Arnold

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  I thought about it. I actually considered it, which was not so astonishing. Schneck was a pro. He knew how to manipulate young guys with their heads full of dreams.

  “Just come back inside, Arnold,” he coaxed. “Let’s not talk on the street.”

  I went inside with him. I sat in a chair and listened to more of his talk. He reiterated everything he’d said, making his promises all seem more attractive. I watched him while he talked. I hated what I saw in his eyes. Everything in me was saying no. I realized I would get everything he promised eventually if I just kept pushing myself. I wanted to do it with dignity. I wanted to do it in a good way, rather than have something I’d feel sorry about.

  “No—” I said. I shook my head and got up.

  He reached out to touch me.

  “No—” I said.

  He knew I meant it.

  I continued to work in the gymnasium, but my relationship with Schneck wasn’t good. We did finally become friends much later, when I no longer needed him for anything. But at first it was a strain. I had to see him almost daily and occasionally he would let me know that his offer still stood. I kept getting more and more independent. That made it easier for me to say no. And after a while I loosened up enough so I could even laugh about our encounter with my friends in the gym. I became aware of the fact that there were a few homosexuals around bodybuilding. These were not the bodybuilders themselves, not the serious ones. Two or three rich guys in Munich hung out in gyms and tried to pick up young bodybuilders by promising them the world. Some of them did accept. But I was never sorry I turned down the offers I had.

  I found myself a room. I couldn’t afford much. It was one of those places people let out when they have extra space in their apartment and want help paying the rent. You eat with them and share a bathroom.

  My ego wouldn’t allow me to let my parents know what a struggle I was having. As far as they knew, I was happy, earning a decent salary, and making progress in every direction. Otherwise they would have gotten on my case to come home.

  At that point my own thinking was tuned in to only one thing: becoming Mr. Universe. In my own mind, I was Mr. Universe; I had this absolutely clear vision of myself up on the dais with the trophy. It was only a matter of time before the whole world would be able to see it too. And it made no difference to me how much I had to struggle to get there.

  Managing a health club was an entirely new experience. I was supposed to be a trainer, to show people how to exercise, to devise programs which would make them lose fat and rebuild their bodies. At first, confronted with these people who’d come to me for guidance, I felt helpless. I thought I still needed someone giving me advice on my workouts. But I realized I had to do it in order to survive.

  I had to live a split life, acting as an instructor to the health club clients on the one hand, and trying to train myself for the Mr. Universe title on the other. It was frustrating. People who would never benefit from what I told them kept taking my time. They paid and came to the gym. But it was a disgusting, superficial effort on their part. They merely went through the motions, doing sissy workouts, pampering themselves. And there was so much I wanted to do with those wasted hours.

  I trained both morning and evening. It was the beginning of the split routine that would later become famous. But I got into it originally because it was expedient. There was no initial theory involved. I worked out from nine to eleven in the morning and then again from seven to nine at night. I couldn’t believe the results. Within two months I gained another five pounds.

  In the Army, when I had trained six hours continuously, I found that I could never handle the kind of weight I wanted to use. But by splitting up my schedule, training arms and shoulders in the morning, resting for a few hours and eating at least two substantial six-course meals, then going back to train my legs, chest and abdominals in the evening, I discovered I had plenty of energy to handle a lot of poundage. It was like a whole new workout on a different day. I was rested, my energy was back, and my mind was ready for it.

  At first, nobody paid much attention to this split routine, except to knock it. They thought I was stupid to train twice a day. They said I’d get overtrained, that my muscles would start to deteriorate.

