Auteur: Erik Hedegaard
Interessant verhaal, de moeite om eens te lezen:
What would make a man eat seven meals a
day, dead-lift six hundred pounds, and pump himself with drugs that turn his brain to mush, make him crazy, and could eventually
kill him? Erik Hedegaard enters the world of professional bodybuilding to find out.
DAVID DEARTH HAULED HIS BODY, IN ALL ITS ARTERIAL
and noodle-veined glory, up onstage, once again facing the crowd, his muscles heaped over him like a load of dirt-farm potatoes. He lowered his head briefly, then sucked up his chest so that his lats flared away like wings. He was short, but the crowd didn’t care. His abs locked down into his stomach, granitic cubes.
"Yeah, Dave!" the crowd went.
"All right, Dave!"
"Dave, Rock-n-Roll Wild Child—yer back!"
This was at the Sixth Annual Pro International Bodybuilding Championships in Niagara Falls, New York, sanctioned by the International Federation of Body-Builders (IFBB). Dave and the other competitors were here to win big, but failing that, a top-three placement would still guarantee them a place in the Mr. Olympia contest, or the 0, as it’s known in the business, the event all bodybuilders dream of winning.
And yet Dave, being Dave, had other reasons for wanting to dominate here. As usual, he was in desperate need of money—for his rent, his food, his steroids, his diuretics, his ex-wife, his kid. Also, perhaps more important, he’d been away from the IFBB Contest circuit and talking lots of loud shit at Gold’s Gym in Venice, California, the so-called mecca of bodybuilding.
The competitors now fanned out across the stage, lumbering in time to some crappy Star Wars—era music. Dave swiveled the ball
his glutes and thighs gleamed like things aeronautic. -
Wayne DeMilia took the microphone. Wayne was the IFBB official in charge of the pros, not widely loved and much feared. He was telling the contestants to form a line like they just had. His request caused some confusion. The big guys flailed around up there, banged into each other, then veered off without direction.
After a while, Wayne had about had it. "Come on, guys!" he said. "Can’t you remember how you stood fifteen minutes ago?"
There was some derisive hooting in the crowd. Later, during a moment of silence, Wayne began calling out the names of the five finalists: Mauro Sarni, Ray McNeil, Milos Sarcev, Jim Quinn— Big Jim Quinn, the biggest guy there...
Dave swayed.
Wayne leaned into the microphone. "Finalist number five!" he said. "He’s competitor number nineteen! David Dearth!"
"Yeah!" the crowd went. "O.K.!"
Dave dropped his head, breathing deeply. He was going to win this thing. Win or place second. He felt sure of it. He was in great shape. The crowd had let him know he was the freak to beat. He began shaking his fists.
THERE ARE, IN THIS COUNTRY, AROUND 30 MILLION PEOPLE WHO
lift weights somewhat regularly. But only a fraction of those could be considered hard-core practitioners of the sport—as even they call themselves, freaks. Freaks are often the ones who, at Gold’s Gym in Venice, are likely to note on the men’s room wall that BEING ON THE JUICE IS THE BEST. Freaks such as these can have steroid habits that can suck down nearly $100,000 a year. They are on strict diets. They wake up, pop their vitamins, go train, come home, make a few phone calls, take a nap, train in the evening, watch TV, and go to bed. They may eat seven meals a day. Their dress clothes—when and if they wear dress clothes—have to be custom-tailored. Quite often, because of the drugs, they are coïtus maniacs—"dogs in heat," one top IFBB official told me. "Even if an ugly girl walks by, they’re ready to roll. They are absolutely nuts, and they don’t care."
In this world, of course, there are many big men. There’s Arnold, the biggest of the big; Lee Haney, eight times Mr. Olympia; and Do-rian Yates, the current Mr. Olympia. But none loom so large over bodybuilding as the brothers Weider, Joe and Ben. Ben is the president of the IFBB, which now has affiliations in over 150 countries; his main concern these days is getting into the Olympics, which most observers think is a lost cause (due to steroid use).
