Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Read online

  Being busy helping customers meant that I had no time to train the way I was used to, with an intense four- or five-hour workout each day. So I adopted the idea of training twice a day, two hours before work and two hours from seven to nine in the evening, when business slacked off and only the serious lifters were left. Split workouts seemed like an annoyance at first, but I realized I was onto something when I saw the results: I was concentrating better and recovering faster while grinding out longer and harder sets. On many days I would add a third training session at lunchtime. I’d isolate a body part that I thought was weak and give it thirty or forty minutes of my full attention, blasting twenty sets of calf raises, say, or one hundred triceps extensions. I did the same thing some nights after dinner, coming back to train for an hour at eleven o’clock. As I went to sleep in my snug little room, I’d often feel one or another muscle that I’d traumatized that day jumping and twitching—just a side effect of a successful workout and very pleasing, because I knew those fibers would now recover and grow.

  I was training flat out because in less than two months I knew I would be going up against some of the best bodybuilders alive. I’d signed up for Europe’s biggest bodybuilding event, Mr. Universe, in London. This was a brash thing to do. Ordinarily, a relative novice like me wouldn’t have dreamed of taking on London. I’d have competed for Mr. Austria first, and then if I won, I’d have aimed for Mr. Europe. But at that rate, being “ready” for London would have taken years. I was too impatient for that. I wanted the toughest competition I could get, and this was the most aggressive career move I could make. Of course, I wasn’t an idiot about it. I didn’t expect to win in London—not this time. For now, though, I was determined to find out where I stood. Albert loved the idea, and since he knew English, he helped me fill out the application.

  For a regimen as fanatical as mine, I needed more than one training partner. Luckily, there were enough serious bodybuilders in Munich who got a kick out of my Mr. Universe dream, even if they thought I was a little nuts. Franz Dischinger trained with me regularly, and so did Fritz Kroher, who was a country boy like me, from a small town in the Bavarian woods. Even Reinhard Smolana, owner of the rival gym, joined in. Sometimes he invited me to train at his gym or he came to mine to work out after hours. After just a few weeks, I felt like I’d found my buddies, and Munich was starting to seem like home.

  My favorite training partner was Franco Columbu, who quickly became my best friend. I’d met him in Stuttgart the year before; he’d won the European championship in power lifting on the same day that I won Mr. Junior Europe. Franco was an Italian from the island of Sardinia, where he grew up on a farm in a tiny mountain village that sounded even more primitive than Thal when he described it to me. He spent much of his boyhood herding sheep, and at age ten or eleven, he’d be out in the wilderness alone for days at a time, finding his own food and fending for himself.

  Franco had to drop out of school at thirteen to help on the family farm, but he was very hardworking and smart. He’d started out as a bricklayer and amateur boxer and made his way north to Germany to earn his living in construction. In Munich, he learned the language and the city so well that he qualified to be a taxi driver. The Munich taxi driver exam was hard even for natives, and for an Italian to pass it amazed everyone.

  Franco was a power lifter, I was a bodybuilder, and we both understood that these sports were complementary. I wanted to add bulk to my body, which meant having to work with heavy weights, and Franco knew how to do that. Meanwhile, I understood bodybuilding, which Franco wanted to learn. He told me, “I want to be Mr. Universe.” Others laughed at him—he was only five foot five—but in bodybuilding, perfection and symmetry can beat sheer size. I liked the idea of us training together.

  Maybe because he’d spent so much time in the wild, Franco was quick to pick up on new ideas. He loved my theory of “shocking the muscle,” for instance. It always seemed to me that the biggest obstacle to successful training is that the body adjusts so quickly. Do the same sequence of lifts every day, and even if you keep adding weight, you’ll see your muscle growth slow and then stop; the muscles become very efficient at performing the sequence they expect. The way to wake up the muscle and make it grow again is to jolt it with the message “You will never know what’s coming. It will always be different from what you expect. Today it’s this, tomorrow it’s something else.” One day it’s ultraheavy weights; the next day high reps.

  A method we developed to shock the muscle was “stripping.” In a normal weight training sequence, you do your first set with lighter weight and then work your way up. But in stripping, you do the reverse. For example, in preparation for London, I needed to bulk up my deltoids. So I’d do dumbbell presses, where you hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height and then raise them up above your head. With stripping, I’d start at my top weight: six repetitions with 100-pound dumbbells. Put those down, take the 90-pound dumbbells and do six reps. And so on, all the way down the rack. By the time I reached the 40s, my shoulders would be on fire and six reps would feel like each arm was lifting 110 pounds, not 40. But before putting down the weights, I’d shock the deltoids further by doing lateral raises, lifting the 40s from hip level out to shoulder height. After that, my shoulder muscles would be so totally berserk that I did not know where to put my hands. It was agony to let them hang by my sides and impossible to lift them. All I could do was drape my arms on a table or a piece of equipment to relieve the excruciating pain. The deltoids were screaming from the unexpected sequence of sets. I’d shown them who was boss. Their only option now was to heal and grow.

