“I CAN ALWAYS GET you a job as a lifeguard at the Thalersee, so just remember if anything goes wrong, you never have to worry.” That’s what Fredi Gerstl told me when I visited him to say good- bye. Fredi was always generous about helping young people, and I knew he meant well, but I wasn’t interested in a lifeguard job or any other safety net. Even though Munich was only two hundred miles from Graz, for me it was the first step on the way from Austria to America.
I’d heard stories about Munich: how every week a thousand trains came into its train station. I’d heard about the nightlife and the wild atmosphere of the beer halls and on and on. As the train came near to the city, I began seeing more and more houses, and then bigger buildings, and then up ahead the city center. I was wondering in a corner of my brain, “How will I find my way around? How will I survive?” But mostly I was selling myself on the mantra “This is going to be my new home.” I was turning my back on Graz, I was out of there, and Munich was going to be my city, no matter what.
Munich was a boomtown, even by the standards of the West German economic miracle, which was in full swing by 1966. It was an international city of 1.2 million people. It had just landed the right to host the Summer Olympics in 1972 and the soccer World Cup finals in 1974. Holding the Olympic Games in Munich was meant to symbolize West Germany’s transformation and reemergence into the community of nations as a modern democratic power. Construction cranes were everywhere. The Olympic Stadium was already going up, as were new hotels and office buildings and apartments. All across the city were major excavations for the new subway system, designed to be the most modern and efficient in the world.
The
Albert Busek had promised to have a couple of guys come meet me at the station, and as I walked up the platform, I saw the grinning face of a bodybuilder named Franz Dischinger. Franz had been the junior-division favorite in the Best Built Man in Europe competition in Stuttgart, the title I’d won the year before. He was a good- looking German kid, even taller than me, but his body had not filled out yet, which I think was why the judges had picked me instead. Franz was a joyful guy, and we’d hit it off really well, laughing a lot together. We’d agreed that if I ever came to Munich, we’d be training partners. After we grabbed something to eat at the station, he and his buddy, who had a car, dropped me off at an apartment on the outskirts of town where Rolf Putziger lived.
I had yet to meet my new boss, but I was glad he had offered to put me up, because I couldn’t afford to rent a room. Putziger turned out to be a heavy, unhealthy-looking old man in a business suit. He was almost bald and had bad teeth when he smiled. He gave me a friendly welcome and showed me around his place; there was a small extra room that he explained would be mine as soon as the bed that he’d ordered for me was delivered. In the meantime, would I mind sleeping on the living room couch? It didn’t bother me at all, I said.
I thought nothing about this arrangement until a few nights later, when Putziger came in late and instead of going into his bedroom lay down next to me. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable coming into the bedroom?” he asked. I felt his foot pressing up against mine. I was up off that couch like a shot, grabbing my stuff and heading for the door. My mind was going nuts: what had I gotten myself into? There were always gays among bodybuilders. In Graz, I’d known a guy who had a fantastic home gym where my friends and I would work out sometimes. He was very open about his attraction to men and showed us the section of the city park where the men and boys hung out. But he was a real gentleman and never imposed his sexual orientation on any of us. So I thought I knew what gay men were like. Putziger definitely didn’t seem gay; he looked like a businessman!
Putziger caught up with me on the street as I stood trying to process what had happened and figure out where to go. He apologized and promised not to bother me if I came back in the house. “You are my guest,” he said. Back inside, of course, he tried to close the deal again, telling me he could understand that I preferred women, but if I’d be his friend, he could get me a car and help my career and so on. Of course, I could have used a real mentor at that point, but not at that cost. I was relieved to get out of there for good the next morning.
The reason Putziger didn’t fire me was that he needed a star for his gym even more than he needed a lover. Bodybuilding was such an obscure sport that there were only two gyms in Munich, and the larger of the two belonged to Reinhard Smolana, who in 1960 was the first Mr. Germany and who had won Mr. Europe in 1963. Smolana had also already placed third in Mr. Universe competition, so he was without any doubt the best-ranked German bodybuilder and the obvious authority on weight training. His gym was better equipped and more modern than Putziger’s. Customers gravitated to Smolana; my job as the new sensation was to help the Universum Sport Studio compete. Albert Busek, the editor of
Albert would have been a doctor or scientist or intellectual if anyone had ever told him to go to the university. Instead, he’d gone to engineering school. He discovered working out and then realized that he had talents for writing and photography. He asked Putziger if he could do some work for the magazine. “Yeah, give me an article, write something,” Putziger said. After Albert and his wife had twins, and his student funding was cut, he ended up working for Putziger full time. Before long, Albert was running the magazine and had established himself as an expert on the bodybuilding scene. He was sure that I would become the next big thing, and because he wanted to see me succeed, he was willing to be the buffer between Putziger and me.
Apart from my troubles with the owner, the job was ideal. Putziger’s establishment consisted of the gym, the magazine, and a mail-order business that sold nutritional supplements. The gym itself had several rooms instead of one big hall; it also had windows and natural light rather than the damp concrete walls I had gotten used to at the stadium in Graz. The equipment was more sophisticated than any I’d ever had access to. Besides weights, there was a full set of machines for shoulders, back, and legs. That gave me the opportunity to add exercises that would single out muscles, add definition, and refine my body in ways that are impossible to achieve with free weights alone.
I’d learned in the army that I loved helping people train, so that part of the job came easily. Over the course of the day, I would teach small groups and do one-on-one sessions with a wild assortment of guys: cops, construction workers, businessmen, intellectuals, athletes, entertainers, Germans and foreigners, young and old, gay and straight. I encouraged American soldiers from the nearby base to train there; the Universum Sport Studio was the first place I’d ever met a black person. Many of our customers were there simply to boost their fitness and health, but we had a core group of competitive weight lifters and bodybuilders whom I could imagine as serious training partners. And I realized that I knew how to rally and challenge guys like that. “Yeah, you can be my training partner; you need help,” I’d joke. As the trainer, I liked being the ringleader, and even though I had very little money, I would take them out for lunch or dinner and pay.
Being busy helping customers meant that I had no time to train the way I was used to, with an intense four- or five-hour workout each day. So I adopted the idea of training twice a day, two hours before work and two hours from seven to nine in the evening, when business slacked off and only the serious lifters were left. Split workouts seemed like an annoyance at first, but I realized I was onto something when I saw the results: I was concentrating better and recovering faster while grinding out longer and harder sets. On many days I would add a third training session at lunchtime. I’d isolate a body part that I thought was weak and give it thirty or forty minutes of my full attention, blasting twenty sets of calf raises, say, or one hundred triceps extensions. I did the same thing some nights after dinner, coming back to train for an hour at eleven o’clock. As I went to sleep in my snug little room, I’d often feel one or another muscle that I’d traumatized that day jumping and twitching—just a side effect of a successful workout and very pleasing, because I knew those fibers would now recover and grow.
I was training flat out because in less than two months I knew I would be going up against some of the best bodybuilders alive. I’d signed up for Europe’s biggest bodybuilding event, Mr. Universe, in London. This was a brash thing to do. Ordinarily, a relative novice like me wouldn’t have dreamed of taking on London. I’d have competed for