It’s Joe Weider, though, who is most responsible for making bodybuilding what it is today. Without the Master Blaster (as he is sometimes called), there would be no Arnold: Joe paid the Oak’s way here from Austria, put him through school, and essentially promoted him to the top. In fact, like Arnold, Joe has ridden the fitness craze of the ‘80s to become something of an empire unto himself. He publishes magazines (Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Men’s Fitness); sells nutritional supplements (Flex Fire, Sugar-Free Big, Dynamic Body Shaper); hawks exercise equipment, books, videos; and rakes in, he says, nearly $1 billion a year.
With his squirrelly little mustache and silver hair, Joe is a curious, amusing fellow given to spirited fits of hyperbole. "Bodybuilders don’t walk on powerful legs," he likes to say grandly. "They float! They actually feel sorry for the average person, struggling to feel worthwhile, watching his body deteriorate."
There is no denying that Joe, as well as Ben, loves bodybuilding and bodybuilders. Even so, neither of them is widely liked. For years, despite the Weiders’ denial, rumors have circulated that the IFBB’s contests are fixed in favor of the most marketable contestants. Moreover, Joe recently began paying twenty-four of the sport’s top professionals a total of $1 .5 million a year to appear in his magazines only. While the money keeps the guys in food and supplements, the contract language limits their exposure, and bodybuilders are, by nature, exposure-loving sorts. So they must be pissed, almost as pissed as the magazines who can’t feature the top guys on their covers.
"Everybody’s very upset," says one magazine publisher. "They are dominating the sport, and they are so greedy. But if you insult the Weiders, you get cut off."
In fact, Joe had been paying the so-called Weider athletes for a long time, without demanding that they work just for him. But that was when the other magazines did everything the Weider way. Then, with the introduction three years ago of a new, competing organization—the World Bodybuilding Federation—that changed. The other magazines began to write about the WBF,
and both Ben and Joe felt this as a knife to the heart.
"I always thought these magazines were loyal to us because we were the biggest," Joe recently told me. "But they changed their colors so fast it was unbelievable."
For the betrayal, Joe and Ben decreed the magazines would be shut out. But they weren’t the only ones. So would the thirteen pro bodybuilders who left the IFBB, among them David Dearth.
AFTER THE 0, THE NEXT BIGGEST SHOW IN BODYBUILDING
is the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic, held every winter in Columbus, Ohio, and presided over by Arnold himself. Total prize money, $225,000—a pittance by the standards of modern athletics. But this is bodybuilding; the $80,000 top prize is considered a fortune.
It was here that I got my first look at the world of competitive bodybuilding, hooking up with Dave, who wasn’t competing, and his girlfriend, fitness model Sherilyn Godreau.
"Gawd," I said when I first met Dave, and he was pleased.
Sherilyn, who has big eyes and major breasts, nodded happily. Dave was wearing Doc Martens, jeans with ready-made rips, and a muscle tee. His hair was tied back in a ponytail. His arms were as big as trash cans, wild with veins and, upon first viewing, a little sickening. They looked like they were about to burst.
We went to a restaurant. Restaurants are where bodybuilders spend much of their time. The place was packed with eating, somewhat mellow freaks. Characteristically, there was not a lot of smiling going on. Dave ordered a baked potato, a few pieces of fish, and some steaks.
He had complaints. "The public doesn’t look at us as athletes," he said between wolf bites. "What the public sees us as is prima donnas in our underwear, flexing and showing off. They don’t see all the work and sweat and frustration, the constant dieting, the year-round training."
I’m not sure, but he may have had this on his mind because of what Arnold had said a day earlier in The New York Times: "If somebody talks to me about bodybuilding in a serious way, I say
- Let’s be honest. It’s nonsense. Fifty guys standing around in their little posing trunks with oil slapped on their body. Showing off in front of five thousand people. It’s a joke."
This statement caused a great hue and cry among bodybuilders, none of whom believed Arnold had said it. Shortly thereafter, he offered a clarification. He’d been quoted out of context, he said. He would never do anything to hurt the sport he so loved. Nonetheless, he had given voice to the primary anxiety of serious bodybuilders everywhere: that far from looking manly in front of a crowd on contest day, they simply look silly.
