Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  Several days later, and much to my surprise, Nobby Orens himself sent me a heartfelt congratulatory e-mail, having seen my feat on the evening news. I found this inspiring, and it added to my growing fandom and respect for the Guinness World Records tradition, derived from the book’s British roots and faux Anglo formality. The elaborate yet vaguely democratic rules (no private jets, lest records become the sole province of eccentric billionaires) and quirky titles like Keeper of the Records (what the company calls its top rules official), made the whole undertaking somehow seem more noble. Orens’s gesture fit this model of a gentleman’s game. This was one of the things that would later inspire me to write in my article for Golf Magazine, “For nearly half a decade his record stood as a testament to the iron will of the avid traveling golfer. Having devoted a large portion of my life to promoting golf travel, I hope Mr. Orens realizes I had no malice in my epic journey, which I consider good for the game itself. Similarly, I expect to one day find my own name stripped from the pages of Guinness by another thrill-seeker who admits that a long plane ride between rounds is far more practical than shooting 58.” Later, when I interviewed him by phone, Orens, now a senior citizen who has given up record breaking, explained his motivation to me, “Why? Ego. It makes me feel good to have the certificate on the wall. I’m looking at the certificate right now, as we talk. But I wasn’t upset when it was broken because I didn’t expect it to last forever. If I had expected it would never be broken I would have been upset. The day after I set it I was talking to my wife and said ‘someone will break it one of these days.’” In this same spirit, I regularly told my friends and my wife the same thing, that I expected my record to fall and that I wished the next long-distance golfer good luck.

  I lied. When my record was usurped a year later, I was not happy about it at all. I questioned the integrity of the record breaker and the book, since I know a thing or two about the limits of this record, and the new mark, given its particular terminus points, seemed implausible at best. It had been broken by an Australian not long after my try, proving that everything I would later learn about printed records and more publicized records being much more tempting and vulnerable marks was true. I imagine the Aussie watched it on Sydney’s Channel Nine News the morning of my greatest day and immediately began making his plans to erase me from the record book.

  What had started less than year before with a random newspaper article had brought me into the limelight of Guinness, and was about to draw me further into the whirlpool of madness that I would soon see in many other record holders. They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but for me there was another alternative. Having tasted world recordom, and having lost it, I could get it back and taste it again. And I would.

  Why couldn’t I just go quietly into the night with the same good grace as Nobby Orens? Because breaking the record had become a much bigger deal than I ever expected. I knew it would be fun, and I knew it would make a good story for Golf Magazine, and I knew it was something none of my fellow golf writers had ever done. What I did not know was that I would become the center of more attention than I had ever gotten in my life. This started before I even left the golf course at Pelican Hill that day. As I sank my birdie putt in the waning daylight, a film crew from ESPN was on hand to record it, possibly tipped off by their peers Down Under. My trophy case is not exactly overflowing with sports awards, but I was a Top Ten Play of the Day on ESPN’s SportsCenter that night. As soon as I walked off the green, I was interviewed by an ABC crew and numerous radio stations. I was on ABC evening news nationwide and on Good Morning America the next day. Friends I had not spoken to in ages called to congratulate me, having seen me on the tube. In the next few weeks I got incessant calls from many more radio stations and newspapers, and was filmed for the local news on NBC. All this attention slowed down, but for months I got phone calls at home from radio stations asking for interviews. An NBC news crew came to my house to film me. My local paper, the award-winning Valley News, made me the featured cover story above the fold on page one. The crazy part of all this is that my record was not especially impressive or shocking, and it lacked the visual drama of say, holding rattlesnakes in your mouth or pulling a 747 down the runway. On top of its specificity and difficult to understand title (The Greatest Distance Between Two Rounds of Golf Played on the Same Day), it was just one of hundreds of records broken or set that year and not even the only one that day (incredibly, somebody else set the record for lifting the most copies of the new edition of the Guinness book itself). I’m still sane enough to know that the record never warranted the level of attention it received, which begged the question, how far could someone promote a really fun record? My Guinness World Records certificate, signed by the Keeper of the Records himself, soon arrived in the mail, and I promptly had it expensively framed. It is now proudly displayed in my home. To this day, every time I attend a party or function and someone I know tells someone else about my records, people want to know everything. My fifteen minutes of fame waned but never really ended: more than three years later, after my record had been broken and is no longer in the book, I still get the occasional call for a newspaper or radio interview.

