This 1978 product, endorsed by Rod Carew, couldn’t turn your kids into big leaguers, but it could distract them with an idiotic, repetitive task so that you could have a minute. Another cheap piece of plastic from the geniuses at K-Tel.
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Tags: Rod Carew
There are probably lots of ways to improve your tennis game, but I doubt listening to long-playing records is one of them. From the idiots at K-Tel, 1974.
Tags: John Newcombe
The human body is so much more resilient than we suppose, but it was not made for ultra-running, at least not in the long term. Leaving marathons in the dust, ultra-running competitions don’t just tax the body, they repossess it, as they stretch for dozens of miles across unforgiving terrain. Micah True, nicknamed “Caballo Blanco,” one of the competition’s pioneers, was found dead two weeks ago, enveloped in the shocking beauty of New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness. From his obituary in the Telegraph:
“A former prizefighter who once lived in a cave in Hawaii, True regularly ran distances of more than 50 miles over steep and rocky trails and, under the name Caballo Blanco (‘White Horse’) was a central character in Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run (2009). As McDougall told it, the mysterious ‘Caballo’ became an almost mythic figure in the villages of Mexico’s Sierra Madre when he moved to live there in the mid-1990s: ‘Some said Caballo Blanco was a fugitive; others heard he was a boxer who’d run off to punish himself after beating a man to death in the ring. No one knew his name, age or where he was from.’ A village schoolmaster McDougall spoke to recalled that some of his pupils had been herding goats in the mountains when a ‘weird creature” with the shape of a man, but taller than any man they had ever seen and ‘deathly pale and bony as a corpse… with shocks of flame-coloured hair jutting out of his skull.’ had darted through the trees above them. The village elders thought it must be a dead soul, out to clear up some unfinished business.
On one matter, however, all accounts of Caballo Blanco concurred. He had come to northern Mexico in the 1990s and trekked deep into the wild, impenetrable Barrancas del Cobre, the ‘Copper Canyons,’ to live among the Tarahumara Indians, an enigmatic desert tribe famous for their ability to keep going over long distances. McDougall described how True had overcome athletic injuries to his ankles after learning a new way to run wearing the simple thin-soled sandals favoured by the Tarahumara. While testing them out ‘he’d slip-scramble sprint downhill for miles, barely in control, relying on his canyon-honed reflexes but still awaiting the pop of knee cartilage, the rip of a hamstring, the fiery burn of a torn Achilles tendon he knew was coming any second.’ But it never came.” (Thanks Browser.)
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Micah True, Pack Burro Race, Colorado, 2011:
Tags: Micah True
Two decades before Dan Okrent invented fantasy baseball at the Rotisserie restaurant in New York in 1980, there was John Burgeson, an IBM worker in Akron who figured out computer sports leagues long before there was an infrastructure to support them. Bess Kalb tells his story in an excellent new Grantland article. An excerpt:
‘The common narrative holds that the journalist Dan Okrent invented fantasy baseball in 1980 — and cleaving to the widely accepted definition of ‘fantasy baseball,’ it’s true. In Okrent’s vision, any fan could be the owner of a team in a fantasy league. Fantasy gamers would draft active MLB players based on whatever instincts and intangibles a real GM would take into consideration and they’d follow each player’s performance throughout the season to compete against other fantasy teams in the league. The concept was infectiously straightforward. By the end of the decade, a half million people throughout the country were deep into roto. Okrent’s version became a craze, and his game, not John’s, is why the modern incarnation of all fantasy sports exists.
While Okrent is indisputably the game’s father, John is its genetically distant forebear, and for the sake of historical correctness he recently decided to claim great-grand-paternity. In January 2009, just shy of his 80th birthday, John Burgeson logged on to Wikipedia and edited the entry for fantasy baseball to include this: ‘An early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620 computer in 1960 by John Burgeson, IBM Akron.’ He appended some scanned documents confirming the game’s existence, and with them, he wrote himself into history. Of course, neither Burgeson nor Okrent profited from their inventions, but on that day, John earned a bit of credit for an idea lost in a filing cabinet for 50 years.
