzzle.

Tyler Hinman says:

Well that took entirely too [redacted] long. Looking forward to seeing myself in the first-initial-last-name version.

Where he would be the THIN MAN, of course…

Danny K Bernstein says:

That went swimmingly.

And finally, JrMan says:

I am old enough for Spitz’s name to have been the first to come to mind when I initially read the meta clue.

I was born just after the 1972 Olympics, so I don’t remember this at all of course. What’s Mark S. doing these days? Still swimming!

And now, everyone out of the pool! Time for this week’s meta…

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This puzzle’s contest answer, which is seven letters long, is what meta-crossword instructions should not be.

Good luck!