Universe.
One night I found myself standing in the wings and watching Reg pose onstage for a crowd of several hundred cheering exhibition fans. Then he went to the microphone and called me to the stage. He moderated while I showed off my strength: I would perform a two-arm curl of 275 pounds and deadlift 500 pounds five times. I finished by posing and received a standing ovation. I was ready to leave the stage when I heard Reg say, “Arnold, come over here.” When I got to the microphone, he said, “Say something to the people.”
So I said, “No, no, no.”
“Why not?”
I said, “I don’t speak English that well.”
“Hey!” he says. “That’s very good! Let’s give a little applause. That takes a lot of nerve for a guy who doesn’t speak English to say a sentence like that.” He started clapping, and then they were all applauding.
All of a sudden I felt, “Gee, this is amazing. They liked what I said!”
Reg went on: “Say to them, ‘I like Ireland.’ ”
“I like Ireland.” Applause again. He said, “I remember you telling me earlier that this is the first time you’re in Belfast, and you couldn’t wait to get here. Right?”
“Yes.”
“So tell them! ‘I couldn’t wait …’ ”
“I couldn’t wait …”
“ ‘… to get here.’ ”
“… to get here.” Wow, again applause. And every sentence he said for me to repeat, I got applause.
If he had told me the day before, “I’m going to bring you onstage and ask you to say a few words,” I would have been scared to death. But here I was able to practice public speaking without the pressure. I didn’t have to sweat about the audience accepting me or caring what I said. That fear was not there, because the body was the focus. I was lifting, I was posing. I knew they accepted me. This was just extra.
After that, I studied Reg at a bunch of shows. The way he spoke was unbelievable. He could entertain people. He was outgoing. He told stories. And he was Hercules! He was Mr. Universe! He knew about wine, he knew about food, he spoke French, he spoke Italian. He was one of those guys who really had his act together. I watched the way he held the mike, and I said to myself, “That’s what you’ve got to do. You can’t just pose on stage like a robot and then walk off so people never get to know your personality. Reg Park talks to them. He’s the only bodybuilder I’ve seen who talks to people. That’s why they love him. That’s why he’s Reg Park.”
Back in Munich, I concentrated on building up business at the gym. Old man Putziger was almost never around, which was totally fine with Albert and me. He and I made a great team. Albert managed everything—the mail-order nutritional supplements business, the magazine, and the gym—doing the work of several men. My job, besides training, was to recruit new members. Our business goal, of course, was to overtake Smolana’s and become the city’s top gym. Advertising was an obvious first step, but we couldn’t afford much of it, so we had some posters printed up. We’d wait until late at night and then work our way across the city—pasting them up at construction sites, where we figured the workers would be interested in bodybuilding.
But this strategy wasn’t as successful as we hoped. We were scratching our heads about why until Albert passed one of the construction sites in daylight and noticed a Smolana poster on the wall in the exact spot where one of ours had been. It turned out that Smolana had been sending his guys around town pasting their posters over ours before the glue could dry. So we changed our routine. We’d poster once at midnight and then make a second pass at four in the morning to make sure that when the construction workers showed up for work, our gym would be the poster on top. Everybody got a kick out of the poster war, and slowly our membership started to grow.
Our pitch was that while Smolana’s had more room, we had more spirit and more fun. We also had the wrestlers going for us. Today professional wrestling is a giant TV sport, but back then wrestlers would travel from city to city and put on bouts. When they came to Munich, they’d perform at the Circus Krone, which had a huge permanent arena as its home base. Whenever there was a wrestling match, the place was packed.
The wrestlers were always looking for somewhere to work out, and they picked our gym when they heard about me. I trained with guys like Harold Sakata, from Hawaii, who’d played the villain Oddjob in the 1964 James Bond movie
Still, I was proud that our gym was becoming a little like the United Nations, because I planned to go global with everything that I wanted to do. American and British bodybuilders passing through town would stop by, and word got around among the American troops stationed nearby that the Universum Sport Studio was a good place to train.
Having a big range of customers was the perfect sales tool. If someone said to me, “Well, I was over at Smolana’s gym, and they have more machines than you,” I would say, “Well, they have one more room than we have, you’re absolutely right. But think about why it is that everyone wants to come here. When any American bodybuilder comes from overseas, they train here. When the military looks for a gymnasium, they train here. When the professional wrestlers come into town, they train here. We even have women wanting to join!” I built it into a whole routine.
My initial success in London had reassured me that I was on the right track and that my goals were not crazy. Every time I won, I became more certain. After the 1966 Mr. Universe contest, I won several more titles, including Mr. Europe. Even more important for my local reputation, during the March beer festival I won a round of the Lowenbraukeller’s stone-lifting competition, hoisting the old beer hall’s 558-pound stone block higher than every other contestant that day. (The weight was in German pounds, equivalent to 254 kilos, or 558 English pounds.)
I knew I was already the favorite to win the 1967 Mr. Universe competition. But that didn’t feel like enough—I wanted to dominate totally. If I’d wowed them with my size and strength before, my plan now was to show up unbelievably bigger and stronger and really blow their minds.
So I poured my energy and attention into a training plan I’d worked out with Wag Bennett. For months I spent most of my earnings on food and vitamins and protein tablets designed to build muscle mass. The drink of choice in this diet was like a nightmarish opposite of beer: pure brewer’s yeast, milk, and raw eggs. It smelled and tasted so vile that Albert sampled it once and threw up. But I was convinced that it worked, and maybe it did.
I read everything I could find about the training methods of the East Germans and the Soviets. Increasingly, there were rumors that they were using performance-enhancing drugs to get superior results from their weight lifters, shot-putters, and swimmers. As soon as I figured out that steroids were the drugs in question, I went to the doctor to try them myself. There were no rules against using anabolic steroids then, and you could get them by prescription, yet already people seemed to feel two ways about their use. Bodybuilders didn’t talk about steroids as freely as they talked about weight routines and nutritional supplements, and there was an argument about whether the bodybuilding magazines should educate people about the drugs or ignore the trend.
All I needed to know was that the top international champions were taking steroids, something I confirmed by asking the guys in London. I would not go into a competition with a disadvantage. “Leave no stone unturned” was my rule. And while there wasn’t any evidence of danger—research into steroids’ side effects was only getting under way—even if there had been, I’m not sure I would have cared. Downhill ski champions and Formula One race drivers know they can get killed, but they compete anyway. Because if you don’t get killed, you win. Besides, I was twenty years old, and I thought I would never die.
To get the drugs, I simply went to see a local general practitioner. “I heard this will help muscle growth,” I said.
“It’s supposed to, but I wouldn’t oversell it,” he replied. “It’s meant for people in rehab after surgery.”
“Can you let me try it?” I asked, and he said sure. He prescribed an injection every two weeks and pills to take in between. He told me, “Take these for three months and stop the day the competition is over.”
Steroids made me hungrier and thirstier and helped me gain weight, though it was mostly water weight, which was not ideal because it interfered with definition. I learned to use the drugs in the final six or eight weeks leading up to a major competition. They could help you win, but the advantage they gave was about the same as
