It never struck me as strange that the girls I was dating weren’t putting on makeup or lipstick or painting their nails. I thought having hairy legs and underarms was normal because in Europe none of the women waxed or shaved. In fact, I got caught by surprise by it one morning the following summer. I was in the shower with a girlfriend—we’d watched the Apollo astronauts make the first moonwalk on my little black-and-white TV the night before—and she asked. “Do you have a razor?”
“Why do you need a razor?”
“I hate these nubs on my legs.” I didn’t know what “nubs” meant, so she explained.
“What?” I said. “You shave?”
“Yeah, I shave my legs. It’s so gross.” I’d never heard that expression either. But I gave her my razor and watched her soap her legs, her calves, her shins, her knees, and shave them like she’d been doing it for five thousand years. Later that day I said to the guys at the gym, “Today a chick shaved in my fuckin’ shower. Have you ever seen that?”
They looked at one another solemnly, nodded, and said, “Yeaaah.” Then everybody cracked up. I tried to explain: “Oh, because in Europe, girls are all with the Bavarian look, you know, with the hair all over.” That just made them laugh harder.
Eventually I pieced it together. Some of the girls I dated didn’t shave: this was their protest against the establishment. They felt the beauty market was all about exploiting sex and telling people what to do, so they were rejecting that by being more natural. It was all part of the hippie era. The flowery dresses, the frizzy hair, the food they ate. They all wore beads, lots of beads. They brought incense to my apartment, so the whole place stank. That was bad, but I felt they were on the right track with the freedom of smoking a joint and the naturalness of nudity. All that was wonderful. I’d grown up a little bit like that myself, with the uninhibited scene at the Thalersee.
—
All that laid-back stuff was great, but my mission in America was clear. I was on a path. I needed to train like hell, diet like hell, eat well, and win more major titles the following fall. Weider had promised me a year, and I knew that if I did those things, I’d be on a roll.
Winning a couple of Mr. Universe contests in London didn’t make me anywhere near the best bodybuilder in the world. There were too many overlapping titles, and not everyone was competing in the same place. Being the best would really come down to beating champions like the guys whose pictures I had hanging all over the walls of my room: Reg Park, Dave Draper, Frank Zane, Bill Pearl, Larry Scott, Chuck Sipes, Serge Nubret. They had inspired me, and I said to myself, “These are the kinds of people I have to go through eventually.” My victories had put me in their league, but I was the newcomer with a lot left to prove.
At the very top of the pedestal was Sergio Oliva, the 230-pound, twenty-seven-year-old Cuban emigré. By now the muscle magazines simply called him the Myth. He’d taken his most recent Mr. Olympia title that fall in New York unopposed: not one of the other four bodybuilding champions invited to compete even showed up.
Oliva’s background was even more unusual than mine. His father was a sugarcane laborer in pre-Castro Cuba, and during the revolution in the 1950s, Sergio enlisted in General Fulgencio Batista’s army alongside his dad. After Fidel Castro and his rebel forces prevailed, Sergio established himself as an athlete. He was an Olympic weight lifter of much higher caliber than me, ending up on the Cuban team in the 1962 Central American and Caribbean Games. He would have led the team in the 1964 Olympics if he had not hated Castro’s regime so much that he defected to the United States along with many of his teammates. He was also a terrific baseball player. That’s what had helped him refine his waist: tens of thousands of reps twisting to swing a bat.
I’d met Sergio at the 1968 Mr. Universe contest in Miami, where he gave a posing demonstration that drove the audience wild. As one of the muscle magazines put it, his posing split the concrete. There was no question that Sergio was still way out of my reach. He was really ripped and pound for pound thicker, with more muscle intensity than I had. He had the rare ability among bodybuilders to look fantastic just standing relaxed. His silhouette was the best I’d ever seen: a perfect V-shape tapering from very wide shoulders to a naturally narrow, tubular waist and hips. The “victory pose,” Sergio’s trademark, was a move that very few bodybuilders in competition would even attempt. It involved simply facing the audience with the legs together and the arms extended straight overhead. It exposed the body completely: the huge, sweeping thighs built up from Olympic lifting, the tiny waist, and the near-perfect abdominals, triceps, and serratus. (The serrati are muscles on the sides of the rib cage.)
I was determined to beat this man eventually, but I was still far from having the kind of body I would need. I’d come to America like a hundred-carat diamond that everyone was looking at and saying, “Holy shit.” But the diamond was only rough cut. It was not ready for display, at least not by American standards. Building a totally world-class body typically takes ten years at least, and I’d been training for only six. But I came on strong, and people were saying, “Look at the size of this young kid. What the hell? This guy, to me, has the most potential.” So I’d won my victories in Europe as much on promise and courage as on the fine points of my physique. A huge amount work still remained to be done.
The ideal of bodybuilding is visual perfection, like an ancient Greek statue come to life. You sculpt your body the way an artist chisels stone. Say you need to add bulk and definition to your rear deltoid. You have to choose from an inventory of exercises for that muscle. The weight, the bench, or the machine becomes your chisel, and the sculpting could take a year.
This means you have to be able to see your body honestly and analyze its flaws. The judges in the top competitions scrutinize every detail: muscle size, definition, proportion, and symmetry. They even look at veins, which indicate an absence of fat under the skin.
In the mirror I could see plenty of strong points and plenty of weaknesses. I’d succeeded in building a foundation of power and mass. By combining Olympic lifting, power lifting, and bodybuilding, I’d developed a very thick and wide back, close to perfect. My biceps were extraordinary in size, height, and muscle peak. I had ripped pectoral muscles, and the best side-chest pose of anybody. I had a real bodybuilder’s frame, with wide shoulders and narrow hips, which helped me achieve that ideal V shape that is one element of perfection.
But I also had some shortcomings. Relative to my torso, my limbs were too long. So I was always having to build the arms and legs to make the proportions seem right. Even with massive twenty-nine-inch thighs, my legs still looked on the thin side. My calves fell short compared to my thighs, and my triceps fell short compared to the biceps.
The challenge was to take the curse off all those weak points. It’s human nature to work on the things that we are good at. If you have big biceps, you want to do an endless number of curls because it’s so satisfying to see this major bicep flex. To be successful, however, you must be brutal with yourself and focus on the flaws. That’s when your eye, your honesty, and your ability to listen to others come in. Bodybuilders who are blind to themselves or deaf to others usually fall behind.
Even more challenging is the biological fact that, in every individual, some body parts develop more readily than others. So when you start working out, you might find yourself saying after two years, “Gee, isn’t it interesting that my forearms never got really as muscular as the upper arms,” or “Isn’t it interesting that my calves somehow aren’t growing so much.” That was my particular bugaboo—the calves. I started out training them ten sets three times a week just like the other body parts, but they did not respond the same way. Other muscle groups were way ahead.