  I ignored them. I kept pushing myself and growing, growing fast. I had two immediate goals. I was going to win Mr. Europe and I was going to compete in a Mr. Universe contest. I felt good about the Mr. Europe; it was a cinch. But I had no idea how I’d do in London. At that point I no longer knew how I’d get to London. Schneck had taken back his offer and I didn’t have the money myself. But I knew I’d make it somehow. And I didn’t know how big those guys would be. People kept telling me they were gigantic, they were animals, monsters. All I had to judge by were photographs—which I knew could be deceptive. I looked at the guys who had competed in the previous contest. “No,” I decided, “I can’t beat the guy who won.” I’d look at the second-place winner. “No, I can’t beat him.” I’d look at the guy who placed third. “I can’t beat him either.” I went right down the line, trying to figure out who I might beat. I got to eighth or ninth place and figured I might have a chance if I tried hard enough.

  It was a loser’s way of looking at it. I defeated myself before I even entered, before I’d even completed the year’s training. But I was young. I was being self-protective. I hadn’t yet pulled together my ideas about positive thinking and the powers of the mind over the muscles.

  At the Mr. Europe contest, rumors about me were circulating long before I arrived. People were anxious to get a look at this monster from Munich. They had heard all these stories from the bodybuilding circuit. “Arnold has nearly fifty centimeters of arm . . .” (Which was close to 20 inches.) The most amazing thing about that was my age: “Arnold is only nineteen years old . . .” Nobody could figure it out at all. People at the contest crowded around me. They wanted to look, to touch. “How did you do it?” they asked. They were flipped out. They thought I must be training under some special drug program or something.

  Onstage, the first pose I did was double biceps—because I knew my greatest strength was arms. The judges almost fainted. When I hit the first arm shot, they looked at me with their mouths hanging open. I flexed again and heard one judge whisper, “Oh, my god, where’d this guy come from?” After hearing his comment, there was no stopping me. I felt as if my body were blooming, unfolding, opening up. I filled up with energy and kept posing, doing ten times more poses than I had intended. I just didn’t want to leave the platform.

  I experienced something I had never felt before: a rush of confidence, a feeling I was going to win. It seemed to sweep me up and carry me along with it. I noticed, too, that the judges picked up on it. I did win. I wiped out all the favorites. In fact, I made such an impression on the officials that they decided to pay my ticket to the Mr. Universe contest.

  A week later, I entered the competition for the Best Built Man of Europe. I won that one too. But it backfired on me. It was not sponsored by the same federation as the Mr. Europe contest and that first federation declared I had violated something in their code and was therefore no longer eligible for the ticket to the Mr. Universe contest.

  What a blow that was. The owner of the gymnasium had backed out, and the Mr. Europe people had disqualified me because I’d entered and won another contest. I couldn’t believe it.

  I was dejected, naturally, but I had too much drive to let this political maneuvering stop me. I wasn’t alone in my efforts. Reinhart Smolana, who owned another gymnasium in Munich, recognized how hungry I was for winning and got behind me. Reinhart knew what it was all about. The year before, he had competed and won his height class at the Mr. Universe contest. However, he realized he would never win the overall award because he didn’t have enough body weight. So he started a collection and put all his energy into trying to get me to London. And finally, after one solid month of hassling and scraping, we had enough money for a ticket.

  Winning Mr. Europe, 1
966

  That was the first time I’d ever flown anyplace. I was on my way to the Mr. Universe contest and I had never even been in an airplane. Which is just one more indication of how inexperienced I was. I hadn’t been willing to work my way up through the countless little Mr. Thises and Mr. Thats. I was shooting for the top.

  I remember thinking as I did up my seat belt, “What if it crashes and I never get there?” And when I heard the landing gear come up with a shudder into the body of the plane, it was like a cold fist closing on my heart. I was certain we were gone.

  I arrived in London knowing almost no English. I kept repeating, “I would like to go to the Royal Hotel, please,” a sentence I had practiced during the flight. Two businessmen from Munich said they were staying at the Royal and took me in their taxi.

  When we got there, I didn’t see any bodybuilders. Something was wrong. Where was the Mr. Universe contest? The businessmen asked at the desk and then translated for me. The contest was at another Royal Hotel.

