Iron Game

This is Larry Scott back in the olden days. I was introduced to him in 1967 when I opened my first bodybuilding magazine and inside the cover was this picture, which burned itself permanently into my retinas. I was looking at something I had never seen before, and suddenly wanted more than I had ever wanted anything before in my life, except for Raquel Welch. No, no, I didn't want Larry Scott, I wanted to look like Larry Scott. Who knows, maybe if I looked like Larry Scott, I'd have a chance with Raquel Welch! (Both Larry and Raquel still look pretty good, by the way) Or maybe not, since it didn't work for Larry, probably because he isn't very tall. (shown here actual size) But at the time I wasn't thinking that far ahead, all I could see was a guy who made Charles Atlas look like America's Junior Miss and I wanted to look as much like that as I could.

By the way, have you ever met any idiot who actually sent away for that ridiculous Charles Atlas course? What kind of moron would fall for that? Can you imagine how stupid a guy would have to be to pay real money for a strength program advertised in a comic book? HA HA! What a joke!

Ok, I did.

Hey, give me a break, I was desperate and weight training was still a fringe activity so I really hadn't heard much about it yet.

And Charlie taught me some extremely valuable principles regarding the most optimally effective methods for stimilating muscular hypertrophy, principally that standing in a doorway and pressing your arms against the jams is a total waste of time . "Dynamic Tension" indeed.  

Anyway, that was before I saw Larry Scott, during an age when weight training wasn't widespread and even most professional athletes weren't any bigger than they could get doing pushups and running and eating like a horse, or maybe eating a horse, I don't know, I wasn't there. In fact, many football coaches actually warned against weights because they thought it would make you slow. That should tell you something about football coaches.

So there weren't many mass monsters back in those days, but there were some, and they got that way by using the most scientifically designed, high volume, free weight, progressive resistance principles ever devised, known in those days simply as: steroids.

Now I don't want to discount the value of world class genetic potential and years of hard work, but that program can only take a guy so far, and John Grimek and Steve Reeves had already been there. Steve Reeves set a standard of male physical perfection that no one was ever going to match, plus he was even taller than Raquel Welch. But there were guys who wanted to "push the envelope" of muscularity and when they discovered that pushing envelopes wasn't helping them at all, they turned to pushing drugs. This produced results that had previously only been possible in comic books, and made musclehead jocks totally and ironically dependent for their exogenous masculinity on the efforts of the same pencil-necked geeks in lab coats and pocket protectors they had been beating up since elementary school. Better living through chemistry!

So this common-law marriage of cast iron and pharmacology produced a new generation of athletes like Larry Scott, and no one had ever, ever looked like this before. By the time I saw his picture, Larry had already won the first two Mr Olympia titles and retired, but the drugs, which were plentiful and cheap and legal at the time, stayed around to launch the careers of a half century of athletes, especially the single most successful androgenic drug receptacle of all time, and you know who I'm talking about, that's right, Arnold. I'm sure he would have been a dynamic character without it, but keep in mind the charisma that made Arnold rich enough to buy his own planet comes in 5mg tabs of Dianabol stacked with Primobolan Depot.

Still, he and Larry were lightweights compared with today's bodybuilders, who offload their juice with forklifts from flatbed trucks in 55 gallon drums and need a staff of 12 and a Cray Supercomputer to monitor the anabolics, insulin, growth hormone, diuretics, and 9,450 other pharmaceutical agents they take everyday.

But as I was looking at that picture of Larry Scott, I didn't know about any of this, I was just a skinny high school junior tired of getting pushed around and I knew I had found everything I was looking for and more. It was time to kick sand in Charles Atlas' face and find a gym.

The only place in town was open three days a week for women and three days a week for men. They had some free weights and a couple cable machines and a lap pool that would fit inside any bathtub currently owned by Arnold. But it was all I needed and I managed to make it down there twice a week where I trained my arms for two hours until I couldn't turn the steering wheel of my '56 chevy and had to sit in the parking lot for twenty minutes before I could drive home. I should have worked my legs, but all I had time for was arms and shoulders and I went at it hard for about three months and it changed my life. I'm serious. Jerks started leaving me alone and girls started wanting to go out with me. It was weird. In fact, even though I was grateful for the results, it pissed me off that I gained more status from having big arms than I had ever gotten from any dimension of my character or intelligence. Which could imply that maybe I wasn't as smart or interesting as I thought I was, but it's my past and I'll remember it however I want.

Anyway, I trained another three months my senior year, but it was the sixties and I got sidetracked. I never took the drugs that Larry and Arnold were taking, but I managed to find some other ones with properties I found interesting in completely different ways. It wasn't long before I gave all that up, but it took me awhile to get back into weights.

Twenty seven years.

In 1982 I quit smoking and started running. In fact, I had only gone about 400 meters when I suddenly realized how important it was that I do something immediately for the sake of my health. So I threw up. Then I felt better and walked home.

The next day I quit running and started jogging. This seemed to work better, and I discovered the slower I went the farther I could go and the less throwing up I had to do. By the end of the second week, I could jog two miles without stopping, and this made me very happy, even though a mile/week pace is nothing to brag about. After a year I was going five miles a day, five days a week, at a pace so slow it took instruments to detect any spatial displacement. Eventually I settled in to about four miles every other day, but I managed to keep this up off and on for many years, even though I was frequently interrupted by injuries, as a result of my reckless tendency to engage in extreme and dangerous activities like sneezing. If you don't know what I'm talking about, congratulations! You are one of the 29 people in the world who don't have back problems! The rest of you understand perfectly how it's possible for a guy to be putting in 20 miles a week and moving pianos around and then get laid up for two weeks by a cough or taking out the garbage or sitting too long in one position while reading the Sunday paper, for crying out loud.

But I continued to slug it out, even though I was so slow I was continually being passed by small children, people with walkers, caterpillars, bacteria, and glaciers.

At one time I wanted to know how if felt to run at the same pace as a world class marathon runner. I found out these guys run 26 back-to-back 5 minute miles, and while I knew a 5 minute mile was totally out of the question for me, I thought I ought to be able to handle one 75 second quarter. Then I realized that meant I would have to throw up again, so I gave up the whole idea.

One January, after a long layoff, I was so excited about starting again in cold weather and facing the challenge of ice and snow and bitter cold and maybe trying one more time to beat a glacier in a 5k, that I decided it was time to do something else instead. I went to a gym, and as hard as I looked, I couldn't find any ice or snow anywhere in the place. The temperature was 70 degrees and there wasn't any wind. Nobody tried to run me over with a car. Hey! This was for me! I discovered that you can go home again, it just costs a lot more now than it did when you left.

The interesting thing about a gym is that it's the opposite of real life. In real life we do stuff to things. We pick up something and we move it to a different place, and if we have a lot of stuff to move, we try to do it without getting too tired. If we walk or run, the object is to wind up in a different place than where we started.

In the gym, the object is to get as tired as possible without accomplishing anything. Drive to the gym, pay money to spend an hour on the treadmill getting exhausted without going anywhere, then drive home, right?

People pick up big chunks of pig iron and move them around until they can't do it anymore, then put them right back down where they were when they started. At least they're supposed to. (Hey you! Put that back where it belongs, your mommy's not here to pick up after you!) Try explaining the logic behind this to someone who lives in a third world country.

Anyway, something sure happens to me. I'm a lot better at this weight training business than I ever was at distance running and passing cars don't drench me with dirty ice water.

Thanks, Larry.

copyright © 2002 Dan Manthos