and that’s why he lost, blah, blah, blah. I wanted him going away thinking he’d have to gain a few pounds to compete. He was soft today, and I wanted him softer in New York.
Mr. Olympia was scheduled two weeks later for a cushy Manhattan theater, and around noontime that day a bunch of us got together at the nearby Mid City Gym. The minute I saw Sergio, I started teasing him about eating, and Franco joined in, asking him if he’d lost weight. That made everybody laugh except Sergio. In fact, as I was soon to see, he had taken the bait. He’d added ten pounds in the two weeks since Columbus, and nobody can gain ten pounds in two weeks and still look cut.
The Town Hall theater had 1,500 seats, and it probably had never seen a crowd as rowdy as this. His fans were chanting “Sergio! Sergio! Sergio!” and mine trying were to outshout them, chanting “Arnold! Arnold! Arnold!” At the end of a long afternoon, the judges called us back for a final pose-off onstage. Sergio went through his standard repertoire, and, just as I’d planned, I went into high gear, ripping off three poses to every one of his. The crowd really loved this.
But the judges kept calling out poses until finally I was thinking, “We’ve been posing a long time.” It seemed like it wasn’t because the judges were uncertain about their decision; it was just because people were on their feet and going berserk, and the judges were saying, “Let’s keep this going; the people love it.”
We were exhausted. That’s when I went for the kill. An idea came into my head, and I said to Sergio, “I’ve had it. I think those guys ought to know now, however the chips fall.”
He said, “Yeah, you’re right.” He walked off one side of the stage and I started to walk off the other—but I walked only two steps. Then I stopped and hit another pose. And I turned toward his side and shrugged as if to say, “Where’d he go?”
Sergio came right back onstage a little confused. But by this time “Arnold!” was the only name they were chanting, and some of the fans were even booing him. I used the moment to execute my best professional posing and shots. Then it was over. The judges held a little meeting backstage, and the emcee came out and announced that I was the new Mr. Olympia.
Sergio never said anything to me about how I’d mocked him, but he told other people he felt he’d been had. That’s not how I saw it. It was a primal moment. I’d finished him off by instinct in the heat of a competition that I’d dominated by then all the same.
Still, the next morning was strange, because Sergio, Franco, and I were sharing a hotel room. As soon as Sergio woke up, he amazed me by doing all kinds of push-ups and exercises. He was such a fanatic. Even the day after competition, he was pumping up in the hotel!
I have to admit that then I felt sorry that he’d lost. He was a great champion and an idol for many people. For years my mind had been fixed on wanting to destroy him, take him out, make him second, make him the loser. But the morning after beating him, I woke up and saw him next to me and felt sad. It was too bad he had to lose to make way for me.
CHAPTER 8
Learning American
IN BODYBUILDING I WAS king of the mountain, but back in everyday LA I was still just another immigrant struggling to learn English and make a life. My mind was so fixed on what I was doing in America that I rarely gave a thought to Austria or Germany. If I was competing in Europe, I’d go home to visit, and I kept in touch with Fredi Gerstl in Graz and Albert Busek in Munich. Often I would cross paths with Albert and other European friends on the bodybuilding circuit. I regularly sent pictures and letters home to my parents, telling them what I was doing. Whenever I won a championship, I’d send them the trophy, because I didn’t need it in my apartment, and I wanted them to be proud. I’m not sure any of this meant much to them at the start, but after awhile they put up the photos and built a special shelf in their home to show off the trophies.
My dad would answer my letters for both of them. He always enclosed my original letter marked up in red ink—correcting my mistakes in spelling and grammar. He said this was because he thought I was losing touch with the German language, but he’d done the same thing with the essays he required Meinhard and me to write for him as kids. This kind of thing made it easy to believe that my parents and Austria were frozen in time. I was glad to be away living my own life.
Meinhard and I hardly kept in touch. Like me, he’d finished trade school and served a year in the army. Then he’d gone to work for an electronics company, first in Graz and later in Munich while I was living there. But our paths rarely crossed. He was an elegant dresser and a hard partyer and had a wild life with girls. Lately he’d been transferred to Innsbruck, Austria, and he’d gotten engaged to Erika Knapp, a beauty who was the mother of his three-year-old son, Patrick, and he showed signs of finally settling down.
He never got the chance. The spring after I won Mr. Olympia, in 1971, the phone rang in our apartment one day when I was out of town. It was my mother calling with the terrible news that my brother had been killed in a car accident. Meinhard crashed while driving alone drunk on a mountain road near the Alpine resort of Kitzbuhel. He was just twenty-five years old.
I was away in New York, and Franco took the call. For some reason, the news made him feel so stricken that he couldn’t tell me. It wasn’t until three days later, when I came back to LA, that he said, “I have to tell you something, but I have to tell you after dinner.”
Eventually I got it out of him that my brother had died.
“When did it happen?” I asked.
“Three days ago I got the phone call.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“I just didn’t know how to tell you. You were in New York and you were doing your business. I wanted to wait until you got home.” If he had called me in New York, I could have been halfway to Austria already. I was touched by his worry for me, but also frustrated and disappointed.
I called my parents right away. My mother was sobbing on the phone and was barely able to speak at first. But then she told me, “No, we’re not going to have the burial here; we’re going to keep Meinhard in Kitzbuhel. We’re going tomorrow morning, and we’ll have a very small service.”
“I just found out about it,” I said.
She said, “Well, I wouldn’t try to come now, because even if you get the first plane, with the nine-hour time difference and the long flight, I don’t think you’ll get here in time.”
It was a terrible blow to the family. I could hear the devastation in both my parents’ voices. None of us was good at communicating feelings, and I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry? It’s terrible? They knew that. The news left me numb. Meinhard and I were no longer close—I’d seen him only once in the three years since I’d moved to America—but still my mind flooded with memories of us playing as kids, going on double dates when we were older, laughing together. We would never have that again. I would never see him again. All I could think to do was push this out of my mind so I could go on with my goals.
I threw myself into my Los Angeles life. Going to school, training five hours a day at the gym, working in the construction and mail-order businesses, making appearances, and going to exhibitions—all of it was happening at the same time. Franco was just as busy. We both had incredibly full schedules, and some days stretched from six in the morning until midnight.
Becoming fluent in English was still the hardest thing on my to-do list. I envied my photographer friend Artie Zeller, who was the kind of person who could visit Italy for a week with Franco and come back speaking Italian. Not me. I couldn’t believe how difficult learning a new language could be.
At the beginning, I’d try to translate everything literally: I would hear or read something, convert it in my head back into German, and then wonder, “Why do they have to make English so complicated?” There were things that I seemed unable to grasp no matter who explained them to me. Like contractions. Why couldn’t you say “I have” or “I will” rather than “I’ve” and “I’ll”?
Pronunciations were especially dangerous. As a treat, Artie took me to a Jewish-Hungarian restaurant where the dishes were the same as Austrian food. The owner came to take our order, and I said, “I saw this one thing