  I never confused myself with a celebrity, and no one ever recognized me because of my record or my television appearances. I knew that it was all only interesting to myself, my family, and my friends, yet Guinness fever still set in. The thing that made me step back and look at the Guinness phenomenon in a new light is that I had already had the chance to be in the public eye. I had been an expert guest on numerous television and radio shows before, had spent time with numerous celebrities, had been made up for the cameras in the green room. My name had bylined more than 3,000 articles, and during my travels I had repeatedly met readers of my columns who did not know my face but knew my name. My wife used to joke that her husband was one of the few men who had his picture taken for Playboy, as my mug appeared a couple of times on its contributors page. If a Guinness World Record for something so stupid as playing golf with a break for movies and cocktails could become so personally important to me, what would be the effect of this attention on someone who had never before been in the public eye? What was so powerful in the book’s allure? I would soon find out.

  4

  Guinnessport: Getting into Guinness Goes Prime Time

  The thing about these people is that they are crazy, but they are doing stuff, that as Norris McWhirter would say, “was at the edge of possibility.” We never laughed at them. Even if they were flipping beer mats [coasters], we’d say “you go try it.” These guys had taken the time to learn how to do something that no one else can do, and that’s amazing. I had an enormous amount of respect for them. It’s not the same as being an Olympic Gold medalist or concert pianist, but they do something better than anybody else. Ultimately the only difference is in the “quality” of what they do.

  —GREG CHILDS, LONGTIME PRODUCER OF BBC’S RECORD BREAKERS

  If you want to settle a pub argument in 2004, you’d be crazy to go to Guinness World Records. Actually, you’d be crazy to go to it at all, unless you wanted to know who has the largest ice-lolly stick collection in the world, or the most Pepsi cans from around the world. But I have never been in a pub conversation in which someone said: “I wonder who has got the most yo-yos in a private collection,” or “What’s the most Smarties eaten by someone using a chopstick in three minutes?”

  —MILES KINGTON, THE INDEPENDENT (LONDON)

  It is no coincidence that the Guinness Book of Records sold more copies and gained popularity as it added more and more pictures to its pages. Likewise, it would increase sales and become even more popular when it put its images on the airwaves. It didn’t hurt that the book had no competition, was part of a famous brand, and filled a void in the marketplace. But the book’s rapid evolution from a bet-settling device and barroom curiosity into mainstream reading was driven not by a global need to locate the highest point in Ireland, but r
ather by the nearly universal appeal of its human element. Almost from the beginning, readers formed bonds with the likes of the world’s oldest, fattest, tallest, and shortest people, alongside those sporting the longest beards, mustaches, and fingernails. All of these were cases where a picture was worth a thousand words. While no photo will ever bring the world’s largest boiler to vivid life, a picture of the obese McCrary twins on side-by-side motorcycles creates an indelible impression for the reader that no simple textual description of their weights could achieve. When the original staid book failed to sell nearly as well in the States as it had in England, and Norris McWhirter was at a loss to comprehend the new market, he let U.S. distributor David Boehm, chief of Sterling Publishing, carry the ball. A savvy marketer, Boehm wrapped the plain green cloth in a glossy cover, printed front and back with images and bold print espousing superlatives, including a picture of the most people riding a single bicycle along with illustrations of a man eating an ox and a lion tamer at work. Fully three-quarters of the images on Sterling’s “new” cover were of actual people setting records, despite their minuscule representation in the pages of the book, whose content leaned toward mountains and machines. This skewed ratio would immediately begin changing, and with nearly every subsequent issue, more and more pages and photos were devoted to humans. No matter how odd a cross section of humanity they were, readers could relate to them as fellow human beings, and this, it would seem, was part of the key to the public fascination with Guinness.

