Mr. Austria first, and then if I won, I’d have aimed for Mr. Europe. But at that rate, being “ready” for London would have taken years. I was too impatient for that. I wanted the toughest competition I could get, and this was the most aggressive career move I could make. Of course, I wasn’t an idiot about it. I didn’t expect to win in London— not this time. For now, though, I was determined to find out where I stood. Albert loved the idea, and since he knew English, he helped me fill out the application.
For a regimen as fanatical as mine, I needed more than one training partner. Luckily, there were enough serious bodybuilders in Munich who got a kick out of my Mr. Universe dream, even if they thought I was a little nuts. Franz Dischinger trained with me regularly, and so did Fritz Kroher, who was a country boy like me, from a small town in the Bavarian woods. Even Reinhard Smolana, owner of the rival gym, joined in. Sometimes he invited me to train at his gym or he came to mine to work out after hours. After just a few weeks, I felt like I’d found my buddies, and Munich was starting to seem like home.
My favorite training partner was Franco Columbu, who quickly became my best friend. I’d met him in Stuttgart the year before; he’d won the European championship in power lifting on the same day that I won Mr. Junior Europe. Franco was an Italian from the island of Sardinia, where he grew up on a farm in a tiny mountain village that sounded even more primitive than Thal when he described it to me. He spent much of his boyhood herding sheep, and at age ten or eleven, he’d be out in the wilderness alone for days at a time, finding his own food and fending for himself.
Franco had to drop out of school at thirteen to help on the family farm, but he was very hardworking and smart. He’d started out as a bricklayer and amateur boxer and made his way north to Germany to earn his living in construction. In Munich, he learned the language and the city so well that he qualified to be a taxi driver. The Munich taxi driver exam was hard even for natives, and for an Italian to pass it amazed everyone.
Franco was a power lifter, I was a bodybuilder, and we both understood that these sports were complementary. I wanted to add bulk to my body, which meant having to work with heavy weights, and Franco knew how to do that. Meanwhile, I understood bodybuilding, which Franco wanted to learn. He told me, “I want to be Mr. Universe.” Others laughed at him—he was only five foot five—but in bodybuilding, perfection and symmetry can beat sheer size. I liked the idea of us training together.
Maybe because he’d spent so much time in the wild, Franco was quick to pick up on new ideas. He loved my theory of “shocking the muscle,” for instance. It always seemed to me that the biggest obstacle to successful training is that the body adjusts so quickly. Do the same sequence of lifts every day, and even if you keep adding weight, you’ll see your muscle growth slow and then stop; the muscles become very efficient at performing the sequence they expect. The way to wake up the muscle and make it grow again is to jolt it with the message “You will never know what’s coming. It will always be different from what you expect. Today it’s this, tomorrow it’s something else.” One day it’s ultraheavy weights; the next day high reps.
A method we developed to shock the muscle was “stripping.” In a normal weight training sequence, you do your first set with lighter weight and then work your way up. But in stripping, you do the reverse. For example, in preparation for London, I needed to bulk up my deltoids. So I’d do dumbbell presses, where you hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height and then raise them up above your head. With stripping, I’d start at my top weight: six repetitions with 100-pound dumbbells. Put those down, take the 90-pound dumbbells and do six reps. And so on, all the way down the rack. By the time I reached the 40s, my shoulders would be on fire and six reps would feel like each arm was lifting 110 pounds, not 40. But before putting down the weights, I’d shock the deltoids further by doing lateral raises, lifting the 40s from hip level out to shoulder height. After that, my shoulder muscles would be so totally berserk that I did not know where to put my hands. It was agony to let them hang by my sides and impossible to lift them. All I could do was drape my arms on a table or a piece of equipment to relieve the excruciating pain. The deltoids were screaming from the unexpected sequence of sets. I’d shown them who was boss. Their only option now was to heal and grow.
