Muscle Wars

Joe.

Chapter 1

IN THE BEGINNING

My Catholic upbringing notwithstanding, I have long har-bored the devilishly delicious notion that after he’d made Eve and let there be light for a delirious Adam, God wafted Himself away from snake-infested Eden to create an earthly heaven that he named The Caribbean.

There is ample evidence supportive of my admittedly pagan conclusion. While each stubbornly clings to its idiosyncratic heritage— bequeathed by the first Spanish, Dutch, French, or English settlers— the islands of the Caribbean bask blissfully in a basinful of blessings: limpid blue water that’s heaven to yachtsmen, skiers, and snorkelers; white sand beaches; and, thanks to soothing trade winds, comfortable year-round temperatures ranging between seventy-five and eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. From these blest isles have sprung some of the world’s most celebrated bodies: Sergio Olivia (Cuba), Bertil Fox (Saint Kitts-Nevis), Serge Nubret (Guadeloupe), Paul Wynter (Antigua), Earl Maynard, Albert Beckles, Roy Callender (Barbados, all three), Elliott Gilchrist (Grenada), Chris Forde (Trinidad), and Johnny Fuller (Jamaica).

Not that these island people are more health-conscious than their overseas cousins. No, the Caribbean man is simply a product of his natural habitat. His breakfast consists of fresh garden fruit untouched by chemicals, eggs from corn-fed, homegrown chickens, and cassava bread, made from manioc, a close relative of the sweet potato. Coffee break means time for a glass of refreshing, mineral-rich coconut water—from fresh green coconut. Lunch is steamed fresh fish with yams, boiled pumpkin or sweet potato, and fresh green salad dressed with olive oil and vinegar. (Stewed or baked chicken is a Sunday dish; red meat, very expensive, is only for special occasions.) Dessert will be a piece of sugarcane or whatever tropical fruit is in season. Supper, served around six p.m., closely resembles lunch.

Since television is still fairly new to the region, few locals take their entertainment sitting down. Fun is movement: foot races at the beach, canoeing, sailing, or dancing through the night to sensuous calypos rhythms, fueled by the vibrations of one’s partner and heady Mount Gay Rum.

And evidently it all does a body good.

What a gleaming Porsche is to the Beverly Hills predator, what GQ gladrags and Pierre Cardin jewelry are to the cool New York dude, so is a fine-tuned physique to the Caribbean man and woman. Caribbean youngsters learn early that nothing else matters as much as the successful conclusion of the hunt; that the difference between bagging a bird and having it fly into someone else’s bush often has everything to do with the hunter’s physique. Bright pigments and imaginative wear are no measure of a person’s vitality. A bloated, flabby, neglected body, loosely wrapped in dry, dead skin, indicates a sluggish mind—and limited sexual endurance.

A man’s body is his love instrument. And instinctively he learns to care for it; to keep it muscular and rock hard. His woman is just as body-conscious. Where she is concerned the most important word in the English language is tight!

Caribbean people are born narcissistic.

Even so, in the Caribbean of my youth, on my native Saint Lucia, at any rate, there were no gyms. There were no organized fitness classes, no seminars on health and nutrition. My first body-building lessons came in the form of a correspondence course on dynamix tension. I’d seen the author’s advertisements in all the American comic books I so avidly read in my preteens. They appealed to my presumed atavistic for self-preservation. After all, if there was one commodity guaranteed never to run out in Saint Lucia, it was sand. Who could be sure some heavy-footed numbskull wouldn’t one day take it into his bully head to score points by kicking a load into my face.

Unfortunately, instruction in dynamic tension cost much more than I could spare from my weekly allowance, so I was forced to reconcile myself to defenseless ignorance until such time as I could afford enlightenment.

I didn’t have to wait long. I had barely turned twelve when a friend presented me the ten or twelve chapters that held the secrets of machomanhood, as revealed to Mr. Charles Atlas during visits to the various New York zoos, where to his surprise he discovered that the powerhouses of the animal world—gorillas, tigers, bears, lions—never lifted a barbell! All they aver did was tug at the iron bars on their cages, push against immovable walls, and stretch out on the floor. Yet these beasts displayed an impressive stretch and development that made the day’s most celebrated strongmen look like lumpy Lilliputions.

