having a good suntan.
Later on, after I retired from bodybuilding, drug use became a major problem in the sport. Guys were taking doses of steroids twenty times the amount of anything we took, and when human growth hormone came on the scene, things really got out of hand. There were instances where bodybuilders died. I’ve worked hard since then with the International Federation of Bodybuilding and other organizations to get drugs banned from the sport.
The total effect of all these training refinements was that by September 1967, when I got on the plane again for London, I was packing another ten pounds of muscle.
That second Mr. Universe competition was every bit as good as I imagined. I went up against bodybuilders from South Africa, India, England, Jamaica, Scotland, Trinidad, Mexico, the United States, and dozens of other countries. For the first time, I heard people chanting “Arnold! Arnold!” I’d never experienced anything like that before. As I stood on the pedestal, holding my trophy, just the way I’d envisioned, I actually was able to deliver the right words in English to show some class and share the fun. I said into the microphone, “It is my lifetime ambition realized. I am very happy to be Mr. Universe. I say it again, it sounds so good. I am very happy to be Mr. Universe. My thanks to everyone in England who have helped me. They have been very kind to me. Thank you all.”
Being Mr. Universe brought me a lifestyle beyond a young man’s wildest dreams. In warm weather, the bodybuilders would pile into our old cars and head for the countryside and do the gladiator thing—grill fresh meat and drink wine and occupy ourselves with girls. At night I was hanging out with an international crowd of bar owners, musicians, bar girls—one of my girlfriends was a stripper and one was a gypsy. But I was wild only when I was wild. When it was time to train, I never missed a session.
Reg Park had promised that if I won Mr. Universe, he would invite me to South Africa for exhibitions and promotions. So the morning after the competition, I sent him a telegram saying, “I won. When am I coming?” Reg was as good as his word. He sent a plane ticket, and over the holiday season of 1967, I spent three weeks in Johannesburg with him, his wife Mareon, and their kids Jon Jon and Jeunesse. Reg and I traveled all over South Africa, including Pretoria and Cape Town, giving exhibitions.
Up until then, I had only the dimmest idea of what success in bodybuilding and movies and business really meant. Seeing Reg’s happy family and prosperous life inspired me as much as seeing him play Hercules. Reg had started as a working-class kid in Leeds and was a bodybuilding star in America by the time he fell in love with Mareon in the 1950s. He took her to England and married her, but Leeds depressed her, so they moved back to South Africa, where he started his gymnasium chain. The business had done very well. Their house, which he called Mount Olympus, overlooked the city and had a swimming pool and gardens. The interior was roomy, beautiful, comfortable, and filled with art. As much as I was loving my hard-training, fun-loving, brawling, girl-chasing lifestyle in Munich, living with the Parks reminded me to keep my sights set higher than that.
Reg would wake me up at five o’clock each morning; by five thirty we’d be at his gym at 42 Kirk Street working out. I never even got up at that hour, but now I learned the advantage of training early, before the day starts, when there are no other responsibilities and nobody else is asking anything of you. Reg also taught me a key lesson about psychological limits. I’d worked my way up to three hundred pounds of weight in calf raises, beyond any other bodybuilder I knew. I thought I must be near the limit of human achievement. So I was amazed to see Reg doing calf raises with
“The limit is in your mind,” he said. “Think about it: three hundred pounds is less than walking. You weigh two hundred fifty, so you are lifting two hundred fifty pounds with each calf every time you take a step. To really train, you have to go beyond that.” And he was right. The limit I thought existed was purely psychological. Now that I’d seen someone doing a thousand pounds, I started making leaps in my training.
It showed the power of mind over body. In weight lifting, for many years there was a 500-pound barrier in the clean and jerk—kind of like the four-minute barrier in the mile, which wasn’t broken until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. But as soon as the great Russian weight lifter Vasily Alekseyev set a new world record of 501 in 1970, three other guys lifted more than 500 pounds within a year.