  In the course of research for this book, I interviewed dozens of people, many of whom had read the book as children, a rite of passage in the United States, and then not picked it up in the years or decades since. At the mere mention of its title, the Guinness Book of Records, nearly everyone I spoke to between the ages of twenty and fifty conjured up the same exact memories, recalling a handful of iconic images: the guy with the long twisting fingernails, the McCrary twins on their matching motorcycles, the original Siamese twins, the man with the “beard” of honey bees, and Robert Earl Hughes, holder of the lofty title, Heaviest Human of All Time. All were remembered more for their shocking pictures than the accompanying text.

  “I’m sure you have interviewed countless people who have said the same, not especially original or profound thing, that there was something very relatable about everyday people doing incredible things,” explained journalist Ben Sherwood, a lifelong fan of the book and until recently the executive producer of Good Morning America. Sherwood recalled how his childhood memories of the book helped shape a novel he had written.

  I was the number two producer on the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw at the time, and when I was working on that there was the impeachment of President Clinton and the war in Kosovo and other interesting stories, but there was so much media focus on certain things, and I wanted to find a way to talk about important truths, without writing a book about a network television producer or magazine. The Guinness Book of World Records popped up, because I had always loved it and Robert Earl Hughes and all those guys were floating around in my head.

  These universal recollections led to Sherwood’s Guinness-inspired romantic comedy, The Man Who Ate the 747, the vehicle he used to talk about the important truths of human existence.

  Like every boy, I just loved the pictures and the people. My 1974 edition of the book, it was shaped like a brick in those days, and it was my most coveted possession. I read it so many times that I literally had to keep it in a shoebox because it was falling apart. The principal characters in my novel, many of them were inspired by characters of my childhood imagination, from the book, and they became sort of imaginary friends. I stared at their pictures and wanted to know what the world’s tallest man was like, what the world’s heaviest man was like.

  The journalist in Sherwood added, referring to Robert Hughes, “He was buried in a coffin the size of a piano, but not actually a piano, a distinction which is often misunderstood.”

  “What’s the world’s best-selling copyrighted book?” Ken Jennings asks rhetorically. Of course Jennings knows the answer, just as he remembers more trivia factoids than most of will forget in our lifetimes. In his book Brainiac, documenting the history of trivia, he recalls eagerly reading the Guinness book on family car trips at age seven or eight and trying to impress his parents with its esoteric facts. “These are a particular favorite of young boys who have just received a copy of the world’s best-selling copyrighted book, the Guinness Book of World Records, and want to quiz you on that book’s semi-famous superlatives—the crazy guy in Nepal with four-foot fingernails, for instance, or those fat twins on the motorcycles.” Jennings’s book gives no specific details about these people, because he rightly assumes that for his audience, no further explanation is necessary: everybody everywhere knows exactly what fingernails and fat twins he is talking about. As he told me, “When I think about the Guinness records that I remember as a kid, there’s got to be some element of the nineteenth-century carnival freak show about it. It’s freaks…those are the people that everyone remembers. So there is certainly something about ogling the oddball as well, which is a less inspiring answer as to why people like it than the limits of human achievement or whatever.”