In 1960, nobody cared about a computer wonk in Akron tinkering at his desk for his own amusement, and John’s game never caught on. “
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Atari Baseball, 1979:
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Tags: Bess Kalb, John Burgeson
This classic photograph of legendary American frontier lawman Wyatt Earp in his dotage, shows a gunslinger at rest six years before his death, but nearly three decades earlier he was anythng but calm, having gotten himself into quite a fix in the Bay Area. Earp was brought in to referee the Bob Fitzsimmons-Tom Sharkey heavyweight prizefight in San Francisco on December 2, 1896, to be the strong arm to make sure that order ruled both inside the ring and out. But he caused a near-riot.
Earp walked into the ring with a Colt .45 strapped to him and that was the least crazy thing that occurred. The Wild West legend disqualified Fitzsimmons in the 8th round on a phantom foul. Plenty of people felt the call was crooked. The ring was nearly torn down and lawsuits were filed. Before long, Earp was jeered out of town. An excerpt from “Earp Has No Fears,” which ran in the December 4, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“San Francisco, Cal.–Wyatt Earp, the most talked about man of the hour, takes a philosophical view of the criticisms that are being heaped upon him for his decision Wednesday night, and says he will wait for the time to set him right with the public.
‘If I had any fears that I erred in my decision they would have disappeared when I saw Sharkey to-day,’ said he last night. ‘Sharkey did not strike a foul blow to my mind. At the break he struck Fitzsimmons as soon as his arm was free, but that is following Queensbury rules. It is true that it was agreed that there was to be no fighting at the break, but my instructions from the club were not to be technical, but to give the audience a good fight for their money.’
When Wyatt Earp appeared in the ring to act as referee, he wore a large sized pistol. Last night Earp was arrested on a charge of carrying concealed weapons. He was released on bail.
Police Commissioner Gunst is satisfied that the fight was jobbed. So disgusted is he with the general result that he has announced that there will be no more prize fighting in San Francisco if his influence can prevent it.”
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Shockingly, Earp was hired to manage security for Fitzsimmons’ next match three months later in Carson City, Nevada, versus “Gentleman” Jim Corbett:
Tags: Bob Fitzsimmons, Police Commissioner Gunst, Tom Sharkey, Wyatt Earp
“The machine cannot lie,” said Leland Stanford, but racer Jackie Stewart knew that humans certainly could–especially to themselves–as he discusses his elaborate preparations for Monaco in 1972 with his good friend, yes, Roman Polanski.
Stunt cyclist Evel Knievel, destined for amazing fame but just an opening act at this point, makes his debut on Wide World of Sports in 1967.
Tags: Evel Knievel
Junior Johnson having car trouble, 1953, a dozen years before he was famously profiled by Tom Wolfe.
Tags: Junior Johnson, Tom Wolfe
Old Time wrestling legend Chief Jay Strongbow reportedly passed away today. The good Chief was always very proud of his Native American heritage, which was impressive since he was Italian. Here he is fighting a galoot, for some strange reason, inside of a shark cage. Who booked this shit?
Tags: Chief Jay Strongbow
Video about the press conference to promote the 1992 rematch between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, which was played for money, not glory. Fischer was far gone at this point, a sad spectacle overflowing with demons.
Tags: Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky
The baseball season, which began last week with a pair of games in Japan, gets going in earnest this week. Welcome back.
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Robert De Niro and the “Singing Mammoths” rock out on the set of the Mets’ erstwhile postgame show, Kiner’s Korner, 1972:
Don’t look back, Satchel–something might be gaining on you, 1971:
“I threw the piss out of the ball the last part of the year,” 1981:
Tags: Bill Lee, Robert De Niro, Satchel Paige
Two Titanic survivors, tennis pros Richard Williams and Karl Behr, met for a match in Boston several months after the disaster. In “Unsinkable,” L. Jon Wertheim’s excellent new Sports Illustrated story, the writer recalls their dramatic stories. An excerpt that imagines the shipwreck occurring in our media-drenched era:
“Imagine the Titanic sinking not in 1912 but in 2012. Passengers’ Twitter feeds and Facebook posts would describe the disaster in real time as they were rescued. Cable networks would provide round-the-clock coverage, complete with theme music, a catchphrase—Catastrophe at Sea!—and digital animation of the sinking. Morning shows would book survivors, literary and film agents would hustle story rights, class-action lawyers would troll for clients. Just see the media frenzy that followed the sinking of the Italian luxury cruise linerCosta Concordia earlier this year.
Now consider a scenario in which two of the survivors were dashing, world-class athletes in the same sport, destined to face off against each other many times. The hype surrounding those matches would be immeasurable. After their playing careers, the two men would be bracketed together—the Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson of the sea—perhaps cowriting a book, then hitting the speaking circuit.
