Reg Park gave me the wake-up call on that. He had perfect twenty-one-inch calves, so fully developed that each one looked like an upside-down valentine heart under the skin. When I trained with him in South Africa, I saw what he did to achieve that. He trained his calves every day, not just three times a week, and with a mind-blowing amount of weight. I was proud that I’d worked up to calf raises with three hundred pounds, but Reg had a cable system that let him apply one thousand. I said to myself, “This is what I need to do. I have to train my calves totally differently and not give them even a chance of not growing.” When I got to California, I made a point of cutting off all my sweatpants at the knees. I would keep my strongpoints covered—my biceps, my chest, my back, my thighs—but I made sure that my calves were exposed so everyone could see. I was relentless and did fifteen sets, sometimes twenty sets, of calf raises every single day.
I knew all the muscles I needed to focus on systematically. In general, I had better muscles for pulling motions (biceps, lats, and back muscles) than for pressing motions (front deltoids and triceps). It was one of those hereditary things that meant I had to push those muscles much harder and do more sets. I’d built the big back, but now I had to think about creating the ideal definition and separation between the lats and the pecs and the serratus. I had to do exercises for the serratus, so that meant more closed-grip chin-ups. I had to lower the lats a little, which meant more cable raises and one-arm raises. I had to get the rear deltoids, which meant more lateral raises, in which you hold a dumbbell in each hand while standing and lift them straight out to the sides.
I had a whole list of muscles to attack: the rear deltoid and the lower latissimus and the intercostals and the abdominals and the calves, and blah, blah, blah! These all had to be built and chiseled and separated and brought into proper proportion to one another. Each morning, I’d get breakfast with one or two training buddies, usually at a deli called Zucky’s on the corner of Fifth Street and Wilshire Boulevard. They had tuna, they had eggs, they had salmon, all the things I liked. Or we would go to one of those family breakfast places like Denny’s.
Unless I had English class, I would go straight to Gold’s and work out. Afterward, we might hit the beach, where there would be more exercises on the open-air weight-lifting platform, plus swimming and jogging and lying on the sand to perfect our tans. Or I’d go over to Joe Weider’s building and work with the guys cooking up stories for the magazine.
I always split my routine into two training sessions. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I would focus on, say, chest and back. At night I would come back and work on my thighs and calves, and then practice posing and do other exercises. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it was shoulders, arms, and forearms. Of course, calves every day, abs every day except Sunday, which was a rest day.
Often for lunch or dinner we’d hit one of the local smorgasbords. Growing up in Europe, I’d never even heard of a smorgasbord. The idea of a restaurant where you could eat all you wanted would have been incomprehensible. The bodybuilders would start with five, six, or seven eggs, after which we’d go to the next station and eat all the tomatoes and vegetables. Then we would have the steak, and then the fish. Muscle magazines in those days were always warning that you had to have your amino acids, and that you had to be careful because the amino acids in certain foods weren’t complete. “Hey,” we said, “let’s not even think about it; let’s just eat all the proteins. We have the egg, the fish, the beef, the turkey, the cheese—let’s just have it all!” You would think the owners of the smorgasbord would have charged us more at least. But they treated us no different from any other customer. It was as if God had created a restaurant for bodybuilders.
During those first months in Los Angeles, everything was going so well that it was hard to believe. There were surprisingly few consequences from my car crash, apart from the gash in my thigh. The crocodile wrestler who owned the GTO scarcely batted an eye about the damage. He worked for a dealership where he had his pick of the used cars, and his reaction was “Don’t worry about it.” In fact, he hired me. One of the dealer’s specialties was exporting used cars, and I earned pocket money that fall by driving cars down to Long Beach and onto a freighter headed for Australia.
A few insurance companies called the gym to talk about damages to the other cars, but the conversations were too hard for me to understand, so I’d hand the phone to a workout partner. He’d explain that I was new to America and had no money, and the companies gave up. The only dramatic effect of the accident was that it made me frantic about getting health insurance. In Europe, of course, everybody was insured: you fell into a certain category if you were a student; if you were a child, you were covered by your parents’ insurance; if you had a job, you had workers’ coverage—even the homeless were covered. It scared me not to be covered here. I kept worrying, “If I get sick, what do I do?” I had no idea that you could go to an emergency room and receive free medical care. And even if I’d known, I wanted no handouts. Though it took me six months, I made sure that I paid back Bill Drake for my doctor bill.
It so happened that Larry Scott, a former Mr. Olympia who was retired from bodybuilding but still worked out every day, was now a regional sales manager for a big insurance company.
“I hear you’re looking for insurance,” he said to me. “Let me help you.”
He came up with a policy that cost $23.60 a month, plus another $5 for disability, which sounded expensive to me because I earned only $65 a week from Weider. But I bought it and must have been one of the few new immigrants in LA with health insurance.
Around Thanksgiving 1969 I got an invitation to a December bodybuilding competition and demonstration in Hawaii. The crocodile wrestler had been planning to go home for the holidays, and he said, “I love Hawaii. Why don’t I come with you and hang out and train with you for a few days, and then I’ll go on to Australia from there?” The plan sounded good to me. Besides the obvious attractions of the beaches and the girls, Hawaii offered the chance to get to know Dr. Richard You, a US Olympic team physician who practiced there, and to visit weight-lifting legends like Tommy Kono, Timothy Leon, and Harold “Oddjob” Sakata (whom I already knew from Munich). So my buddy and I went to Joe Weider and asked if he knew the promoters and what he thought about me going. He was all for it. I could use the experience, he said, and the pressure of an upcoming competition would make me train harder.
CHAPTER 6
Lazy Bastards
JOE WEIDER CALLED THE hard-core bodybuilders lazy bastards. From what I could tell, he was mostly right. The typical customers at Gold’s Gym were guys with day jobs: construction workers, cops, professional athletes, business owners, salesmen, and, as time went by, actors. But with a few exceptions, the bodybuilders were lazy. A lot of them were unemployed. They wanted to lie on the beach and have somebody sponsor them. It was always, “Hey, Joe, can you give me an airline ticket to fly to New York to the contest?” “Hey, Joe, can you give me a salary so I can train in the gym?” “Hey, Joe, can I have the food supplements for free?” “Hey, Joe, can you get me a car?” When they didn’t get the handouts they felt entitled to, they were pissed. “Be careful of Joe,” I’d hear them say. “That cheap son of a bitch doesn’t keep his promises.” I saw him completely differently. It’s true Joe had a hard time parting with money. He came from a poor background where he had to fight for every nickel. But I didn’t see any reason why he should just hand out money to any bodybuilder who asked.