  The book’s embrace of the human element in both photo and print began almost immediately. While the content is nearly identical, the first U.S. version, printed less than a year after the book’s debut and still bearing the original green cover, rearranged the order, opening with the Human Being, which had been relegated to the fourth chapter in the original British edition, behind the Universe, Natural World, and Animal Kingdom. In just one year, the emphasis had already shifted, and readers’ first glance at the Guinness Book of Records would be one of amazing humans for decades to come. This section focused on anatomical and biological records, oldest, tallest, fattest, and the like, rather than on the “human achievements,” such as juggling and sword swallowing, which had their own chapter farther back in the book. The very first truly updated edition, the blue book of late 1956, had several times as many pictures as the original, published just a year earlier, and specifically, many more photos of people. But these early volumes still focused on famed athletes, explorers, and adventurers, rather than images of the individuals whose claim to fame was quirky or unintentional. This omission did not last long: photos of the longest mustache appeared in the light blue 1964 edition, along with Britain’s (“and possibly the world’s”) longest married couple. The light blue also included, alongside its scientists and Olympians, an eerie image of Ms. Henrietta Howland Green, the world’s most miserly millionaire, who despite amassing a fortune of $95 million, delayed necessary surgery on her son while searching for a free clinic, resulting in the amputation of his leg. By the maroon edition of 1966, giants, dwarves, and Britain’s most prolific murderer were appearing in the greatly expanded photo sections. The following year’s turquoise edition was a watershed for human record holders: for the first time photos moved onto the pages of the book itself, accompanying the text, rather than on special photo insert pages, a change that caused the human element to multiply even more quickly in both image and word. By the cerise edition of 1969, which marked the final year of the book’s original size and format, these images had become the precursor to today’s visually driven editions, showing readers the world’s fattest man standing on a scale, the shortest dwarf standing next to a kilted “normal height” human, and most important, the first ever image (albeit a drawing rather than photo) of the man who, since the very first Guinness Book of Records in 1955, came to epitomize all things Guinness—the tallest man in the history of the world.

  Born in Alton, Indiana, on February 22, 1918, Robert Pershing Wadlow looked like a normal infant, and there was nothing to suggest the stature he would go on to achieve. When his parents, Addie and Harold Wadlow, first held their son, he was a slightly-above-average eight-pound, eight-ounce baby, born into a family of five healthy children, with two brothers and two sisters, all remarkably aver
age in physique and appearance. But not Robert: at the age of two, he underwent a double hernia operation, and from that point on began to grow at a rate still unprecedented in human history. By age five he stood 5'4". He was over six feet tall by the age of eight, while at nine he could carry his 5'11" father up the stairs of the family home on his back. Although he remained enviably slim, his weight would reach almost a quarter of a ton by age twenty-one (491 pounds) and he grew to an ultimate height of 8' 11.1". Despite having died a decade and a half before Sir Beaver’s inspired idea for the record book (from a foot infection directly related to his size and poor circulation), Wadlow became a revered fixture of The Guinness Book of Records. He was codified in the very first edition as the tallest human being of all time and still holds the title, one of just a meager handful of original records that have never been broken. In fact, while Wadlow belongs to an elite club that includes the Best Selling Record of all time (Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”), the world’s Largest Dam (Hoover), and the Largest Office Building (the Pentagon), Robert P. Wadlow’s record is likely the only remaining human record from 1955, excepting firsts, such as Hillary’s ascent of Everest, which can never be broken. Someone could theoretically grow taller than Wadlow, but no one has done so or even come close. His height is nearly a full foot taller than that of media darling Bao Xi Shun, the towering Mongolian sheep herder who frequently made headlines during his recent reign as the tallest living human being, and still five inches taller than the new record holder, Ukraine’s Leonid Stadnyck (a veterinary surgeon standing 8'5.5"), who took the mantle from Bao with the 2008 edition. Wadlow’s place in biological history seems secure, while his place in Guinness World Records history is unparalleled: by the fiftieth anniversary 2005 edition, his enduring popularity warranted an entire sub-chapter, a two-page spread complete with half a dozen photos, a detailed biography, and a table listing his height benchmarks by age. No other individual or object or invention is awarded such extensive coverage in the book, and the authority on superlatives calls Wadlow’s record a “true classic” and “one of the most popular and memorable in the 50-year history.” While he never lived to see it, Wadlow became one of the most famous record holders of all time, his likeness replicated in statue form for Guinness World Record museums, where his popularity lives on. When the company opened its flagship museum in London’s Trocadero, the synthetic Wadlow was given an honored position as the very first exhibit visitors saw. A critic for the London Times happily reported that, “Given that many people find a macabre fascination in looking at ‘freaks,’ I was heartened by the reactions of the children and adults I observed, all of whom expressed not only amazement but sympathy for this gentle giant.”