A key discovery we made was that you can’t just copy someone else’s routine, because everyone’s body is different. Everyone has different proportions of torso and limb and different hereditary advantages and disadvantages. You can take an idea from another athlete, but you have to understand that your body may respond very differently from his or hers.
Experimenting like this helped us find ways to fix particular weaknesses. For instance, Franco had bowlegs, and we figured out how to fill out his inner thighs by having him do squats in a wider stance. Then we figured out techniques to build up his inner calves. He would never fool the judges into thinking his legs were perfectly straight. But they would be impressed by how he’d toned down the problem.
For the showdown with Sergio Oliva, I was determined to take my posing to a new level. Franco and I practiced our routines for weeks. To win, you have to be able to hit every pose for minutes at a time. Most bodybuilders will be able to do a vacuum pose, for example, which involves sucking in your stomach to call attention to the development of your chest. But often they can’t hold the pose, either because they’ve pumped up too much backstage or because they’re out of breath from previous poses. Or they have to let the pose go because they cramp up or start shaking.
So one of us would hold a pose for minutes while the other called out what needed to be done. I would be in a bicep pose, and Franco would say, “I see your arm shaking. Stop shaking.” So I’d stop it from shaking. Then he’d say, “Okay, smile,” and “Give me a little bit of twist in the waist,” and then, “Okay, now go into a three-quarter-back pose. Ah, you took an extra step. No good. Start again.”
You practice every pose and every transition because that extra step is the very thing that could make you lose in front of the judges. They’ll think, “That’s unprofessional. You’re not ready for the big time. You are a fucking idiot; get off the stage. You can’t even stand still in the pose. You haven’t even practiced the simplest things.”
At the Mr. Olympia level, what is most important is not necessarily what goes on in the middle of a pose. The judges assume you know how to do that. What becomes crucial is what you do between one pose and the next. How do the hands move? How does the face look? What is the posture? It’s like in ballet. It’s all about the straightness of the back, the head up, not down. Never, ever take an extra step. As you move from pose to pose, you have to visualize yourself as a tiger, slow and smooth. Everything smooth. And precise, without ever looking as if you are straining, because that too shows weakness. You have to be in total command of your face. Maybe you are struggling and completely winded, but you must breathe through your nose while keeping your mouth relaxed. Panting would be the worst. Then when you come back for the next shot, you need to look confident and exactly the way you’re supposed to look.
My preparation for going up against Sergio didn’t stop at the gym. I bought a movie projector. I assembled a whole collection of his performances in competition, and I watched those films at home again and again. Sergio really did have a stunning physique, but I realized that he had been using the same posing routine for several years. This was knowledge I could use to plan for the final one-on-one pose-off at Mr. Olympia. I memorized his moves in the order in which he hit them, and I got ready for each one with three poses of my own. I rehearsed this and visualized it over and over: “When he hits this, I will do this, and this, and this!” My goal was to overwhelm every move Sergio made.
Late that summer, the phone rang one day in Gold’s Gym, and the manager called out from the desk, “Arnold, there’s a guy on the phone by the name of Jim Lorimer.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants to talk to you about the Mr. World competition.”
“Tell him to call back. I’m in the middle of working out.”
That call turned out to be one of those magical things that happened to me that I never could have planned. Jim still laughs about it today. When I called him, he explained that he was the organizer of the world weight-lifting championships, which were being hosted that year by the United States in Columbus, Ohio, and that after the championships, there would be a bodybuilding competition for the title of Mr. World. He wanted me to enter.
I’d never heard of Jim Lorimer and called around to see if anybody knew him. It didn’t take long to learn he was for real. Jim was a former FBI agent, about twenty years older than me, and an important force in American sports. He’d been chairman of the United States Olympic Committee. He’d been a pioneer in building up the women’s teams to compete against the Soviet bloc. He made his living as an executive at Nationwide Insurance, the largest employer in Columbus, and was a suburban mayor and a very well-connected politician. He’d been running the US weight-lifting championships and the Mr. America contest in Columbus on behalf of the AAU for years, and my friends said that those events were always very well organized. That was a big reason that Columbus had been chosen to host the 1970 world championship, and Jim had been asked to step up and run it.
I looked at the calendar and realized that the Mr. World event was on September 25, the Mr. Universe competition in London was on September 24, and the Mr. Olympia contest was in New York on October 7. I thought, “Wow, I could, theoretically, go and win the Mr. Universe in London, then come to Columbus, Ohio, and win the Mr. World, and then go to the Mr. Olympia. That would be unbelievable.” In the space of just two weeks, I could cover the three federations that controlled all the bodybuilding competitions. Winning all three would be like unifying the heavyweight title in boxing: it would make me the undisputed world champ.
I was totally excited until I dug into the airline schedules. Then I called Jim Lorimer. “I want to come,” I began. “But there is no way to make it from Mr. Universe to Mr. World in time. The earliest plane from London after Mr. Universe doesn’t get to New York until two in the afternoon. And there’s no connecting flight from New York to Columbus until five o’clock, which is when your competition already starts.
“Unless you can perform miracles, there is no way I can make it. I’ve talked to the other top bodybuilders from the Mr. Universe contest, like Franco Columbu, Boyer Coe, and Dave Draper, and they’d all be willing to come with me. But we don’t see how it’s possible.
“I hear you’re a big-league organizer and you’re very well connected. So let’s see if you can pull it off.”
It took Jim only a day. He called back and said, “We’re sending a jet.” It was a corporate jet belonging to Volkswagen, one of the event sponsors. “They’ll fly to New York and pick you up.”
—
I couldn’t believe it when my idol Reg Park signed up to compete in the London Mr. Universe contest. I thought he was on my side! When a reporter asked me how it would feel to compete against the greatest Mr. Universe ever, I lost my usual happy-go-lucky attitude. “Second greatest,” I corrected him. “I’ve won the title more times than him.”
Ex-bodybuilding champs come out of retirement all the time to show off their training or refresh their image or who knows why. Reg had won his Mr. Universe titles at widely spaced intervals, in 1951, 1958, and 1965, and maybe he wanted to put a final stamp on the event. Or maybe I was receiving so much attention that he wanted to show that the older generation was still in charge. Whatever was motivating him, it put us at odds in a way I’d never expected.