A century ago the culture was different. Look-at-me sensibilities were considered gauche. Many passengers lucky enough to have ended up on the Carpathia struggled with what today would be diagnosed as post–traumatic stress disorder. This was especially true for the men, whose survival was seen by some as evidence of cowardice. Ismay, the White Star director, was pilloried in the British newspapers. Ostracized by London society, he moved to Ireland and spent the remaining 25 years of his life out of the public eye.
Behr, according to family members, suffered profound survivor’s guilt. His granddaughter Helen Behr Sanford, known as Lynn, spent 10 years meticulously researching his story and recently published Starboard at Midnight, a fictionalized account of Behr’s experience on the Titanic. ‘He wished he had saved someone from the water so that at least an act of heroism could have resulted from his survival,’ she writes. ‘He was crushed by [an] inarticulate sadness beyond anyone’s understanding.'” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Karl Behr, L. Jon Wertheim, Richard Williams
Considering the Los Angeles Dodgers just sold to Magic Johnson’s ownership group for approximately $2.15 billion, I reiterate my question about Forbes’ sports franchise valuations (and most likely all their company valuations). I understand Magic and co. overpaid, but the numbers aren’t even close.
Tags: Magic Johnson
In the technologically simpler era of a hoaxer like Clifford Irving (here and here), perhaps there was some slim chance a public fraud could get away his scheme, or at least he could live well for a good, long time before his deceit undid him. But in our age of extreme connectivity and data trails, there’s no way someone can misrepresent themselves for too long. So why do people continue to perpetrate doomed hoaxes? Pathological behavior, I would assume. But more troublingly: Why do some others continue to cling to a faker’s veracity after the truth has become apparent, as if surrendering on one issue will topple their entire belief system?
From Gene Maddeus’ LA Weekly story about a drug dealer who feigned being a billionaire intent on purchasing the Los Angeles Dodgers:
“At this point, Dodger fans are desperate to be told two things: That the McCourt era is over, and that the team will win again. Unfortunately, nobody can say those things.
McCourt seems to have every intention of hanging on to the Dodger Stadium parking lots. That would force the new owner into an awkward partnership with the most hated man in Los Angeles.
As for winning, no one can make any promises about that, either — at least not while the bankruptcy sale is pending. The auction is a secret process, and the bidders making a play for the team have signed nondisclosure agreements. Though there have been plenty of leaks, no one is permitted to speak directly to the fans.
No one, except Josh Macciello.
Because, as it turns out, Macciello was never a real contender for the team. He is, instead, a fraud. Despite what he’s told reporter after reporter, and despite what those journalists have dutifully repeated, he does not have billions of dollars. He does not have rights to any gold mines. He is, instead, a convicted drug dealer and a huckster who has used his talents to persuade many people — not just journalists — to place their confidence in him. In his wake he has left a string of abandoned projects and broken promises.
The Dodger play is his boldest stunt so far. And, judged strictly as a bid for attention, it was a fantastic success. Reporters and fans ate up the tale of the regular guy who wanted to buy the team. Never mind the gaping holes in that narrative: At the end of the day, it was a great story.
Macciello is such a charismatic force that people continue to believe in him, even when confronted with evidence of his deceit. Provided with some of that information, his publicist, Cindy Rakowitz, continues to stand up for him. ‘I really do believe he has the money somewhere, somehow, some way,’ she says. ‘I want to believe.'”
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“All his life he was a million-to-one shot”:
Tags: Cindy Rakowitz, Gene Maddeus, Josh Macciello
There are few things that make less sense to me than Forbes’ valuations of company worth. Case in point: the Los Angeles Dodgers. In 2011, Forbes values the legendary baseball club, which had awful ownership, at $800 million. Just a year later, it’s clear the team will be sold for somewhere between $1.2 and $1.5 billion, which obviously is a whole different plane. Forbes can’t argue that buyers are bidding with their hearts rather than their heads, that the sale price and the value aren’t close, since Forbes values the Dodgers in 2012 at $1.4 billion. I know good ownership means a great deal, but those numbers don’t compute. Yes, the Angels new TV deal portends well for their L.A. counterparts, but shouldn’t Forbes be able to predict that market?
