My second Mr. Universe victory, in London in 1968, brought me an invitation and a plane ticket to America. I won the professional class and Dennis Tinerino the amateur class.
CHAPTER 5
Greetings from Los Angeles
THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH OF me arriving in Los Angeles. I’m twenty-one years old, it’s 1968, and I’m wearing wrinkled brown pants, clunky shoes, and a cheap long-sleeved shirt. I’m holding a beat-up plastic bag containing just a few things and waiting at the baggage claim to get my gym bag, which holds everything else. I look like a refugee, I can’t speak more than a few phrases of English, and I don’t have any money—but on my face is a big smile.
A photographer and a reporter, freelancers for
The new and marvelous life I had dreamed about easily could have ended just a week later. One of my brand-new gym friends, an Australian strongman and crocodile wrestler, lent me his car, a Pontiac GTO with over 350 horsepower. I’d never driven anything so incredible, and it didn’t take long before I was flying up Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley at autobahn speed. It was a cool and misty October morning, and I was about to learn that the streets of California get very slippery when it starts drizzling.
I got ready to downshift for an upcoming curve. Shifting was something I was good at because all the vehicles in Europe had manual transmissions, including the trucks I drove in the army and my banged-up old car in Munich. But downshifting the GTO slowed the rear wheels abruptly, breaking their hold on the road.
The car spun wildly around two or three times, completely out of control. I was probably down to about thirty miles per hour when momentum took me into the oncoming lanes—which were, unfortunately, very busy with morning traffic. I watched as a Volkswagen Beetle T-boned me on the passenger side. Then some American car hit me, and four or five more vehicles joined the pileup before everything came to a stop.
The GTO and I ended up about thirty yards down from my destination, Vince’s Gym, where I was going to train. The car door on my side worked so I climbed out, but my right leg felt like it was on fire—the impact had wrecked the console between the two front seats, and when I looked down, a big splinter of plastic was sticking out of my thigh. I pulled it out, and now blood started running down my leg.
I was really scared, and all I could think of was to go to the gym for help. I limped in and said, “I just had a big accident.” A few of the bodybuilders recognized me, but the one who took charge was a man I didn’t know, who happened to be a lawyer. “You better get back out to your car,” he said. “Don’t leave the scene of an accident. It’s called a hit-and-run here; hit-and-run, you understand? And you get in a lot of trouble. So go out there, stay with your car, and wait for the police.”
He understood I’d just arrived in the United States and that my English wasn’t good.
“But I’m here!” I said. “And I can look right over there!” I meant that I would easily see when the police arrived and go meet them.
“Trust me, just go back to your car.”
Then I showed him my leg. “Do you know a doctor who can help me with this?”
He saw the blood and muttered, “Oh Christ.” He thought for a second. “Let me call some friends. You don’t have health insurance or anything?” I had trouble understanding what this meant, but we figured out that I didn’t have insurance. Someone gave me a towel to hold against my leg.
I went back to the GTO. People were shaken up and hassled that they had to be late for work and that their cars were damaged and they were going to have to deal with their insurance companies. But nobody jumped all over me or made accusations. Once the cop was sure that the lady in the Volkswagen was okay, he let me go without a citation and just said, “I see you’re bleeding; you ought to get that looked at.” A bodybuilder friend named Bill Drake took me to a doctor and kindly paid the bill to get me stitched up.
I’d been an idiot to cause the wreck, and I wish I had everyone’s names so I could write to them today and apologize.
I knew I’d been lucky: the police in Europe would have been incredibly strict in a situation like this. Not only could I have been arrested but also, as a foreigner, I could very well have ended up in jail or getting deported. The incident definitely would have cost me a lot of money in fines. But the cops in LA took the view that the roads were slick, this was an accident, there were no serious injuries, and the key thing was to get traffic flowing again. The cop who talked to me was very polite; he looked at my international driver’s license and asked, “Do you want an ambulance, or are you okay?” Two guys from the gym told him I’d been in the country only a few days. It was pretty clear I couldn’t really speak English, although I tried.
I went to sleep that night feeling optimistic. I still needed to work things out with the crocodile wrestler, but America was a great place to be.
My first view of Los Angeles was a shock. For me, America meant one thing: size. Huge skyscrapers, huge bridges, huge neon signs, huge highways, huge cars. New York and Miami had both lived up to my expectations, and somehow I’d imagined that Los Angeles would be just as impressive. But now I saw that there were only a few high-rises downtown, and it looked pretty skimpy. The beach was big, but where were the huge waves and the surfers surfing?
I felt the same disappointment when I first saw Gold’s Gym, the mecca of American bodybuilding. I’d been studying Weider’s bodybuilding magazines for years without realizing that the whole idea was to make everything seem much bigger than it was. I’d look at scenes of famous bodybuilders working out at Gold’s, and my vision was of a huge sports club that had basketball courts, swimming pools, gymnastics, weight lifting, power lifting, and martial arts, like the giant clubs you see today. But when I walked in, there was a cement floor, and the whole place was very simple and primitive: a single two-story room about half the size of a basketball court, with cinder- block walls and skylights. Still, the equipment was really interesting, and I saw great power lifters and bodybuilders working out, lifting heavy weights—so the inspiration was there. Also, it was just two blocks from the beach.
The neighborhood of Venice around Gold’s seemed even less impressive than the gym. The houses lining the streets and alleys looked like my barracks in the Austrian army. Why would you build cheap wooden barracks in such a great location? Some of the houses were vacant and run-down. The sidewalks were cracked and sandy, with