I saw the same thing with my training partner Franco Columbu. One afternoon years later we were taking turns doing squats at Gold’s Gym in California. I did six reps with 500 pounds. Even though Franco was stronger than me in the squat, he did only four reps and put the bar back. “I’m so tired,” he said. Just then I saw a couple of girls from the beach come into the gym and went over to say hello. Then I came back and told Franco, “They don’t believe you can squat five hundred pounds.” I knew how much he loved showing off, especially when there were girls around. Sure enough, he said, “I’m gonna show them. Watch this.” He picked up the 500 pounds and did ten reps. He made it look easy. This was the same body that had been too tired ten minutes before. His thighs were probably screaming “What the fuck?” So what had changed? The mind. Sports are so physical that it’s easy to overlook the mind’s power, but I’ve seen it demonstrated again and again.
The immediate challenge for me back in Munich was how to use being Mr. Universe to attract more customers to our gym. Bodybuilding was still so obscure and considered so weird that winning the championship made no splash at all outside the gyms. I’d gotten more celebrity from lifting the heavy stone in the beer hall.
But Albert came up with an idea. If we had asked the newspapers to write a story about me winning Mr. Universe, they’d have thought we were nuts. Instead he had me walk around the city on a freezing day in my posing briefs. Then he called some of his newspaper friends and said, “You remember Schwarzenegger who won the stone-lifting contest? Well, now he’s Mr. Universe, and he’s at Stachus square in his underwear.” A couple of editors thought that was funny enough to send photographers. I led them all over the city: from the market to the Hauptbahnhof, where I made a point of chatting up little old ladies to show I was friendly and nice and not some kind of monster. This is what politicians do all the time, but it was very unusual for a bodybuilder. In spite of the cold, I was having fun. The next morning a picture ran in one of the papers of me in my briefs and at a construction site, where one of the workers who was all bundled up against the cold was gawking at me in amazement.
After more than a year of effort, and stunts like these, we succeeded in doubling the gym membership to more than three hundred—but this was in a city of over a million people. Albert called bodybuilding a subcult of a subcult. We would have long conversations trying to figure out why the sport wasn’t better known. We thought the answer must be in the mentality of most bodybuilders; they are hermits who want to hide under an armor of muscles. So they do everything in secret and train in dungeons and come out only when their muscles make them feel safe. There had been famous strongmen in history, such as Prussian-born Eugen Sandow, often called the father of modern bodybuilding, and Alois Swoboda, but that was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and there had been nobody like them since. No contemporary bodybuilder was enough of a showman to make training really catch on.
The competitions held in Munich were a depressing example of this. They weren’t held in beer halls like the old strongman exhibitions. Instead, they took place in gyms where there would be just bare walls and a bare floor with a few dozen chairs, or in auditoriums on a bare stage. And this was Munich, a city full of people and entertainment and life. The sole exception was the Mr. Germany contest, held each year in the Burgerbraukeller, a beer hall that catered to workers.
Albert and I had the idea of bringing bodybuilding competition upscale. We got together a little money and bought the rights to produce Mr. Europe for 1968. Next, we went to the owners of the Schwabinger Brau, an elegant old beer hall in a classy neighborhood, and asked, “How about having the bodybuilders’ contest here?”
The unusual choice of location helped us publicize the event, and we drew more than a thousand spectators, compared to a few hundred the previous year. Of course, we invited the press and made sure that the reporters understood what they were watching so they could write good stories.
The whole thing could have failed. We could have sold too few tickets, or somebody could have started a riot by leaping up onstage and cracking Mr. Europe over the head with a beer stein. But instead we packed the hall with unbelievable screaming and enthusiasm and life against the background of people drinking and clinking their steins. The energy of our event set a new standard in German bodybuilding.
That year’s Mr. Europe contest had an especially big impact on bodybuilders from Eastern Europe because it coincided with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. On August 21, less than a month before the event, tanks rolled in to crush the democratic reforms that had been instituted during the so-called Prague Spring in early 1968. As the news spread, we got in touch with the bodybuilders we knew there and picked up many in our cars at the border. The Czechs were unusually well represented at Mr. Europe that year because they were able to use the competition as a pretext to flee. They went on afterward from Munich to Canada or to the United States.
I wondered when my turn would come to get to America. One corner of my brain was always focused on the