  —

  After training hard all day I wanted to have fun at night. And in Munich in 1966, fun meant beer halls, and beer halls meant fights. I’d go with my buddies to these places where every night people would be sitting at long tables laughing and arguing and waving their mugs. And getting drunk, of course. People started fights all the time, but it was never like “I’m going to murder this guy.” As soon as a fight ended, one guy would say, “Oh, let’s have a pretzel. Can I buy you a beer?” And the other guy would say, “Yeah, I lost, so you can at least buy me a beer. I don’t have any money anyway.” Soon you’d be drinking together as if nothing had happened.

  The beer itself didn’t really appeal to me because it would interfere with training; I rarely drank more than one in a night. But I was totally into the fights. I felt like I was discovering new power every day and was huge and strong and unstoppable. There was not a lot of thinking involved. If a guy looked at me in a weird way or challenged me for whatever reason, I’d be in his face. I’d give him the shock treatment: I’d rip off my shirt to reveal my tank top underneath and then I’d punch him out. Or sometimes when he saw me he’d just say, “Oh, what the hell. Why don’t we just get a beer?”

  My friends and I backed each other up, of course, if the fight turned into a brawl. The next day, we’d pass around the stories at the gym and laugh. “Oh, you should’ve seen Arnold. He banged these two guys’ heads together and then their friend came at him with a beer mug, but I caught him with a chair from behind, that fucker . . .” We were fortunate because even when the police came, which happened several times, they would just dismiss us. The only time I remember ever being taken in to the police station was when a guy claimed it was going to cost a lot of money to replace his teeth. We were arguing so much about what the teeth would cost that the police thought we’d start fighting again. So they took us in and held us until we agreed on an amount.

  Even better than the fights were the girls. Right across the Schillerstrasse from the gym was the Hotel Diplomat, where airline stewardesses stayed. Franco and I would lean out the window in our tank tops and flirt with them when they spotted us from the street. “What are you doing up there?” they’d call out. “Well, we have a gym here. Do you want to train? Come on up.”

  I also would go across to the hotel lobby and introduce myself to the little groups of stewardesses as th
ey came and went. To get them interested, I would combine my very best methods from the Thalersee and from years of selling hardware. “We have a gym across the street,” I’d say, and I’d compliment the girl and tell her how she might enjoy working out. In fact, I thought it was foolish and stupid that gyms almost never encouraged women to train. So we would let them work out for free. And whether they came because they were interested in the men or purely to train, I was happy either way.

  The girls came mostly at night. Our regular customers were usually gone by eight, but you could use the equipment until nine. I would be doing my second workout with my partners. If the girls just wanted to train, they could take a shower and be out by eight thirty. Otherwise they were welcome to stay, and we’d go out or have a party. Sometimes Smolana would show up with some girls, and then the night could get quite wild.

  For the first few months in Munich, I let myself get carried away by nightlife and fun. But then I realized I was losing focus, and I started disciplining myself. The goal was not to have fun but to become the world champion in bodybuilding. If I was going to get my seven hours of sleep, I had to be in bed by eleven. There was always time to have fun, and we always had fun anyway.

  My boss turned out to be a bigger threat to my Mr. Universe prospects than any beer hall drunk swinging a stein. With just a few weeks to go, I still hadn’t heard back about my application to the contest. Finally, Albert called London, and the organizers said they’d never gotten anything from me. Finally, Albert confronted Putziger, who admitted that he’d found my application in the outgoing mail and thrown it away. He was jealous that I would get discovered and move to England or America before he could make money off me. I’d have been sunk except for Albert’s command of English and his desire to stick up for me. He called London again and persuaded the organizers to consider my application, even though the deadline had passed. They agreed. Just days before the contest, the papers came through, and I was added to the list.

  The other bodybuilders in Munich also rallied in my support. Putziger should have paid my way to London, of course, because any success I might have there would bring attention to his gym. But when word of his sabotage got around, it was his competitor Smolana who passed the hat and raised the three hundred marks I needed for a ticket. On September 23, 1966, I boarded a London-bound flight. I was nineteen, and it was the first time I’d ever taken an airplane. I’d been expecting to take a train, so I was ecstatic. I was sure that nobody I’d gone to school with had flown at this point. I was sitting on an airliner with businessmen, and it had all happened through bodybuilding.

  The first Mr. Universe contest was held the year after I was born, 1948. It took place in London every September. The English speakers dominated, as in all of bodybuilding—especially the Americans, who probably won eight out of every ten years. All the great bodybuilders I’d idolized growing up had won the Mr. Universe title: Steve Reeves, Reg Park, Bill Pearl, Jack Delinger, Tommy Sansone, Paul Winter. I remembered seeing a photograph from the contest when I was a kid. The winner stood on a pedestal, trophy in hand, while everyone else stood below him on the stage. Being on that pedestal was always my vision of where I would end up. It was very clear: I knew what it was going to feel like and look like. It would be like heaven to make that real, but I didn’t expect to win this year. I’d gotten the list of the bodybuilders I’d be competing against in the amateur class, looked at photos of them, and thought, “Jesus.” Their bodies were better defined than mine. I wanted to finish in the top six because I felt like I couldn’t beat the numbers two, three, and four from the last year. I felt they were too defined and I was not quite there. I was still in the slow process of building up to my ideal muscle mass; the idea was to get the size and then cut down and chisel and perfect it.