After training hard all day I wanted to have fun at night. And in Munich in 1966, fun meant beer halls, and beer halls meant fights. I’d go with my buddies to these places where every night people would be sitting at long tables laughing and arguing and waving their mugs. And getting drunk, of course. People started fights all the time, but it was never like “I’m going to murder this guy.” As soon as a fight ended, one guy would say, “Oh, let’s have a pretzel. Can I buy you a beer?” And the other guy would say, “Yeah, I lost, so you can at least buy me a beer. I don’t have any money anyway.” Soon you’d be drinking together as if nothing had happened.
The beer itself didn’t really appeal to me because it would interfere with training; I rarely drank more than one in a night. But I was totally into the fights. I felt like I was discovering new power every day and was huge and strong and unstoppable. There was not a lot of thinking involved. If a guy looked at me in a weird way or challenged me for whatever reason, I’d be in his face. I’d give him the shock treatment: I’d rip off my shirt to reveal my tank top underneath and then I’d punch him out. Or sometimes when he saw me he’d just say, “Oh, what the hell. Why don’t we just get a beer?”
My friends and I backed each other up, of course, if the fight turned into a brawl. The next day, we’d pass around the stories at the gym and laugh. “Oh, you should’ve seen Arnold. He banged these two guys’ heads together and then their friend came at him with a beer mug, but I caught him with a chair from behind, that fucker …” We were fortunate because even when the police came, which happened several times, they would just dismiss us. The only time I remember ever being taken in to the police station was when a guy claimed it was going to cost a lot of money to replace his teeth. We were arguing so much about what the teeth would cost that the police thought we’d start fighting again. So they took us in and held us until we agreed on an amount.
Even better than the fights were the girls. Right across the Schillerstrasse from the gym was the Hotel Diplomat, where airline stewardesses stayed. Franco and I would lean out the window in our tank tops and flirt with them when they spotted us from the street. “What are you doing up there?” they’d call out. “Well, we have a gym here. Do you want to train? Come on up.”
I also would go across to the hotel lobby and introduce myself to the little groups of stewardesses as they came and went. To get them interested, I would combine my very best methods from the Thalersee and from years of selling hardware. “We have a gym across the street,” I’d say, and I’d compliment the girl and tell her how she might enjoy working out. In fact, I thought it was foolish and stupid that gyms almost never encouraged women to train. So we would let them work out for free. And whether they came because they were interested in the men or purely to train, I was happy either way.
The girls came mostly at night. Our regular customers were usually gone by eight, but you could use the equipment until nine. I would be doing my second workout with my partners. If the girls just wanted to train, they could take a shower and be out by eight thirty. Otherwise they were welcome to stay, and we’d go out or have a party. Sometimes Smolana would show up with some girls, and then the night could get quite wild.
For the first few months in Munich, I let myself get carried away by nightlife and fun. But then I realized I was losing focus, and I started disciplining myself. The goal was not to have fun but to become the world champion in bodybuilding. If I was going to get my seven hours of sleep, I had to be in bed by eleven. There was always time to have fun, and we always had fun anyway.
My boss turned out to be a bigger threat to my Mr. Universe prospects than any beer hall drunk swinging a stein. With just a few weeks to go, I still hadn’t heard back about my application to the contest. Finally, Albert called London, and the organizers said they’d never gotten anything from me. Finally, Albert confronted Putziger, who admitted that he’d found my application in the outgoing mail and thrown it away. He was jealous that I would get discovered and move to England or America before he could make money off me. I’d have been sunk except for Albert’s command of English and his desire to stick up for me. He called London again and persuaded the organizers to consider my application, even though the deadline had passed. They agreed. Just days before the contest, the papers came through, and I was added to the list.
The other bodybuilders in Munich also rallied in my support. Putziger should have paid my way to London, of course, because any success I might have there would bring attention to his gym. But when word of his sabotage got around, it was his competitor Smolana who passed the hat and raised the three hundred marks I needed for a ticket. On September 23, 1966, I boarded a London-bound flight. I was nineteen, and it was the first time I’d ever taken an airplane. I’d been expecting to take a train, so I was ecstatic. I was sure that nobody I’d gone to school with had flown at this point. I was sitting on an airliner with businessmen, and it had all happened through bodybuilding.
The first Mr. Universe contest was held the year after I was born, 1948. It took place in London every