Mr. Atlas built on this insight to develop his dynamic tension training system, and rebuilt himself into a macho man capable of hauling freight trains over lengths of New York railroad track. (There were aesthetic benefits, too; he modeled for some of the city’s more famous nude statues.) And then he offered the benefits of his experience to the world’s weaklings, promising them failsafe protection against sandy eyes. I was a beneficiary of dynamic tension, albeit not nearly to the extent demonstrated by its originator. However, by the time I was fourteen, my friends had convinced me that I more than merited the two-foot-high statuette Mr. Atlas awarded his successful students. Alas, even though I kept my long-distance trainer abreast of my progress, he gave no evidence of being impressed. In any event, my tin muscleman never arrived.

Just when I’d become bored with pitting my right biceps against my left, copies of Strength & Health began to reach Saint Lucia. And there was the evidence I needed to prove Mr. Atlas was less than honest when he wrote that barbell training was only good for turning normal people into overdeveloped aberrations. The men pictured in Strength & Health certainly did not look too musclebound to raise their hands over their heads. They were obviously powerful, capable of record clean-and-jerks, military presses, and snatches—Olympic lifts that demanded not only brute strength but coordination and speed movement as well. Save for a few potbellied heavies, the weightlifters featured in Strength & Health were well built. The best built was champion bodybuilder John Carl Grimek, who often appeared on the cover of the magazine. He was JCG and The Great Jawn to buddies and The Glow (for he radiated health) to fans.

While Grimek had been remarkable as a teenaged Olympic lifter, it wasn’t until he switched to bodybuilding that he achieved world renown. He’d been Mr. America in 1940 and 1941, the third man ever to win the title. (Roland Essmaker and Bert Goodrich both won in 1939.) The AAU rule that the title can be held just once was established largely because of Grimek.

Strength & Health was published by Boo Hoffman of the York Barbell Company of York, Pennsylvania. The magazine regularly featured training articles by the likes of Mr. America winners Jules Bacon (1943), Steve Stanko (1944), George Eiferman (1948), and John Farbotnik (1950) for readers whose main interest was bodybuilding. Nevertheless, coverage was primarily concentrated on Olympic weightlifting. Indeed, Strength & Health editors seemed to suggest that it was all right to invest some time in the improvement of one’s physique, but it was really only proper to do so by the means advocated by Mr. Hoffman, which is to say, via the regulation three Olympic lifts. That didn’t entirely make sense to me.

Another thing about Hoffman’s magazine left me uneasy after every reading. While its editors regularly trumpeted the virtues of fair play, they seemed oblivious to the fact that the Mr. America title too often went to the least deserving contender. Year after year extraordinary bodies won no recognition at all while run-of-the-mill entries were lifted to stardom. I found that altogether puzzling.

It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the scales fell from my eyes. I graduated to Your Physique and Muscle Power magazines, both published in Union City, New Jersey, by a man named Joe Weider. Suddenly the picture became clear. The big winners in the annual Mr. America contest were always white, and they were always associated with the York Barbell Club and Bob Hoffman. He was the big cheese in both American weightlifting and bodybuilding, largely, from what I could tell, as a result of his wealth and his highly successful and influential magazine. He had yes-men all around him, only too eager to win his smile. If he said the emperor was impeccably clothed—or, in this case, that a man’s musculature was the best—the others were quick to agree. Yes, yes. Yes Indeed!

In Hoffman’s heyday, the Mr. America contest was not really an event in its own right. It was used to attract paying audiences to weightlifting meets that could not draw enough of a crowd on their own. These meets were boring affairs that went on for hours, held in poorly lit halls almost always too hot or too cold. Those who had organized the Mr. America contest had done so only to take advantage of bodybuilding popularity. Their heart beat only for the weightlifters; there was something denigrating in their approach to bodybuilding. Only after the weightlifters were through onstage did they announce the start of the Mr. America event—usually around eleven p.m.— prompting wild displays of bodybuilding enthusiasm. But the contest nearly always ended in disappointment for contenders and fans alike.

