This was my first time performing in public, so I was excited and nervous when I walked out onstage. I put chalk on my hands to keep the weights from slipping, and right away did a two-arm press of 150 pounds, my normal weight. The crowd gave a big cheer. The applause had an effect like I’d never imagined. I could barely wait for my next turn in the rotation. This time, to my amazement, I lifted 185 pounds—35 pounds more than I ever had before. Some people perform better in front of an audience, some worse. A guy from the other team who was a better lifter than me found the audience distracting and failed to complete his last lift. He told me afterward that he couldn’t concentrate as well as in the gym. For me, it was the opposite. The audience gave me strength and motivation, and my ego kicked in more. I discovered that I performed much, much better in front of others.
CHAPTER 3
Confessions of a Tank Driver
THE MILITARY BASE NEAR Graz was headquarters of one of the tank divisions of the Austrian army. I learned this because all young men in Austria were required to serve, and I was looking for a way to fit the army into my life goals. I realized that the logical thing for the army to do with somebody my size would be to put me in the infantry and have me carry machine guns and ammunition up mountains. But the infantry was based in Salzburg, and this was not consistent with my plan. I wanted to stay in Graz and continue with my training. My mission was to become the world champion in bodybuilding, not to fight wars. That wasn’t really the mission of the Austrian army either. We had a military because we were allowed to have one. It was an expression of sovereignty. But it was a small military, and no one had any thought of engaging in real combat.
I was looking forward to joining the military and being away from home for the first time. I had just finished my education, and the sooner I completed my service, the sooner I could get a passport.
Being a tank driver sounded really good. Several friends who had joined the army were stationed in Graz, and I’d asked a thousand questions about jobs on the base. There were many positions for new recruits, including being in the administrative office or the kitchen, where you never touched a tank. My friends were in the armored infantry, which are troops trained to support tanks by riding on top of them into battle, jumping off, searching for antitank mines, and so on.
But it was the tanks themselves that fascinated me. I love big things, and the American-built M47 Patton, named after the World War II general, certainly fit that. It was twelve feet wide, weighed fifty tons, and had an 800-horsepower engine. It was so powerful that it could push through a brick wall and you’d hardly realize it if you were inside. It amazed me that someone would actually trust an eighteen-year-old with something this big and expensive. The other big attraction was that to qualify as a tank driver, you first had to be licensed in driving a motorcycle, a car, a truck, and a tractor-trailer. The army would supply the training for all that, which would have cost thousands and thousands of schillings in the civilian world. There were only nine hundred tanks in the whole Austrian army, and I wanted to stand out.
My father, who still had dreams of me becoming a policeman or military officer, was happy to put in a word with the base commander, a buddy of his from the war. He was a huge sports fan and was pleased to bring me into the fold. Once I’d completed basic training, he’d see to it that I could set up weight-lifting equipment on the base.
Everything would have worked out perfectly except for one miscalculation. I’d started winning trophies in weight lifting by now. I was the regional junior weight-lifting champ, and just that summer I’d won the Austrian power-lifting championship’s heavyweight division, beating much more experienced men. Even though you could tell at a glance that I was still just an oversize kid, I was starting to compete successfully in bodybuilding too. I won a regional championship and actually placed third in the competition for Mr. Austria—good enough to share the stage with Kurt Marnul, who was still the king. Just before enlisting, I’d signed up for my first international competition, the junior version of Mr. Europe—a crucial next step in my plan. I hadn’t realized that for the whole six weeks of basic training, there was no leaving Graz.
I didn’t mind basic training. It taught me that something that seems impossible at the start can be achieved. Did we ever believe that we could climb a cliff in full field gear? No. But when we were ordered to do it, we did. And along the way, we even stuffed our pockets with mushrooms, which we turned over to the cook that night to make soup.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to compete for Junior Mr. Europe. I stole every minute I could to hit my practice poses in the latrine. I begged the drill sergeant to treat this like he would a family emergency and to let me go to Stuttgart, Germany, to compete. No chance. The night before the event, I finally decided fuck it and walked out of the gate.
A seven-hour train ride later, I was in Stuttgart, hitting my poses in front of a few hundred fans and soaking up the cheers. I won the title 1965 Best Built Junior Athlete of Europe. It was the first time I’d ever been outside Austria and the biggest audience I’d ever had. I felt like King Kong.
Unfortunately, I was punished when I returned to training camp. I was put into detention and made to sit by myself in a cell for twenty-four hours. Then my superiors got word of my victory, and I was freed. I kept my head down for the rest of basic training, and soon I was able to report to the tank unit my father’s friend commanded. From then on, the army became a fantastic joyride. I set up a weight room in the barracks, where I was allowed to train four hours a day. Some of the officers and men also began training too. For the first time in my life, I could eat meat every day—real protein. I grew so fast that every three months I outgrew my uniform and had to be issued the next larger size.
Motorcycle training started right away, followed by cars the next month. We learned basic mechanics, because you always had to be able to fix your vehicle if something simple went wrong. Next was how to drive trucks, which turned out to be difficult because the military trucks had manual, unsynchronized transmissions. To shift up or down, you had to go into neutral and double clutch and rev the engine to the proper speed so that it could mesh with the next gear. This led to much gear grinding and big drama, because after only a little practice on the base, they took us out in real traffic. Until shifting became second nature, it was very hard to keep your eye on the road. I’d be distracted by the shift lever, and all of a sudden I’d see cars stopped in front of me and have to brake and downshift and do the thing with the clutch—all with the instructor yelling at me. By the time we came back to the base, I was always soaked with sweat; it was a great way to lose body fat.
The next stage, learning tractor-trailers, was hairy too, especially backing up using mirrors and opposite-direction steering. This took me a while to master and some crashing and banging into things. It really felt good when I finally graduated to tanks.
The M47 is built to be driven with one hand, using a joystick that controls the gears and the motion of the treads. You sit in the left front corner of the hull and have a brake and gas pedal for your feet. The metal seat can be raised and lowered; normally you drive with the hatch propped open and your head sticking out of the tank to see. But when you button up for battle, you drop the seat, close the hatch, and peer through a periscope. At night, there was a primitive form of infrared that let you just make out trees and bushes and other tanks. I could fit in the seat despite my size, but driving with the hatch shut could be very claustrophobic. I felt really proud to be learning this massive machine, something totally different than I had ever dealt with.