Right now, the New York Mets, another mismanaged team whose owners could be forced to sell, is valued by Forbes at $719 million. Does anyone really believe the franchise would be sold for less than twice that amount? It seems like the Forbes numbers exist in a vacuum, with little to do with reality.•
In “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a discursive, funny and sort of nutty Grantland article, stats guru Bill James explains why crowd decorum at baseball games has improved while inmate behavior in penitentiaries has deteriorated. An excerpt:
“In his 1929 book 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Warden Lewis E. Lawes says that his young daughter, who was born inside the prison, knew all of the prisoners and was allowed to wander freely around the prison, with a few obvious out-of-bounds penalties. Think about what a different world that is from a modern prison. If I could divert your attention for just a second with a serious question: How did we slip backward like that? How did prisons become these violent hellholes that they now are, so that it is unimaginable to have an 8-year-old girl wandering the hallways of a maximum-security lockup?”
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Tags: Bill James, Lewis E. Lawes
Pro hockey players are using computers to try to train their brains to better focus and concentrate. From Tal Pinchevsky at NHL.com:
“Muscles can be toned, endurance can be refined, leadership qualities can be taught. But how do you train a hockey player’s brain? Can a coach work the areas of a player’s brain responsible for awareness and intuition?
The Israeli Air Force, of all people, has the answer.
More specifically, the answer comes from Applied Cognitive Engineering, or ACE, an Israeli technology company that has worked with the Israelis and the U.S. Air Force, as well as NASA and the American military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Originally used to train fighter pilots, ACE’s IntelliGym is now being adopted by more and more hockey coaches.
The cognitive training system develops players’ awareness and ability to make fast-paced decisions and has already made its mark on the hockey world in just three years.
‘We had no idea what to expect. It kind of looked like a video game. Sure enough, you could see how it related to hockey and increased your awareness and knowledge,’ said Michael Cornell, a junior defenseman and alternate captain at the University of Maine, whose team used the IntelliGym last season. ‘I think it was one of those things where it became almost second nature. I read this play differently because of the tools I’ve been using. It helped develop a high level of awareness for me.'”
Tags: Tal Pinchevsky
On International Women’s Day, here’s a 1973 John Chancellor report about the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, which was hokey as a sporting event but used pitch-perfect hoopla on an Ali scale to become a huge national attraction. King triumphed in the Astrodome in straight sets: 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.
In his two years coaching the erstwhile laughingstock New York Knicks in the late ’80s, the forward thinking Rick Pitino had his young and athletic players operate a full-court press on every play. It didn’t make them an NBA champion, but it maximized the talent at hand and earned the team its first division title in two decades. Years later, Malcolm Gladwell published “How David Beats Goliath” in the New Yorker, making a convincing case that this strategy was sound and should be employed more. But conventional wisdom is hard to shake so no one has ever tried it again, and current Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni has taken a lot of flak for his similarly aggressive “Seven Seconds or Less” offensive scheme
I wonder if a young and athletic NFL team should use similar aggression. You couldn’t blitz on every play because offenses are too proficient and rules are stacked in favor of scoring, But how about this for a team that went 2-14 last year: Never punt from anywhere outside your own 35-yard line. Never kick field goals inside the other team’s 35 except during the last two minutes of a game when it would give you the lead.
It’s unlikely we’d ever see such an experiment in a league were most coaches get flustered by basic time management, but a gradual shift to using four downs much better is possible. From Brian Burke’s smart Slate piece on the topic:
“There are many doubters when it comes to four-down football. If you’re in that camp, indulge me in a quick thought experiment. Let’s imagine a football world where the punt and field goal had never been invented. (Sorry, Ray Guy and Jan Stenerud.) In this universe, there would be no second-guessing: Teams would go for it on every fourth down.
Then one day, some smart guy invents the punt and approaches a head coach with his new idea. ‘Hey coach,’ he’d say, ‘instead of trying for a first down every time, let’s voluntarily give the ball to the other team.’ Our coach would be incredulous at this suggestion. ‘You want me to give up 25 percent of our precious downs for just 35 yards of field position? Do you have any idea how difficult it would be for us to score?’ And the coach would be right.
Since that’s not how the game evolved, our thinking about fourth-down strategy is a lot different. But as the sport has changed, with offense securing a firm upper hand over defense, coaches need to rethink their fourth-down orthodoxy. Accounting for interceptions, teams netted around 3.5 yards per pass attempt in 1977, back when many of today’s head coaches were playing and learning the sport. In the modern game, teams are almost twice as productive when they throw the ball, netting close to six yards per passing attempt. As it gets easier for offenses to move down the field, possession (and maintaining possession by going for it on fourth down) becomes more important and field position becomes less important.”