Through his magazines, Joe Weider set out to redress the balance. It was not easy assignment. The apposition was firmly in control. They had lots of money, and they were the official representatives of Olympic weightlifting in America. They had clout! All Weider had was a persuasive argument. He pointed out that despite the obvious superior physiques of men such as George Paine, Melvin Wells, and Arthur Harris, none of them had ever come close to making Mr. America. Did that have anything to do with their being black?

As if to underscore his distaste for prejudice, Weider featured the neglected black champions in multipage spreads in his magazines. He also spotlighted new stars—like Leroy Colbgert, Marvin Eder, Abe Goldberg, Artie Zeller, Bob Shealy, and Bob Walker.

Did the opposition stand idly by? Oh no! Thunderbolts of denunciation were hurled from either side of the iron fence. Hoffman and Weider confronted each other in court more than once. But nothing could stop the revolution. A number of the established AAU champs, nearly all white, came to the conclusion that unless they threw the weight of their support behind Weider, their sport would forever play second fiddle to Bob Hoffman’s first love.

Despite veiled threats from the puissant house of York, Allan Stephan, Malcolm Brenner, George Eiferman, and others joined the revolutionaries. When Weider sponsored Jack Delinger, Clarence Ross, and Leo Robert in the Mr. Universe contest in London, he was rewarded with their support. They became known as Weider students and before long served as boosters for Weider food supplements, Weider weights, and Weider bodybuilding courses.

I was caught up in this revolution from afar. It was largely due to Weider’s inspiration that some friends and I started Saint Lucia’s first bodybuilding gym. Some gym! Regular equipment was unavailable, so for months we collected as much lead as we could lay our hands on, and fashioned from that dumbbells of various poundages. They were crude, yes, but effective enough to deliver the results we’d been dreaming of. From Weider’s magazines we chose our favorite musclemen, then followed their recommended exercise routine to the letter.

I did not have a particular preference. I admired John Grimek for his baseball biceps, George Paine for his horseshoe triceps, and Marvin Eder for his bull strength. (At nineteen, the New Yorker was one of the strongest men in America, not discounting York weightlifters. He was denied a place on the U.S. Olympic team allegedly because he’d posed for a Weider ad.) I was impressed, too, by Clarencde Ross’s artistic posing and by the tremendous back development and overall muscle destiny displayed by England’s Reg Park.

While I dropped over the herculean legs of John Grimek, Steve Reeves, and Jack Delinger, our primitive gym did not have the equipment needed to do their lower body workouts. That explains, why, at age seventeen, my manly upper body was carried by legs that were still very much boy’s.

My friends insist this was a Mr. Saint Lucia contest. I don’t recall the event, maybe because I placed third. You may recognize me to the right of the winner, giving the evil eye to the judges. (Photo by Leo St. Helen, courtesy of Carlton Ishmael)

Every Sunday my friends and I rowed three miles to a secluded beach where we wrestled, set local records for push-ups, and strutted around like penguins, posing for each other on nearby rocks—toujours au naturel! Why the state of undress? Well, it seemed only appropriate. We saw that most of the stars we admired had posed unclothed in the classic tradition. Most offered side views, thighs obscuring genitals, but a few posed facing the camera, in which case their photos were provided pouches by a retoucher. It never occurred to us to wonder why. Our worldly education has not yet begun.

I never won the Mr. Saint Lucia contest, nor the Mr. West Indies title, for the simple reason that no such events were held when I was growing up in the Caribbean. Oh, but I did achieve a measure of international recognition, thanks to George Bender of the U.S. Navy, whose ship periodically dropped anchor in Port Castries. George, a Miami native who trained with a group of shipmates he jokingly called Florida Muscleheads, ran into me near the harbor and was sufficiently impressed by my physique to invite me to meet some of his shipmates.