LATER, I WENT UP TO DAVE AND SHERILYN’S HOTEL ROOM. THE BED
was a mare’s nest of sheets and flung clothes. Dy-O-Derm, one of the products bodybuilders use to give themselves that George Hamilton effect, was smeared across the bathroom mirror and puddled on the floor. Dave studied himself in the mirror, trying to figure out what to wear for a trip to Arnold’s World Gym Fitness Expo.
"I’m having a bad hair day," he said to Sherilyn. "Do you think I should wear that Gold’s baseball hat?"
"That’d be cool," said Sherilyn.
"A bad hair day is when I don’t look cool," said Dave.
"I like your hair, David," said Sherilyn.
Dave smiled at her. He told me his last marriage, his second, had ended not long ago and since then his girlfriends had been "little, petite, and stupid." Not Sherilyn, though. "She’s smart, she’s in the fitness industry, and she eats great."
He looked out the hotel window at a church across the Street. "It’s going to be great having coïtus looking out at that," he said. "We won’t call it ‘coïtus’ tonight. We’ll call it ‘making love.’
Sherilyn laughed gaily. Dave turned on the TV, trying to find some superhero cartoons, his favorite kind. They reminded him, he said, of what he once wanted to be: big. "Most bodybuilders," he said, "were losers at other things, myself included. I couldn’t make it in football or in wrestling. I always wanted to be a super-hero, so I took up bodybuilding."
Later, he held up a pair of shorts. "I’m going to put these on when we get there," he said. "The guys like the size and the mass. The girls like the ass and the crotch."
On the way to the fitness expo, Dave drove with aggressive flair, gunning his car around corners, making illegal turns. A motorcycle cop pulled him over and asked for his license, which he didn’t have. The cop left to write up a summons. Dave remarked that, back in Venice, he still had fifty-two unpaid parking tickets. In 1989, the year he won the amateur nationals and turned pro, he was also a coke addict, snorting between three and eight grams a day. "We would just party and have coïtus all night," he said, "and at five in the morning go buy beer and start drinking to go to sleep." Eventually, he developed a heart arrhythmia, nearly died, and has since cleaned himself up. More or less. "Half the reason I live on Valiums and Xanax and Halcions right now is to keep me keyed down. I pop a couple of Xanax and
it’s like, ‘Oh boy, I got a buzz. I’m O.K., I’m fine.’
The cop returned and leaned down to the window. Dave looked up and tried smiling.
"Three citations," the cop said. "One for the turn. One for no operator’s license. And the third one for operating while your driving rights are under suspension."
"Shit," Dave said. The total came to $1,000.
Afterward, Dave tossed the citations into the backseat, where they were immediately lost in a pile of other garbage.
EXACTLY WHAT MAKES A PROFESSIONAL BODYBUILDER WANT
to build his body in the manner he does is difficult to say. On the other hand, what bodybuilders are and how they customarily behave, as a group, is much clearer.
"The bodybuilder lives day to day," Wayne DeMilia told
me one afternoon. He then recounted a story of a body builder who in just a short time won just a whole boatload of money. "But
what did he do? He went out and bought a car that cost $80,000. That’s their mentality. They get money and then, ‘Well, I gotta go to the gym in a cool car!’ They don’t have a grasp that this will not go on forever.
"I tell them this all the time," said Wayne. "I’m sure Ben and Joe have given up. They say to me, ‘Aw, don’t even bother. They’re bodybuilders.’ These characteristics have not changed in the forty or fifty years since the Weiders first got involved with the sport."
"Why?" I asked him.
"A combination of things. If people tell you all day long you look great, you’re fantastic—it affects your head. The coïtusual aspect—male, female, whatever, saying, ‘I want you’ —it’s a big head trip. Then you have to live the part."
Wayne, whom I found to be quite charming, shook his head. "We were in Germany on tour, and four or five of them are looking at one of those white-blonde gym girls. There was talk of a gangbang. I said, ‘I don’t want to know about it. I think you’re all nuts. If she takes on three or four of you at once, how many hundreds of others has she had? You’re will take that risk?’ One guy says, ‘A hard-on has no brains.’ That’s how a bodybuilder takes life," Wayne said. "Very lightly."