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Tags: Brian Burke
Fischer, Yugoslavia, 1961.
Long before anyone knew that the earth beneath his feet would shake ever more violently with time, chess champion Bobby Fischer seemed like an eccentric winner–though definitely a winner. The paranoid accusations and erratic mood swings, however, weren’t merely gamesmanship or arrogance but harbingers of a serious mental illness that would eventually manifest itself in antisemitism and derangement. The opening of Brad Darrach’s 1971 Life profile, “Bobby Is a Ferocious Winner,” at a time when he was still considered combustible by nature rather than condemned by it:
“Angry voices rattles the door to Bobby Fischer’s hotel room as I raised my hand to knock. ‘Goddamnit, I’m sick of it!’ I heard Bobby shouting. ‘I’m sick of seeing people! I got to work, I got to rest! Why didn’t you ask me before you set up all those appointments? To hell with them!’ Then I heard the mild and dignified executive director of the U.S. Chess Federation addressing the man who may well be the greatest chess player in world history in a tone just slightly lower than a yell: ‘Bobby, ever since we came to Buenos Aires I’ve done nothing but take care of you, day and night. You ungrateful—-!’
It was 3 p.m., a bit early for Fischer to be up. Ten minutes later, finding the hall silent. I risked a knock and Fischer cracked the door. ‘Oh yeah, the guy from Life. Come on in.’ His smile was broad and boyish but his eyes were wary. Tall, wide and flat, with a head too small for his big body, he put me in mind of a pale transhuman sculpture by Henry Moore. I had seen him twice before but never so tired.
Just inside the door I stopped short. The room looked like a terminal moraine of bachelorhood. Bedclothes in tortured piles on the floor. Socks, underwear, bags, newspapers, magazines jumbled on the spare bed. Boxes stacked all over the couch, and on the floor between the beds a single graceful banana peel. The only clean place in the room was a small table by the window, where a set of handsome wooden chessmen had been set up for play. Serenely beautiful, an altar in the debris of battle.”
Tags: Bobby Fischer, Brad Darrach
Just listened to a fun interview that Bill Simmons did with stats guru Bill James at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. I paid close attention to James’ ability to remember names and dates, and like pretty much every informavore I’ve ever encountered, his recall isn’t very good. The memory is just so elastic even for someone who’s brilliant, except for a few anomalies. Interesting that James points out that he was actually aided in his early career in the 1970s by working with numbers in a time before everyone had a computer or two in their pocket. Because collecting and crunching info was so difficult in an unwired world, others interested in sports stats pretty much gave up while James soldiered on. An excerpt from James talking about his first use of computers:
“Bill Simmons: There’s no way you’re using a computer at this time?
Bill James: We didn’t have personal computers, no. Everything was handwritten and in notebooks.
Bill Simmons: When did you move over to the personal computer?
Bill James: I enjoyed personal compyers as soon as they came out–
Bill Simmons: I would have guessed.
Bill James: I never could program or anything like that. We had a Kaypro…I had a spreadsheet on it that was 32 cells long and 16 wide.”
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A great 1983 Kaypro commercial by ad legend Joe Sedelmaier:
Tags: Bill James, Bill Simmons, Joe Sedelmaier
The tremendously talented–and tremendously disturbed–chess champion Bobby Fischer, who would go on to become both a king and pawn in life, appearing on I’ve Got A Secret, 1958. Dick Clark is the inquisitor.
Tags: Bobby Fischer, Dick Clark
According to a new Businessweek piece, there are some green shoots in the U.S. solar industry. But it’s been an agonizingly slow-to-develop energy source for Americans and everyone else because of the price of the hardware. Two videos about earthlings trying to harness the sun.