I accepted George’s invitation, posed for his friends, ate with them in the crew’s mess, and was introduced to my first TV set. George and one of his pals joined me for my first workout with regular barbells and dumbbells in the ship’s gym. That afforded him the perfect opportunity to photograph me in all my pumped-up splendor, sweating in my underwear. He promised to submit the pictures to Earl Leiderman, then features editor of Your Physique.

Several weeks later I received a letter from Mr. Leiderman. He informed me that I had an impressive build, certainly deserving of exposure in his magazine’s Rising Stars department. All I had to do was supply him with reproducible photos. That, of course, meant something besides the photographic efforts of my local friends. I was very disappointed. I’d already bragged to half the town that my pictures would soon be featured in an American magazine. Still, there was some consolation in Mr. Leiderman’s observation that I was on my way to physique stardom. Of course I let everyone hear about that!

On subsequent visits my American friend supplied me with food supplements advertised in Weider’s magazines but beyond the reach of local musclemen. I trained with George whenever his ship came in. He provided me with subscriptions to both Your Physique and Muscle Power, which were then touting bodybuilding as catching up in popularity with boxing and baseball. Judging from the reportage on Steve Reeves, Lou Degni, Ed Fury, Joe Gold, and others, nearly every other West Coast muscleman was in the movies. Mae West was setting attendance record wherever she appeared with her troupe of diapered hemen, which included an Hungarian Mr. Universe winner, Mickey Hargitay—until he triggered a battle of the bulge between saggy Mae and titillating Jayne Mansfield over usufruct of his muscles.

To read Earl Leiderman’s Let’s Gossip column, Muscle Beach was the new Garden of Eden. The biggest names in bodybuilding had more or less taken up permanent residence there. They gamboled on the sands, staged weekly body-beautiful pageants, performed spectacular feats of strength and agility, juggled barbells and barbells, and generally carried on as if they had never heard of such mundane responsibilities as earning room and board.

I couldn’t get enough of Leiderman, Barton Horvath, Charles Smith, and the other writers who kept me up to date on all that mattered in bodybuilding—including the ongoing war between Weider and York. I went to bed with Clancy Ross on my mind and awoke with Steve Reeves inspiring me to physical perfection—until my mother, deciding that too much of a suspect thing called for a firm hand, banned my main reading material from our house and imposed a moratorium on home bodybuilding until such time as she was satisfied with my mental development.

I found a way around that. I took my workouts wherever I could— at my friend’s homes, at the beach. In the middle of the night, when everyone else was asleep, I’d roll my cumbersome lead dumbbells out from their hiding place under my bed and surreptitiously pump up my arms, chest, and shoulders until sweat puddled on the floor. The I’d towel my body dry before sneaking back into bed, perchance to dream I was Mr. Universe.

I was almost eighteen when my American friend first suggested I should get out of Saint Lucia. My bodybuilding potential was obvious, he said. I was one of the few people he’d ever met who genuinely had seventeen-inch biceps. So what if my thighs were only one inch larger than my upper arms? A few workouts in America would soon fix that. America, after all, had the best food, an unending supply of supplements, inspirational weekend bodybuilding festivals, and all the wonderful training contraptions that were advertised in the muscle magazines.

Joe Weider lived in America.

The stars lived in America.;

Clearly my future was in America!

But I had neither the financial means of getting there, nor the least idea how I’d support myself once I was stateside. George was persuasive. He knew a plane foreman in Florida who was in the business of helping out illegal immigrants and could arrange a job for me.

For months the devil tempted me. Accept George’s offer, hissed the serpent in my ear at bedtime. It’ll be easy sneaking you aboard.

But I resisted. Instead, I accepted a ticket from my mother and sailed to England—where Reg Park lived.

Of all the times to visit Great Britain, I thoughtlessly picked winter. Naturally London was snowbound.

As I nervously waited an uncle, a longtime resident of England who had promised to meet my boat train at Victoria Station, I had my first look at the natives. I did not not enjoy the view.