Interessant verhaal, de moeite om eens te lezen:
What would make a man eat seven meals a
day, dead-lift six hundred pounds, and pump himself with drugs that turn his brain to mush, make him crazy, and could eventually
kill him? Erik Hedegaard enters the world of professional bodybuilding to find out.
DAVID DEARTH HAULED HIS BODY, IN ALL ITS ARTERIAL
and noodle-veined glory, up onstage, once again facing the crowd, his muscles heaped over him like a load of dirt-farm potatoes. He lowered his head briefly, then sucked up his chest so that his lats flared away like wings. He was short, but the crowd didn’t care. His abs locked down into his stomach, granitic cubes.
"Yeah, Dave!" the crowd went.
"All right, Dave!"
"Dave, Rock-n-Roll Wild Child—yer back!"
This was at the Sixth Annual Pro International Bodybuilding Championships in Niagara Falls, New York, sanctioned by the International Federation of Body-Builders (IFBB). Dave and the other competitors were here to win big, but failing that, a top-three placement would still guarantee them a place in the Mr. Olympia contest, or the 0, as it’s known in the business, the event all bodybuilders dream of winning.
And yet Dave, being Dave, had other reasons for wanting to dominate here. As usual, he was in desperate need of money—for his rent, his food, his steroids, his diuretics, his ex-wife, his kid. Also, perhaps more important, he’d been away from the IFBB Contest circuit and talking lots of loud shit at Gold’s Gym in Venice, California, the so-called mecca of bodybuilding.
The competitors now fanned out across the stage, lumbering in time to some crappy Star Wars—era music. Dave swiveled the ball
his glutes and thighs gleamed like things aeronautic. -
Wayne DeMilia took the microphone. Wayne was the IFBB official in charge of the pros, not widely loved and much feared. He was telling the contestants to form a line like they just had. His request caused some confusion. The big guys flailed around up there, banged into each other, then veered off without direction.
After a while, Wayne had about had it. "Come on, guys!" he said. "Can’t you remember how you stood fifteen minutes ago?"
There was some derisive hooting in the crowd. Later, during a moment of silence, Wayne began calling out the names of the five finalists: Mauro Sarni, Ray McNeil, Milos Sarcev, Jim Quinn— Big Jim Quinn, the biggest guy there...
Dave swayed.
Wayne leaned into the microphone. "Finalist number five!" he said. "He’s competitor number nineteen! David Dearth!"
"Yeah!" the crowd went. "O.K.!"
Dave dropped his head, breathing deeply. He was going to win this thing. Win or place second. He felt sure of it. He was in great shape. The crowd had let him know he was the freak to beat. He began shaking his fists.
THERE ARE, IN THIS COUNTRY, AROUND 30 MILLION PEOPLE WHO
lift weights somewhat regularly. But only a fraction of those could be considered hard-core practitioners of the sport—as even they call themselves, freaks. Freaks are often the ones who, at Gold’s Gym in Venice, are likely to note on the men’s room wall that BEING ON THE JUICE IS THE BEST. Freaks such as these can have steroid habits that can suck down nearly $100,000 a year. They are on strict diets. They wake up, pop their vitamins, go train, come home, make a few phone calls, take a nap, train in the evening, watch TV, and go to bed. They may eat seven meals a day. Their dress clothes—when and if they wear dress clothes—have to be custom-tailored. Quite often, because of the drugs, they are coïtus maniacs—"dogs in heat," one top IFBB official told me. "Even if an ugly girl walks by, they’re ready to roll. They are absolutely nuts, and they don’t care."
In this world, of course, there are many big men. There’s Arnold, the biggest of the big; Lee Haney, eight times Mr. Olympia; and Do-rian Yates, the current Mr. Olympia. But none loom so large over bodybuilding as the brothers Weider, Joe and Ben. Ben is the president of the IFBB, which now has affiliations in over 150 countries; his main concern these days is getting into the Olympics, which most observers think is a lost cause (due to steroid use).