A 1970s NASA film from Huntsville, Alabama:
A contemporary suburban Tokyo experimental solar city:
Finally got around to reading “The Delivery Guy Who Saw Jeremy Lin Coming,” Jason Gay’s fun WSJ piece about an amateur numbers-cruncher who predicted the unlikely rise of the NBA’s newest superstar. An excerpt:
“In May 2010, an unsung numbers hobbyist named Ed Weiland wrote a long-term forecast of Jeremy Lin for the basketball website Hoops Analyst. At the time, Lin was a lightly regarded, semi-known point guard who had completed his final season at Harvard. But Weiland saw NBA material. He emphasized how well Lin played in three nonconference games against big schools: Connecticut, Boston College and Georgetown. He noted how Lin’s performance in two unsexy statistical categories—two-point field-goal percentage (a barometer of inside scoring ability) and RSB40 (rebounds, steals and blocks per 40 minutes) compared favorably with college numbers put up by marquee NBA guards like Allen Iverson and Gary Payton. Weiland concluded that Lin had to improve on his passing and leadership at the point, but argued that if he did, ‘Jeremy Lin is a good enough player to start in the NBA and possibly star.’”
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Tags: Ed Weiland, Jason Gay, Jeremy Lin
More than anything else, George Butler and Charles Gaines’ 1977 pseudo-documentary, Pumping Iron, brought the appeal of muscle mass to America. A loose look inside the world of competitive bodybuilding starring a charismatic if Machiavellian Arnold Schwarzenegger, the film focused on Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, which was ground zero for bicep building and steroid taking in the U.S. The original Gold’s is the focus of Paul Solotaroff’s new Men’s Journal article, “Muscle Beach and the Dawn of Huge.” The opening:
“Robby Robinson, a wedge of black marble, arrived in Venice Beach in 1975 with one oversize suitcase and seven dollars. That was every dime he had after quitting his job and selling everything of value but the trophies he’d won at bodybuilding shows in the Jim Crow South. He’d left behind a wife, three small children, and a certain localized fame as the best-ever body in the state of Florida, fronting 20-inch biceps, a 28-inch waist, and 205 pounds of peaked, freak muscle on his hourglass, 5-foot-8 frame. But if your dream back then was to make the cover of Muscle Builder and storm the palace of giants in your sport, there was one thing to do and one place to do it: Join Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach. With the ocean at its back, the sun through its skylights, and the biggest men on Earth trooping in by the dozen to bench 450 before breakfast, Gold’s was Camelot-by-the-shore. You felt its pull in your hypertrophied heart, deep in the belly of that reckless muscle.
Robinson, born and raised in the swamps of Tallahassee by an illiterate mother and a bootlegging father who later abandoned his 14 children, had a deep and perfectly rational terror of whites. Driving to shows in Mississippi and Georgia, he had seen the signs posted on rural light poles: niggers, don’t get caught here come sundown. But it was a letter from a white man that had brought him to Venice: a written invitation from no less than Joe Weider, the publisher of Muscle Builder, to come out and join his stable of champion bodies living and training large in Los Angeles. Robinson got off the plane expecting to be met by Weider, or if not by him then by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Weider’s Austrian prince, who’d won the title of Mr. Olympia five times running. Neither showed up, though, and after standing around for hours, Robinson tossed the suitcase over his shoulder and walked nine miles to Venice in platform heels.
He found a place to crash at a fellow bodybuilder’s and showed up at Gold’s one morning that spring, gawking through the window, dumbstruck. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to train. I was so in awe. All my idols in one room! Arnold and Denny Gable, Bob Birdsong and Franco Columbu; these beasts working out with no shirts or shoes and a crowd of people watching from the street.’ The gym manager, Ken Waller (a Mr. America and Mr. Universe), saw Robinson hulking by the door. ‘You,’ he growled. ‘You wanna train here? Fine: Come lift what we lift.’ He pointed to a pair of humongous dumbbells, 150-pounders with tapered grips. ‘Get down on that bench and give me 10,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, get the fuck out and stay out.’ Robinson, who’d built himself in backwoods gyms, had never seen dumbbells half so big. Somehow he got them onto his thighs, then, trembling, winched his back down on the bench. Each rep was a carnival of toil and pain, the weights teetering as they went up and ticked back down, the fibers of his mid-pecs shrieking. ‘I’ve no idea how I did that set,’ says Robinson, now 65 and still wondrously carved, his traps and triceps bulking through a linen shirt, his waistline waspish as ever. ‘But the adrenaline going through me then, that drive to be one of them — it was like a double shot of steroids and B-12.’ He fought the 10th rep up, screaming and twisting, then dropped the weights on the concrete floor. ‘You’re in,’ grunted Waller. ‘You’re one of us. Now go and give me a dead lift of 700.'”
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“Can you believe how much I am in heaven?”
Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Gaines, George Butler, Paul Solotaroff, Robby Robinson