The Englishy seemed as cold as the winds that bit through the fabric of my tropical suit. Many had their heads wrapped in thick wool scarves, only their eyes uncovered and peering out desperately from under the brims of bowler hats. The pallid faces remined me of candle wax. Everyone, men and women alike, wore either black or gray, the colours of mourning. Although Victoria Station buzzed with big-city activity, I couldn’t help thinking I’d stumbled upon the loneliest place in the world. This was hardly the perfect environment for an aspiring bodybuilding champion.

But first impressions are seldom dependable, I reminded myself. Over the years Britain had produced a fair crop of winners, among them the majestic Reg Park, Spencer Churchill, Arnold Dyson, John Leesl, and Henry Downs. Moreover, the Natural Amateur Body Builders Association (NABBA), promoter of the widely respected Mr. Universe contest, had its headquarters in London. The scene at Victoria Station notwithstanding, somewhere in the city there had to be pumping heart.

En route to my uncle’s East London flat, I considered my immediate future. First things first. Before I could set out to fulfill Mr. Leiderman’s expectations of me, I had to find a job. Starvation was hardly compatible with bodybuilding stardom. While my uncle had offered me a bed and a regular place at his table, I worried about overstaying my welcome.

A general scarcity of jobs, not to mention rampant racism, stood in the way of my immediate employment. I looked for work everywhere. Once, despite the winter, I wore my tightest short sleeves to an interview with a personnel manager who had advertised for twenty bodybuilders only to discover his ad referred to vacancies in an automobile factory. What he so urgently required were builders of car bodies. I slunk out of his office, enlightened but still unemployed.

With no other choice open to me, I signed on at the National Assistance Board, the British equivalent of the welfare office. At least now I’d be able to buy my own food.

Three months after I’d left Saint Lucia with a head full of sunny fantasies, I was still chasing rainbows. Nearly out of my mind with boredom and disillusionment, I decided to phone Reg Park at the Yorkshire number given in his magazine, The Reg Park Journal. I’d admired him in pictures for years, all the while wondering what it might be like to meet him in person. What a thrill to hear him actually speaking to me! His voice was warm, caring, comforting, totally without affection. He recommended a gym near my uncle’s address and promised the proprietor would allow me free use of the facility if I said Reg sent me.

It was a dingy little basement gym off Poplar’s Commercial Road in East London. I worked out there for only a few weeks before the months of fruitless job-hunting in the cold finally drove me to enlist in the Royal Signals, the communications divisions of the British Army.

My military stint lasted just under two years, after which I landed a job at a London animal-food processing plant. I joined a gym operated by British bodybuilding personality Rueben Martin. His coaching took. I was soon voted Mr. Home Countries.

Other titles followed. Then in 1965 I won the Mr. Great Britain finals, sponsored jointly by Weider-Great Britain and the British Amateur Weight Lifters’ Association (BAWLA). For several draft political reasons—including its open friendliness toward Weider’s British representative, a onetime hot Mr. America prospect named Ludwig Shusterich—BAWLA was frowned upon by NABBA, which had always vigorously courted and enjoyed the vital support of the old duke of York, Pennsylvania, himself, Strength & Health publisher Bob Hoffman. (Yes, yes. The old stateside war was still going strong, blowing its poisonous exhaust in the faces of weightlifters and bodybuilders of the supposedly United Kingdom.)

I chose to make my stand on the BAWLA side for purely selfish reasons, not the least of those being the fact that the winners of BAWLA’s somewhat mediocre events would be invited to compete in America in contests promoted by the burgeoning International Federation of Body Builders (IFBB), of which Joe Weider’s brother Ben was president. All expenses would be paid by Weider-Great Britain. The leading musclemen from New York and the Caribbean— in the latter case, mainly Puerto Ricans and blacks from the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Trinidad—were making hot names for themselves via Weider’s Muscle Builder magazine, the IFBB’s official journal and the replacement for Your Physique and Muscle Power at the front lines in the war against York. By now several top AAU bodybuilders, Larry Scott and Harold Poole among them, had defected to the IFBB and enhanced their star status. I could hardly wait to join them in