Heavy top quark from Fritzsch mass matrices

It is shown, contrary to common belief, that the Fritzsch ansatz for the quark mass matrices admits a heavy top quark. With the ansatz prescribed at the supersymmetric grand unified (GUT) scale, one finds that the top quark may be as heavy as 145 GeV, provided that tan$\beta$ (the ratio of the vacuum expectation values of the two higgs doublets) $\gg 1$. Within a non-supersymmetric GUT framework with two (one) light higgs doublets, the corresponding approximate upper bound on the top mass is $120~ (90)$ GeV. Our results are based on a general one--loop renormalization group analysis of the quark masses and mixing angles and are readily applied to alternative mass matrix ans\"{a}tze.