Arnold Schwarzenegger: The Hero of Perfected Mass
Outside the hotel Burgers Park, in Pretoria, South Africa, a group of black workmen in baggy pants and clean white shirts form a circle and drink bootleg “Zulu beer” from brown paper containers. A few feet farther on, a line of black women, kerchiefs on their heads and flowing dresses masking their bodies, wait for “Nie-blanke” (nonwhite) buses to take them to houseclean for white people. Across the street, urchins in scuffed shoes sell newspapers that scream about the hard rain falling in Angola and the soft kiss that Liz Taylor had given her black chauffeur.
But on the enclosed lawn at the Burgers Park hotel, there’s a completely different reality. You might even call it a universe of its own.
It looks like a publicity shot from Spartacus. Large-muscled men lounge motionless, basking in the warm sun that marks spring south of the equator. At an outdoor dining room table, Frank Zane, in one world a Southern California schoolteacher, opens a cellophane envelope and swallows a rainbow — a percentage of the 200 to 400 vitamin/protein pills that will be his “food” for the day. A few tables away, Ken Waller, fresh from the gym, sheepishly explains that he can almost hear his calves talking to him after a workout. Nearby, Robbie Robinson, the current AABA Mr. America and a black sprinter and football player from Florida, examines the deep crevices in his right forearm, then walks through the lobby. He’s staying at this hotel, immune from apartheid, courtesy of the South African Ministry of Sports. Banned from the Olympics for its racist policies, South Africa has put several hundred thousand dollars into the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia contests to involve itself in the world sports community.
Zane, Waller and Robinson are only three of the more than 400 men who’ve flown to South Africa from 30-odd countries to compete in these contests, acknowledged as the Super Bowl of bodybuilding. Many hold records for the weight they’ve been able to lift. But, for much of the past year, they’ve spent six hours a day, six days a week — lifting up to 40 tons daily — trying to shape their physical selves according to a shared vision of what the male body should look like.
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They don’t think of it as a beauty contest: there’s work, and power, involved in what they do. But some months from now, three of the most developed men here will appear at the Whitney Museum in New York. In a roomful of statues, before a panel of art historians and 2500 onlookers, they’ll flex their muscles and suggest similarities to the alabaster and marble around them. Some of the historians will call the exhibition “campy.” Some audience members will slap their foreheads and call it “gross.” Others, like the men and women in T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” will “come and go, speaking of Michelangelo.”
If Michelangelo came here and saw the people at the pool, he might say . . . a-ha!” observes Franco Columbu, the 5’5″, 185-pound Sardinian Sampson of the muscle magazines. At 32, Columbu’s been Mr. Italy, Mr. Europe and three times each the Mr. World and Mr. Universe of the International Federation of Bodybuilders, the major organization of its kind, and the group sponsoring this South African contest. Columbu is a professional who makes perhaps $50,000 a year from endorsements, mail-order products and competitions. In 1975, he finished second in the Olympia contest. He has no illusions about his body:
“This is not a normal thing. We have the muscles developed to the maximum, trying to win a contest. Muscles developed the way we’re developed — that’s abnormal. We are too developed.”
Columbu, like the others, is a specialist at anabolizing his muscles — tearing them down by “bombing them” with concentrated exercise, then supplying them with huge amounts of protein (including artificial steroids) while they’re resting to make them grow.
But big is not enough. Columbu’s muscles must form sweeping peaks and deep valleys. Each has to be exercised — bench presses for the chest, calf raises for the legs, squats and curls and rows for the rest — to make sure that growth is proportional. They have to move fluidly when displayed in front of the practice mirror. And they have to be ready for the 90 seconds that he’ll spend, oiled and hairless, onstage, trying to become Mr. Olympia, the professional who’s the best bodybuilder in the world.
To do that, though, Columbu will have to beat Arnold Schwarzenegger, the hero of perfected mass.
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