  They held the competition in the Victoria Palace Theatre, an old ornate place decorated with marble and statues a few blocks from Victoria Station. Major competitions always followed a set routine. In the morning would be the preliminaries, or technical rounds. The bodybuilders and judges assembled in the auditorium—reporters could sit in, but the public wasn’t allowed. The aim was to give the judges the chance to evaluate the contestants’ muscular development and definition, body part by body part, and systematically compare each man with the rest. You’d stand in a line, along the back of the stage, with all the other men of your class (mine was “amateur tall”). Everyone had numbers pinned to their posing briefs. A judge would say, “Number fourteen and number eight, please step forward, give us a quadriceps.” Those two bodybuilders would walk to the center of the stage and strike a standard pose that showed off the four muscles at the front of the thigh as the judges made notes. The results of these technical rounds were factored into the decisions later in the day. Then, of course, the big show would be the finals in the afternoon: a posing competition for each of the classes and ultimately a pose-off among the class winners to crown the overall amateur and professional champs.

  Compared to the other competitions I’d seen, Mr. Universe was the big time. The Victoria Palace was completely sold out: more than fifteen hundred seats filled with applauding and cheering bodybuilding fans, and dozens more outside hoping to squeeze in. The show itself was as much circus as contest. The stage was professionally lit, with spotlights and floods, and they’d brought in a whole orchestra to help set the mood. The two-hour program included entertainment between the rounds of competition, like a bikini contest, acrobats, contortionists, and two troupes of women in leotards and mod boots who paraded and struck poses holding little barbells and weights.

  To my amazement, in the technical round that morning, I’d discovered that I’d overestimated my competition. The top “tall amateur” bodybuilders were indeed better defined, but put us all together on stage, and I still stood out. The truth is that not all bodybuilders are strong, especially those who have done most of their training with weight machines. But years of power lifting and working with free weights had given me massive biceps and shoulders and back muscles and thighs. I simply looked bigger and stronger than the rest.

  By showtime, word had gotten around that this monster teenager had shown up from out of nowhere with an unpronounceable name, and he was a goddamn giant. So the crowd was especially noisy and enthusiastic when our group came on. I didn’t win, but I came much closer than I or anyone else would have expected. By the final pose-off, the contest was down to me and an American named Chester Yorton, and the judges decided for Chet. I had to admit that was the right call: although Chet was at least twenty pounds lighter than me, he was truly chiseled and beautifully proportioned, and his posing was smoother and more practiced than mine. Besides, he had a great suntan that made me look like bread dough next to him.

  I was ecstatic being the surprise runner-up; I felt like I’d won. It threw me into the spotlight, so much so that people started to say, “Next year he’s going to win.” Muscle magazines in English started mentioning me, which was extremely important because I had to become known in England and America to reach my goal.

  The giddiness lasted only until I had time to think. Then it hit me: Chet Yorton had ended up on that pedestal, not me. He’d earned the victory, but I thought I’d made a big mistake. What if I had gone to London intending to win? Would I have prepared better? Would I have performed better? Would I have won and now be Mr. Universe? Instead, I’d underestimated my chances. I didn’t like the way this made me feel and worked myself into quite a state. It really taught me a lesson.

  After that, I never went to a competition to compete. I went to win. Even though I didn’t win every time, that was my mind-set. I became a total animal. If you tuned into my thoughts before a competition, you would hear something like: “I deserve that pedestal, I own it, and the sea ought to part for me. Just get out of the fucking way, I’m on a mission. So just step aside and gimme the trophy.”

  I pictured myself high up on the pedestal, trophy in hand. Everyone else would be standing below. And I would l
ook down.

  —

  Three months later, I was back in London, laughing and horsing around on a living room rug with a jumble of kids. They belonged to Wag and Dianne Bennett, who owned two gyms and were at the center of the UK bodybuilding scene. Wag had been a judge at the Mr. Universe contest, and he’d invited me to stay with him and Dianne in their house in the Forest Gate section of London for a few weeks of training. Although they had six kids of their own, they took me under their wing and became like parents to me.

  Wag had made it clear that he thought I needed a lot of work. At the top of his list was my posing routine. I knew there is a huge difference between hitting poses successfully and having a compelling routine. Poses are the snapshots, and the routine is the movie. To hypnotize and carry away an audience, you need the poses to flow. What do you do between one pose and the next? How do the hands move? How does the face look? I’d never had a chance to figure very much of this out. Wag showed me how to slow down and make it like ballet: a matter of posture, the straightness of the back, keeping the head up, not down.

  This I could understand, but it was harder to swallow the idea of actually posing to music. Wag would put the dramatic theme from the movie Exodus on the hi-fi and cue me to start my routine. At first I couldn’t think of anything more distracting or less hip. But after a while I started to see how I could choreograph my moves and ride the melody like a wave—quiet moments for a concentrated, beautiful three-quarter back pose, flowing into a side chest pose as the music rose and then wham!, a stunning most muscular pose at the crescendo.