The immediate challenge for me back in Munich was how to use being Mr. Universe to attract more customers to our gym. Bodybuilding was still so obscure and considered so weird that winning the championship made no splash at all outside the gyms. I’d gotten more celebrity from lifting the heavy stone in the beer hall.
But Albert came up with an idea. If we had asked the newspapers to write a story about me winning Mr. Universe, they’d have thought we were nuts. Instead he had me walk around the city on a freezing day in my posing briefs. Then he called some of his newspaper friends and said, “You remember Schwarzenegger who won the stone-lifting contest? Well, now he’s Mr. Universe, and he’s at Stachus square in his underwear.” A couple of editors thought that was funny enough to send photographers. I led them all over the city: from the market to the Hauptbahnhof, where I made a point of chatting up little old ladies to show I was friendly and nice and not some kind of monster. This is what politicians do all the time, but it was very unusual for a bodybuilder. In spite of the cold, I was having fun. The next morning a picture ran in one of the papers of me in my briefs and at a construction site, where one of the workers who was all bundled up against the cold was gawking at me in amazement.
After more than a year of effort, and stunts like these, we succeeded in doubling the gym membership to more than three hundred—but this was in a city of over a million people. Albert called bodybuilding a subcult of a subcult. We would have long conversations trying to figure out why the sport wasn’t better known. We thought the answer must be in the mentality of most bodybuilders; they are hermits who want to hide under an armor of muscles. So they do everything in secret and train in dungeons and come out only when their muscles make them feel safe. There had been famous strongmen in history, such as Prussian-born Eugen Sandow, often called the father of modern bodybuilding, and Alois Swoboda, but that was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and there had been nobody like them since. No contemporary bodybuilder was enough of a showman to make training really catch on.
The competitions held in Munich were a depressing example of this. They weren’t held in beer halls like the old strongman exhibitions. Instead, they took place in gyms where there would be just bare walls and a bare floor with a few dozen chairs, or in auditoriums on a bare stage. And this was Munich, a city full of people and entertainment and life. The sole exception was the Mr. Germany contest, held each year in the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer hall that catered to workers.
Albert and I had the idea of bringing bodybuilding competition upscale. We got together a little money and bought the rights to produce Mr. Europe for 1968. Next, we went to the owners of the Schwabinger Bräu, an elegant old beer hall in a classy neighborhood, and asked, “How about having the bodybuilders’ contest here?”
The unusual choice of location helped us publicize the event, and we drew more than a thousand spectators, compared to a few hundred the previous year. Of course, we invited the press and made sure that the reporters understood what they were watching so they could write good stories.
The whole thing could have failed. We could have sold too few tickets, or somebody could have started a riot by leaping up onstage and cracking Mr. Europe over the head with a beer stein. But instead we packed the hall with unbelievable screaming and enthusiasm and life against the background of people drinking and clinking their steins. The energy of our event set a new standard in German bodybuilding.
That year’s Mr. Europe contest had an especially big impact on bodybuilders from Eastern Europe because it coincided with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. On August 21, less than a month before the event, tanks rolled in to crush the democratic reforms that had been instituted during the so-called Prague Spring in early 1968. As the news spread, we got in touch with the bodybuilders we knew there and picked up many in our cars at the border. The Czechs were unusually well represented at Mr. Europe that year because they were able to use the competition as a pretext to flee. They went on afterward from Munich to Canada or to the United States.
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I wondered when my turn would come to get to America. One corner of my brain was always focused on the question. In the Austrian army, for example, when I found out that they were sending tank drivers to the States for advanced training, I fantasized about staying in uniform for that. The problem, of course, was that when the training in America ended, I’d have to come back to Austria, and I’d still be in the army.
So I stuck with my original vision: a letter or a telegram would come, calling me to America. It was up to me to perform well and do something extraordinary, because if Reg Park had gotten to go there by doing something extraordinary, then I also would get to go by doing something extraordinary. In judging my progress, I used him and Steve Reeves as my benchmarks. Just like Reg, I’d gotten a very early start—earlier even than him, because he’d begun at seventeen just before he went into the military, and I’d started at fifteen. Winning Mr. Universe at the age of twenty got me this initial bang of publicity in the bodybuilding world, because I’d beaten Reg’s long-standing record—he’d won at twenty-three, back in 1951.
When I first became obsessed with bodybuilding, I dreamed that winning Mr. Universe in London would guarantee my fame and immortality. But in reality, the competitive scene had grown much more complex. Like boxing today, bodybuilding had multiple federations that were constantly competing for control of the sport. They ran the championships that attracted bodybuilding’s elite: the Mr. Universe contest in Britain; the Mr. World competition, which moved from country to country; the Mr. Universe contest in the United States; and the Mr. Olympia, a new event intended to crown the professional bodybuilding champion of the world. Fans needed scorecards to keep track of all this, and the important point for me was that not all the top bodybuilders competed at a given event. Some of the top Americans skipped the Mr. Universe competition in London and competed only in the American version, for instance. So the only real way for a bodybuilder to become the undisputed world champ was to rack up titles in all the federations. Only after he had challenged and defeated all rivals would he be universally acknowledged as the best. Reg Park had dominated in his day by winning the London Mr. Universe competition three times in fourteen years. Bill Pearl, a great California bodybuilder, had dominated by winning three Mr. Universe titles at that point plus Mr. America and Mr. USA. Steve Reeves had been Mr. America, Mr. Universe, and Mr. World. I was anxious not to just beat their records but also to run over them; if somebody could win Mr. Universe three times, I wanted to win it six times. I was young enough to do it, and I felt like I could.
Those were my dreams as I trained for the Mr. Universe contest to be held in London in 1968. To get to America, first I would have to thoroughly dominate the European bodybuilding scene. Having won Mr. Universe in the amateur class the year before was a great start. But it automatically elevated me to professional status, opening a whole new field of competitors. That meant that I had to go back and win the professional title even more decisively than I’d won as an amateur. That would make me a two-time Mr. Universe, and I’d really be on my way.
I made sure nothing else interfered. Not recreation, not my job, not travel, not girls, not organizing the Mr. Europe contest. I took time for all those things, of course, but my first priority remained working out a hard four or five hours per day, six days per week.