winner, not me. I stood by onstage trying not to look stunned while a guy five inches shorter than me and fifty pounds lighter took the prize.
It was a blow. I’d finally made it to America, just as I had envisioned. But then I lost Mr. Universe in Miami. To a lighter and shorter man. I thought the competition had been fixed because he was just not big enough to win against me. Even though I lacked the definition, he was a scrawny little guy.
That night, despair came crashing in. My cheerfulness almost never deserts me, but it did then. I was in a foreign country, away from my family, away from my friends, surrounded by strange people in a place where I didn’t speak the language. How had I even made it this far? I was way out of my depth. All of my belongings were in one little gym bag; I’d left behind everything else. My job was probably gone. I had no money. I didn’t know how I’d get home.
Worst of all, I’d lost. The great Joe Weider had brought me across the Atlantic to give me this opportunity, but instead of rising to the occasion, I’d embarrassed myself and failed to perform. I was sharing the room with Roy Callender, a black bodybuilder based in England who had also been in the London competition. He was very sweet, talking to me about my loss. He was much more mature than I was and was talking about things I did not quite understand. He was talking about feelings.
“Yeah, it’s hard to lose after such a big victory in London,” he said. “But remember that next year you will win again, and everyone will forget about this loss.”
This was the first time that a man had ever been that nurturing with me. I knew that women were nurturing: my mother was nurturing, other women were nurturing. But to get real empathy from a guy was overwhelming. Up till then, I’d thought that only girls cry, but I ended up crying quietly in the dark for hours. It was a great relief.
When I woke up the next morning, I felt much better. Sunlight was pouring into the room and the phone next to the bed was ringing.
“Arnold!” said a raspy voice. “It’s Joe Weider. I’m out by the pool. You want to come down and order some breakfast? I’d like to interview you for the magazine. We want to do a cover story about you, exactly how you train …”
I went out to the pool, and there was Joe, wearing a striped bathrobe, waiting at a table with a typewriter right there. I couldn’t believe it. I’d grown up on his magazines, in which Joe Weider always portrayed himself as the Trainer of Champions, the man who invented all the training methods and made bodybuilding happen and created all the greats. I idolized him, and here I was sitting with him by a pool in Miami. Suddenly the fears of the night before washed away. I felt important again.
Joe was in his midforties, clean shaven with sideburns and dark hair. He wasn’t big—more medium height— but he was husky. I knew from the magazines that he worked out every day. He had a voice you couldn’t miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.
He asked everything about how I trained. We talked for hours. Even though my English made it slow going, he felt I had more to offer in the way of stories than the rest of the bodybuilders. I told him all about working out in the woods in the gladiator days. He enjoyed listening to all that. He interviewed me in great detail about the techniques I’d developed: the “split routine” method of training two or three times a day, the tricks that Franco and I had come up with to shock the muscles. Meanwhile I had to keep pinching myself. I was thinking, “I wish my friends in Munich and in Graz could see this, me sitting with Mr. Joe Weider, and he is asking me how I train.”
By noon he seemed to make up his mind. “Don’t go back to Europe,” he said finally. “You need to stay here.” He offered to pay my way to California and get me an apartment, a car, and living expenses so that I could concentrate on training for an entire year. By the time the same competitions came around again the next fall, I’d have another shot. Meanwhile, his magazines would report on my training, and he would supply translators so I could write about my programs and express my ideas.
Joe had plenty of opinions about what I needed to do to get to the top. He told me I’d been focusing on the wrong things; that even for a big man, power and bulk weren’t enough. I had to train harder for muscle definition on top of these. And while some of my body parts were fantastic, I was still lacking in back, abs, and legs. And my posing needed more work. Training schemes were Joe Weider’s specialty, of course, and he couldn’t wait to start coaching me. “You are going to be the greatest,” he said. “Just wait and see.”
That afternoon at the gym, I thought more about my loss to Frank Zane. Now that I’d stopped feeling sorry for myself, I came to harsher conclusions than those I’d reached the night before. I still felt the judging had been unfair, but I discovered this wasn’t the real cause of my pain. It was the fact that I had failed—not my body, but my vision and my drive. Losing to Chet Yorton in London in 1966 hadn’t felt bad because I’d done everything I could to prepare; it was just not my year. But something different had happened here. I was not as ripped as I could have been. I could have dieted the week before and not eaten so much fish and chips. I could have found a way to train more even without access to equipment: for instance, I could have done one thousand reps of abs or something that would have made me feel ready. I could have worked on my posing—nothing had stopped me from doing that. Never mind the judging; I hadn’t done everything in my power to prepare. Instead, I’d thought my momentum from winning in London would carry me. I’d told myself I’d just won Mr. Universe and I could let go. That was nonsense.
Thinking this made me furious. “Even though you won the professional Mr. Universe contest in London, you are still a fucking amateur,” I told myself. “What happened here never should have happened. It only happens to an amateur. You’re an amateur, Arnold.”
Staying in America, I decided, had to mean that I wouldn’t be an amateur ever again. Now the real game would begin. There was a lot of work ahead. And I had to start as a professional. I didn’t ever want to go away from a bodybuilding competition like I had in Miami. If I was going to beat guys like Sergio Oliva, that could never happen again. From now on if I lost, I would be able to walk away with a big smile because I had done everything I could to prepare.
European Bodybuilding Photographs
