I looked at the calendar and realized that the Mr. World event was on September 25, the Mr. Universe competition in London was on September 24, and the Mr. Olympia contest was in New York on October 7. I thought, “Wow, I could, theoretically, go and win the Mr. Universe in London, then come to Columbus, Ohio, and win the Mr. World, and then go to the Mr. Olympia. That would be unbelievable.” In the space of just two weeks, I could cover the three federations that controlled all the bodybuilding competitions. Winning all three would be like unifying the heavyweight title in boxing: it would make me the undisputed world champ.
I was totally excited until I dug into the airline schedules. Then I called Jim Lorimer. “I want to come,” I began. “But there is no way to make it from Mr. Universe to Mr. World in time. The earliest plane from London after Mr. Universe doesn’t get to New York until two in the afternoon. And there’s no connecting flight from New York to Columbus until five o’clock, which is when your competition already starts.
“Unless you can perform miracles, there is no way I can make it. I’ve talked to the other top bodybuilders from the Mr. Universe contest, like Franco Columbu, Boyer Coe, and Dave Draper, and they’d all be willing to come with me. But we don’t see how it’s possible.
“I hear you’re a big-league organizer and you’re very well connected. So let’s see if you can pull it off.”
It took Jim only a day. He called back and said, “We’re sending a jet.” It was a corporate jet belonging to Volkswagen, one of the event sponsors. “They’ll fly to New York and pick you up.”
—
I couldn’t believe it when my idol Reg Park signed up to compete in the London Mr. Universe contest. I thought he was on my side! When a reporter asked me how it would feel to compete against the greatest Mr. Universe ever, I lost my usual happy-go-lucky attitude. “Second greatest,” I corrected him. “I’ve won the title more times than him.”
Ex-bodybuilding champs come out of retirement all the time to show off their training or refresh their image or who knows why. Reg had won his Mr. Universe titles at widely spaced intervals, in 1951, 1958, and 1965, and maybe he wanted to put a final stamp on the event. Or maybe I was receiving so much attention that he wanted to show that the older generation was still in charge. Whatever was motivating him, it put us at odds in a way I’d never expected.
When we saw each other in the warm-up room, we barely said hello. The competition felt awkward for everybody. The judges were uncomfortable. The fans were uncomfortable. Normally before a contest, other bodybuilders will come up and tell you, “You’re looking great, you’re going to win.” But the people who liked us both didn’t know what to say to one of us with the other man standing right across the room.
The reality is that a bodybuilder simply cannot train as hard when he’s over forty as he can when he’s twenty-three. I was in better shape than Reg—not even necessarily because of effort but just because of youth. His skin wasn’t as fresh, his muscles were slightly in decline rather than in bloom. A few years earlier, it might have been different, but now it was my turn to be king. Reg was good enough that day to beat all the other contestants, including a former Mr. Universe who was only twenty-eight. But he was not good enough to beat me.
I felt good about winning but at the same time sad. My sights were set on Sergio Oliva, and I didn’t need to defeat Reg Park to reach my dream.
The Volkswagen jet that Jim Lorimer had promised was waiting for us on the tarmac in New York the next day. Private jets were much less common than they are now, and for me and the other bodybuilders, it was a thrilling moment; we felt like we were finally getting the royal treatment like other big-time athletes. We flew to Columbus and drove to the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, walking in as the other bodybuilders were already in the middle of pumping up.
I was totally shocked to find Sergio Oliva there. He was a secret entry that nobody had told us about. “Fuck!” I said to myself. He looked like he was in top form, too. I was expecting a showdown with him in two weeks, not now.
It took me a few minutes to snap out of it and figure out what an opportunity this was. Although I hadn’t known that Sergio was coming, I realized he had known about me. That meant he had come to Columbus in order to surprise me and take me out, so that I’d be beaten even before we reached New York, and he would have a clear victory in Mr. Olympia.
But, I reasoned, what could work for him could also work for me. “If I beat him today,” I thought, “that’s it for him in New York.”
I needed to kick it into a higher gear. It was like when you have a superfast sports car with a nitrous injector on the engine: you press a button and get an extra hundred horsepower when you need it. I needed to hit that racing button now.
I took off my clothes, put on the oil, and started pumping up. They called us, and we went out on stage.
Mr. World was by far the biggest bodybuilding event I’d ever seen. Five thousand spectators packed the hall, twice the size of the crowd at the championships in London and New York. What was more, there were lights and cameras and announcers from ABC’s Wide World of Sports; this was the first bodybuilding competition ever to be taped for national TV.
It did not matter if it was five thousand or five hundred seats, I knew that if I could get the crowd going using my salesmanship and charm, that would influence the judges and give me the edge. Sergio was playing the same game, strutting and waving and blowing kisses to his fans; he had a big following, and it was obvious that several dozen had shown up. The four top competitors were me, Sergio, Dave Draper, and Dennis Tinerino. We all came onstage at the same time to let the panel of seven international judges get a first look at us. The emcee asked each of us to show off a few of our favorite poses. The crowd clapped and cheered seeing us all perform at the same time. The energy was tremendous.