  I ran back to the taxi with the correct address. There was no mistake this time. As we pulled up at the curb, I saw at least fifty huge guys standing outside the glass doors. They seemed to be waiting for something. They were monstrous, wearing jackets padded out to almost twice the width of their actual shoulders. There were dudes with funny haircuts from India and Africa, guys wearing clothes from all different parts of the world.

  As soon as I stepped out of my cab they started moving toward me. They crowded close, grabbing and feeling my arms and talking in at least ten different languages. Apparently they had all been waiting for me. They had heard I was the first bodybuilder in Europe with 20-inch arms. In America that measurement wasn’t unusual, but in Europe it was phenomenal—especially on someone barely nineteen years old.

  People hung around me all day. Their minds were blown by my size, by the size of my arms. I was like a little kid with all this attention. I didn’t know what to do, how to act. I wanted to stay in the background and learn. That was the main reason I had come. But nobody would allow it.

  My own eyes were popping. It was the first time I had seen blacks with frizzy hair. And I wondered how anybody could have shoulders as wide as the guys whose jackets stood out like building girders. (Later I learned the answer. When they took them off there was nothing underneath. One Frenchman even had a metal frame built into his.)

  All that year, training for the Mr. Universe contest, I had not seriously expected to win (which was a kind of thinking I was never again to accept from myself): I’d somehow convinced myself I merely wanted to go and see what a big international competition was all about. Of course, somewhere in the back of my mind, hardly more solidly formulated than a daydream, was the idea that maybe I could win. But it was nothing more than that.

  Then all of a sudden in London I found myself being admired by almost every bodybuilder there. This did something positive to me. I started thinking it really might be possible for me to win. That feeling I’d had at the Mr. Europe contest, that flood of self-confidence, started to come again. I felt stronger, I felt ready. I began walking differently, giving out bits of advice in my limited English, allowing my body to open up and my muscles to show even under my clothes.

  I knew that the guys who were admiring my arms, making such a fuss over me, were no threat. So I broke away from them and went around the hotel to size up the rest of my competition. The pictures I’d seen in the magazines during the year hadn’t told me half the truth about a few of them. But with all the attention I’d been getting, I began to feel I could beat them all.

  That idea vanished the first time I saw Chet Yorton. He was coming out of an elevator I was waiting to get in. I stepped back, almost with amazement, and got this sudden sinking feeling: something inside me said there was no way I could beat this man. I admitted it and accepted defeat in that instant. Yorton had come over as the top favorite from America. The magazines already said he had the title as good as won, it was merely a matter of going through the motions. He was absolutely fantastic. He had a different look, a smooth, supple look I had not expected.

  I had thought that 230 pounds of body weight and a 20-inch arm would easily get me to the top. But one look at Chet Yorton told me big arms and a massive body would never be enough. A winner had to have a specific look, a winning look. And Yorton had that look. He was golden brown; he was cut up, defined, each muscle thoroughly mapped with veins. This was the first time I realized the value of being able to see veins on the body. Veins are not particularly attractive to look at, but they tell you a great deal about your condition, about how much or how little fat you have. If you have a layer of fat between your skin and your muscles, you will show no veins. Seeing Yorton told me one thing: Arnold, you are fat. I knew I had to get veins. Which was a new thing for me.

  Compared to most of us in Europe, Chet Yorton and the other Americans were like special creations of science. Their bodies seemed totally ready—finished, polished. Mine was far from finished. I had just come to London with a big, muscular body. And I suddenly saw myself at the beginning of another long, long road, one I’d have to travel if I ever expected to win. The kind of thing I was seeing there had very little to do with body size, which was what I had concentrated on. That was mere foundation material. Now I had to work it down, to carve and shape it. I had to get the separation, the finish, the tan.

  Backstage before the contest I heard endless theories. Some guys were talking about taking saunas before competition as a way of wringing the last bit of water out of their systems. Some were claiming that tensing and flexing helped promote great definition and vascularity. I kept hearing new things right and left. I understood only enough English to get it in snatches, which made it even more confusing. Then another bodybuilder finally started translating for me, and I realized this was not a sport but a very complex science. I had assumed that after almost five years of training I knew all there was to know about bodybuilding; as it turned out, I knew next to nothing.