It’s Joe Weider, though, who is most responsible for making bodybuilding what it is today. Without the Master Blaster (as he is sometimes called), there would be no Arnold: Joe paid the Oak’s way here from Austria, put him through school, and essentially promoted him to the top. In fact, like Arnold, Joe has ridden the fitness craze of the ‘80s to become something of an empire unto himself. He publishes magazines (Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Men’s Fitness); sells nutritional supplements (Flex Fire, Sugar-Free Big, Dynamic Body Shaper); hawks exercise equipment, books, videos; and rakes in, he says, nearly $1 billion a year.
With his squirrelly little mustache and silver hair, Joe is a curious, amusing fellow given to spirited fits of hyperbole. "Bodybuilders don’t walk on powerful legs," he likes to say grandly. "They float! They actually feel sorry for the average person, struggling to feel worthwhile, watching his body deteriorate."
There is no denying that Joe, as well as Ben, loves bodybuilding and bodybuilders. Even so, neither of them is widely liked. For years, despite the Weiders’ denial, rumors have circulated that the IFBB’s contests are fixed in favor of the most marketable contestants. Moreover, Joe recently began paying twenty-four of the sport’s top professionals a total of $1 .5 million a year to appear in his magazines only. While the money keeps the guys in food and supplements, the contract language limits their exposure, and bodybuilders are, by nature, exposure-loving sorts. So they must be pissed, almost as pissed as the magazines who can’t feature the top guys on their covers.
"Everybody’s very upset," says one magazine publisher. "They are dominating the sport, and they are so greedy. But if you insult the Weiders, you get cut off."
In fact, Joe had been paying the so-called Weider athletes for a long time, without demanding that they work just for him. But that was when the other magazines did everything the Weider way. Then, with the introduction three years ago of a new, competing organization—the World Bodybuilding Federation—that changed. The other magazines began to write about the WBF,
and both Ben and Joe felt this as a knife to the heart.
"I always thought these magazines were loyal to us because we were the biggest," Joe recently told me. "But they changed their colors so fast it was unbelievable."
For the betrayal, Joe and Ben decreed the magazines would be shut out. But they weren’t the only ones. So would the thirteen pro bodybuilders who left the IFBB, among them David Dearth.
AFTER THE 0, THE NEXT BIGGEST SHOW IN BODYBUILDING
is the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic, held every winter in Columbus, Ohio, and presided over by Arnold himself. Total prize money, $225,000—a pittance by the standards of modern athletics. But this is bodybuilding; the $80,000 top prize is considered a fortune.
It was here that I got my first look at the world of competitive bodybuilding, hooking up with Dave, who wasn’t competing, and his girlfriend, fitness model Sherilyn Godreau.
"Gawd," I said when I first met Dave, and he was pleased.
Sherilyn, who has big eyes and major breasts, nodded happily. Dave was wearing Doc Martens, jeans with ready-made rips, and a muscle tee. His hair was tied back in a ponytail. His arms were as big as trash cans, wild with veins and, upon first viewing, a little sickening. They looked like they were about to burst.
We went to a restaurant. Restaurants are where bodybuilders spend much of their time. The place was packed with eating, somewhat mellow freaks. Characteristically, there was not a lot of smiling going on. Dave ordered a baked potato, a few pieces of fish, and some steaks.
He had complaints. "The public doesn’t look at us as athletes," he said between wolf bites. "What the public sees us as is prima donnas in our underwear, flexing and showing off. They don’t see all the work and sweat and frustration, the constant dieting, the year-round training."
I’m not sure, but he may have had this on his mind because of what Arnold had said a day earlier in The New York Times: "If somebody talks to me about bodybuilding in a serious way, I say
- Let’s be honest. It’s nonsense. Fifty guys standing around in their little posing trunks with oil slapped on their body. Showing off in front of five thousand people. It’s a joke."
This statement caused a great hue and cry among bodybuilders, none of whom believed Arnold had said it. Shortly thereafter, he offered a clarification. He’d been quoted out of context, he said. He would never do anything to hurt the sport he so loved. Nonetheless, he had given voice to the primary anxiety of serious bodybuilders everywhere: that far from looking manly in front of a crowd on contest day, they simply look silly.