Compared with all the other bodybuilders I’d ever faced, Sergio really was in a class by himself. I was struck by that again the minute we were onstage. It was so hard to look impressive next to him with those extraordinary thighs, that impossibly tiny waist, those incredible triceps. I thought that I might have a little extra edge in the judges’ minds because I’d just come from winning Mr. Universe. Or maybe Sergio had a slim edge because he was much more accomplished in Olympic weight lifting, and most of the judges came from that world.
To psych myself up, I looked for the slightest possible advantage. Now that we were in the bright TV lights, Sergio seemed a little soft to me. That was encouraging. I found that I really could anticipate his moves, and I started matching each pose. The crowd loved it, and you could see the TV cameras swiveling from him to me and back again. When we left the stage, I felt like I’d won that round.
It only got better from there. Sergio had been too free with the oil backstage, it was dripping off him when he posed and made him look more smooth than cut. Also, during his individual routine, he went through the poses a little too fast for people to fully take them in. When my turn came, I made sure I took the time to connect with crowd, so that each pose made them cheer a little louder, and they didn’t want me to leave. It was like Sergio was onstage competing for the first time, and I was totally composed and comfortable.
In the final pose-off, I was 100 percent on. No matter what shot Sergio did to show his strength, I had a matching shot to show my strength. More important, I was the one who was willing to go all out. I was more eager than Sergio. I wanted the title more than he did.
The judges gave me first place unanimously. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, but Sergio had been the champ for so long that he was really shocked. I stood there for a minute repeating to myself, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I just beat Sergio.” The prize was a huge silver trophy, a high-tech electric watch, and $500 in cash—and new popularity and momentum to carry to New York.
When I walked offstage with my trophy, I was careful to do two things. First, I thanked Jim Lorimer. “This is the best organized competition I’ve ever s
een,” I told him. “When I retire from bodybuilding, I’m going to call you, and you and I will be partners. We’ll be right here on this stage running the Mr. Olympia contest.” Jim just laughed and said, “Okay, okay.” It was probably the weirdest compliment he had ever heard, especially from a kid.
Second was to mess with Sergio’s head. It’s foolish to leave anything to chance when you’re trying to unseat a three-time reigning Mr. Olympia. If the contest in New York was close, I told myself, the judges would give it to him. I had to blow him away onstage and make it easy for them to pick me. So I told him I thought I’d won today because I’d gained a lot of muscle size since he’d beaten me in New York the previous year. He was a little light, and that’s why he lost, blah, blah, blah. I wanted him going away thinking he’d have to gain a few pounds to compete. He was soft today, and I wanted him softer in New York.
—
Mr. Olympia was scheduled two weeks later for a cushy Manhattan theater, and around noontime that day a bunch of us got together at the nearby Mid City Gym. The minute I saw Sergio, I started teasing him about eating, and Franco joined in, asking him if he’d lost weight. That made everybody laugh except Sergio. In fact, as I was soon to see, he had taken the bait. He’d added ten pounds in the two weeks since Columbus, and nobody can gain ten pounds in two weeks and still look cut.
The Town Hall theater had 1,500 seats, and it probably had never seen a crowd as rowdy as this. His fans were chanting “Sergio! Sergio! Sergio!” and mine trying were to outshout them, chanting “Arnold! Arnold! Arnold!” At the end of a long afternoon, the judges called us back for a final pose-off onstage. Sergio went through his standard repertoire, and, just as I’d planned, I went into high gear, ripping off three poses to every one of his. The crowd really loved this.
But the judges kept calling out poses until finally I was thinking, “We’ve been posing a long time.” It seemed like it wasn’t because the judges were uncertain about their decision; it was just because people were on their feet and going berserk, and the judges were saying, “Let’s keep this going; the people love it.”
We were exhausted. That’s when I went for the kill. An idea came into my head, and I said to Sergio, “I’ve had it. I think those guys ought to know now, however the chips fall.”
He said, “Yeah, you’re right.” He walked off one side of the stage and I started to walk off the other—but I walked only two steps. Then I stopped and hit another pose. And I turned toward his side and shrugged as if to say, “Where’d he go?”
Sergio came right back onstage a little confused. But by this time “Arnold!” was the only name they were chanting, and some of the fans were even booing him. I used the moment to execute my best professional posing and shots. Then it was over. The judges held a little meeting backstage, and the emcee came out and announced that I was the new Mr. Olympia.
Sergio never said anything to me about how I’d mocked him, but he told other people he felt he’d been had. That’s not how I saw it. It was a primal moment. I’d finished him off by instinct in the heat of a competition that I’d dominated by then all the same.
Still, the next morning was strange, because Sergio, Franco, and I were sharing a hotel room. As soon as Sergio woke up, he amazed me by doing all kinds of push-ups and exercises. He was such a fanatic. Even the day after competition, he was pumping up in the hotel!