  Usually, a bodybuilding contest is held on two different days, one afternoon and the following evening. The prejudging—which is the real judging—takes place on the first afternoon; the show the public attends is in the evening and is more a simple awarding of the titles. The first event is a relatively solemn affair attended only by a select audience. This is normally made up of the press, other bodybuilders and federation officials. The judges call out the lineup from each of the three classes—short, medium and tall men, in that order. They consider them in a group and individually. Their scores are made on judging sheets, which are kept secret until the next evening, when the class winners are announced and the overall winner is named from the top three. Although nothing can be certain at the prejudging, it is possible to get a fairly accurate reading on how things are going from the reactions of this knowledgeable audience. And that day at the Royal Hotel I felt I was definitely doing well—better than I had ever hoped. Everyone came up afterward to talk to me. They seemed to be trying to tell me I had something special.

  When I took my place in the lineup of the tall men, I noticed something strange. Although I was the tallest, I held the next-to-last number. Chet Yorton had registered late—so his name was last on the list. I remember thinking it was a trick, a typical American trick, because the last one in line is the last one to pose; and that person has the advantage of making the last impression. Yes, it was just another American trick. I was sure of it.

  Having seen Yorton, I didn’t expect much from the competition. However, as soon as I went on I got a burst of applause. People were genuinely impressed. I was Mr. Europe, I had such big arms, and I was young, incredibly young.

  I was really inexperienced about the finer points of competition. I had no idea what pose to hit for what effect. Most of my posing routine, if it could be called that, was still copied from what I had seen other bodybuilders doing or poses I had seen in magazines. It was not planned as it ought to have been, with the kind of unity and rhythm that woul
d make the poses show off my body to its best advantage.

  The actual show for the general public was held the next evening at the Victoria Palace Theatre. Again, there was a lot of confusion backstage. I was trying to get pumped up, trying to concentrate on my body, and also trying to absorb as much as I could of what was going on, what was being said.

  The announcer gave me an enthusiastic introduction: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the new sensation from Germany, Mr. Europe, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is nineteen, already a fantastic top bodybuilder, and this is his first time in an international competition. Let’s give him a great welcome.” The applause was so loud and persistent it was impossible to hear the last of his statement.

  I had never appeared before so many people. The theater held nearly 3,000 and it was filled. I was afraid I would freeze up, that I wouldn’t be able to pose at all. To avoid that, I fixed my gaze on a light high up in the ceiling. I hit my first pose and people screamed. There it was again, that warm rush through my body. I started opening up. I struck another pose and people applauded more. I kept posing and they kept applauding. I knew my time was running out, but I didn’t want to get off the platform. I just focused on this white light somewhere up in the top of the theater and went through my clumsy posing routine. When I left the stage, the applause wouldn’t stop.

  “Go on, Arnold,” someone said. And they pushed me back onstage. Up to that point, I was the only one who’d had to do an encore. In my nineteen years of life, I had not experienced anything that meant as much to me as those three minutes of posing. I told myself that it made the entire four years of training worthwhile.

  Then Chet Yorton went out. I was fascinated watching him pose. He was totally in control, confident, strong. His whole appearance was rugged and virile. For the first time I was witnessing the real winning attitude in action. I could see that he felt like a winner. He was formidable. He had been known around Europe as the man to watch, the man who would come in one day and beat everybody. He’d won Mr. California, he’d won Mr. America twice, and had trophies for all the body parts—best legs, best calves, best back—everything. He had just finished making a film with Dave Draper called Don’t Make Waves, which made him a movie star; and now he’d been sent to London to win this contest. All these things together prepared him mentally for a victory. You could see that in the easy way he moved across the stage: confidence seemed to ooze from his pores.