LATER, I WENT UP TO DAVE AND SHERILYN’S HOTEL ROOM. THE BED
was a mare’s nest of sheets and flung clothes. Dy-O-Derm, one of the products bodybuilders use to give themselves that George Hamilton effect, was smeared across the bathroom mirror and puddled on the floor. Dave studied himself in the mirror, trying to figure out what to wear for a trip to Arnold’s World Gym Fitness Expo.
"I’m having a bad hair day," he said to Sherilyn. "Do you think I should wear that Gold’s baseball hat?"
"That’d be cool," said Sherilyn.
"A bad hair day is when I don’t look cool," said Dave.
"I like your hair, David," said Sherilyn.
Dave smiled at her. He told me his last marriage, his second, had ended not long ago and since then his girlfriends had been "little, petite, and stupid." Not Sherilyn, though. "She’s smart, she’s in the fitness industry, and she eats great."
He looked out the hotel window at a church across the Street. "It’s going to be great having coïtus looking out at that," he said. "We won’t call it ‘coïtus’ tonight. We’ll call it ‘making love.’
Sherilyn laughed gaily. Dave turned on the TV, trying to find some superhero cartoons, his favorite kind. They reminded him, he said, of what he once wanted to be: big. "Most bodybuilders," he said, "were losers at other things, myself included. I couldn’t make it in football or in wrestling. I always wanted to be a super-hero, so I took up bodybuilding."
Later, he held up a pair of shorts. "I’m going to put these on when we get there," he said. "The guys like the size and the mass. The girls like the ass and the crotch."
On the way to the fitness expo, Dave drove with aggressive flair, gunning his car around corners, making illegal turns. A motorcycle cop pulled him over and asked for his license, which he didn’t have. The cop left to write up a summons. Dave remarked that, back in Venice, he still had fifty-two unpaid parking tickets. In 1989, the year he won the amateur nationals and turned pro, he was also a coke addict, snorting between three and eight grams a day. "We would just party and have coïtus all night," he said, "and at five in the morning go buy beer and start drinking to go to sleep." Eventually, he developed a heart arrhythmia, nearly died, and has since cleaned himself up. More or less. "Half the reason I live on Valiums and Xanax and Halcions right now is to keep me keyed down. I pop a couple of Xanax and
it’s like, ‘Oh boy, I got a buzz. I’m O.K., I’m fine.’
The cop returned and leaned down to the window. Dave looked up and tried smiling.
"Three citations," the cop said. "One for the turn. One for no operator’s license. And the third one for operating while your driving rights are under suspension."
"Shit," Dave said. The total came to $1,000.
Afterward, Dave tossed the citations into the backseat, where they were immediately lost in a pile of other garbage.
EXACTLY WHAT MAKES A PROFESSIONAL BODYBUILDER WANT
to build his body in the manner he does is difficult to say. On the other hand, what bodybuilders are and how they customarily behave, as a group, is much clearer.
"The bodybuilder lives day to day," Wayne DeMilia told
me one afternoon. He then recounted a story of a body builder who in just a short time won just a whole boatload of money. "But
what did he do? He went out and bought a car that cost $80,000. That’s their mentality. They get money and then, ‘Well, I gotta go to the gym in a cool car!’ They don’t have a grasp that this will not go on forever.
"I tell them this all the time," said Wayne. "I’m sure Ben and Joe have given up. They say to me, ‘Aw, don’t even bother. They’re bodybuilders.’ These characteristics have not changed in the forty or fifty years since the Weiders first got involved with the sport."
"Why?" I asked him.
"A combination of things. If people tell you all day long you look great, you’re fantastic—it affects your head. The coïtusual aspect—male, female, whatever, saying, ‘I want you’ —it’s a big head trip. Then you have to live the part."
Wayne, whom I found to be quite charming, shook his head. "We were in Germany on tour, and four or five of them are looking at one of those white-blonde gym girls. There was talk of a gangbang. I said, ‘I don’t want to know about it. I think you’re all nuts. If she takes on three or four of you at once, how many hundreds of others has she had? You’re will take that risk?’ One guy says, ‘A hard-on has no brains.’ That’s how a bodybuilder takes life," Wayne said. "Very lightly."