I have to admit that then I felt sorry that he’d lost. He was a great champion and an idol for many people. For years my mind had been fixed on wanting to destroy him, take him out, make him second, make him the loser. But the morning after beating him, I woke up and saw him next to me and felt sad. It was too bad he had to lose to make way for me.
CHAPTER 8
Learning American
IN BODYBUILDING I WAS king of the mountain, but back in everyday LA I was still just another immigrant struggling to learn English and make a life. My mind was so fixed on what I was doing in America that I rarely gave a thought to Austria or Germany. If I was competing in Europe, I’d go home to visit, and I kept in touch with Fredi Gerstl in Graz and Albert Busek in Munich. Often I would cross paths with Albert and other European friends on the bodybuilding circuit. I regularly sent pictures and letters home to my parents, telling them what I was doing. Whenever I won a championship, I’d send them the trophy, because I didn’t need it in my apartment, and I wanted them to be proud. I’m not sure any of this meant much to them at the start, but after awhile they put up the photos and built a special shelf in their home to show off the trophies.
My dad would answer my letters for both of them. He always enclosed my original letter marked up in red ink—correcting my mistakes in spelling and grammar. He said this was because he thought I was losing touch with the German language, but he’d done the same thing with the essays he required Meinhard and me to write for him as kids. This kind of thing made it easy to believe that my parents and Austria were frozen in time. I was glad to be away living my own life.
Meinhard and I hardly kept in touch. Like me, he’d finished trade school and served a year in the army. Then he’d gone to work for an electronics company, first in Graz and later in Munich while I was living there. But our paths rarely crossed. He was an elegant dresser and a hard partyer and had a wild life with girls. Lately he’d been transferred to Innsbruck, Austria, and he’d gotten engaged to Erika Knapp, a beauty who was the mother of his three-year-old son, Patrick, and he showed signs of finally settling down.
He never got the chance. The spring after I won Mr. Olympia, in 1971, the phone rang in our apartment one day when I was out of town. It was my mother calling with the terrible news that my brother had been killed in a car accident. Meinhard crashed while driving alone drunk on a mountain road near the Alpine resort of Kitzbühel. He was just twenty-five years old.
I was away in New York, and Franco took the call. For some reason, the news made him feel so stricken that he couldn’t tell me. It wasn’t until three days later, when I came back to LA, that he said, “I have to tell you something, but I have to tell you after dinner.”
Eventually I got it out of him that my brother had died.
“When did it happen?” I asked.
“Three days ago I got the phone call.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“I just didn’t know how to tell you. You were in New York and you were doing your business. I wanted to wait until you got home.” If he had called me in New York, I could have been halfway to Austria already. I was touched by his worry for me, but also frustrated and disappointed.
I called my parents right away. My mother was sobbing on the phone and was barely able to speak at first. But then she told me, “No, we’re not going to have the burial here; we’re going to keep Meinhard in Kitzbühel. We’re going tomorrow morning, and we’ll have a very small service.”
“I just found out about it,” I said.
She said, “Well, I wouldn’t try to come now, because even if you get the first plane, with the nine-hour time difference and the long flight, I don’t think you’ll get here in time.”
It was a terrible blow to the family. I could hear the devastation in both my parents’ voices. None of us was good at communicating feelings, and I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry? It’s terrible? They knew that. The news left me numb. Meinhard and I were no longer close—I’d seen him only once in the three years since I’d moved to America—but still my mind flooded with memories of us playing as kids, going on double dates when we were older, laughing together. We would never have that again. I would never see him again. All I could think to do was push this out of my mind so I could go on with my goals.
—
I threw myself into my Los Angeles life. Going to school, training five hours a day at the gym, working in the construction and mail-order businesses, making appearances, and going to exhibitions—all of it was happening at the same time. Franco was just as busy. We both had incredibly full schedules, and some day
s stretched from six in the morning until midnight.
Becoming fluent in English was still the hardest thing on my to-do list. I envied my photographer friend Artie Zeller, who was the kind of person who could visit Italy for a week with Franco and come back speaking Italian. Not me. I couldn’t believe how difficult learning a new language could be.
At the beginning, I’d try to translate everything literally: I would hear or read something, convert it in my head back into German, and then wonder, “Why do they have to make English so complicated?” There were things that I seemed unable to grasp no matter who explained them to me. Like contractions. Why couldn’t you say “I have” or “I will” rather than “I’ve” and “I’ll”?
Pronunciations were especially dangerous. As a treat, Artie took me to a Jewish-Hungarian restaurant where the dishes were the same as Austrian food. The owner came to take our order, and I said, “I saw this one thing here on the menu which I like. Give me some of your garbage.”
“What did you call my food?”
“Just bring me some of your garbage.”
Artie jumped in right away. “He’s from Austria,” he explained. “He means the cabbage. He’s used to the cabbage from Austria.”
Gradually, though, I started making progress, thanks to my classes at Santa Monica College. Going there really fired me up to learn. On my very first day in English as a Second Language, all of us foreigners were sitting in the classroom, and the teacher, Mr. Dodge, said, “Would you guys like to be inside or outside?”
We all looked around trying to figure out what he meant.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 14