Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 4 Mr. Universe

“I CAN ALWAYS GET you a job as a lifeguard at the Thalersee, so just remember if anything goes wrong, you never have to worry.” That’s what Fredi Gerstl told me when I visited him to say good-bye. Fredi was always generous about helping young people, and I knew he meant well, but I wasn’t interested in a lifeguard job or any other safety net. Even though Munich was only two hundred miles from Graz, for me it was the first step on the way from Austria to America.

I’d heard stories about Munich: how every week a thousand trains came into its train station. I’d heard about the nightlife and the wild atmosphere of the beer halls and on and on. As the train came near to the city, I began seeing more and more houses, and then bigger buildings, and then up ahead the city center. I was wondering in a corner of my brain, “How will I find my way around? How will I survive?” But mostly I was selling myself on the mantra “This is going to be my new home.” I was turning my back on Graz, I was out of there, and Munich was going to be my city, no matter what.

Munich was a boomtown, even by the standards of the West German economic miracle, which was in full swing by 1966. It was an international city of 1.2 million people. It had just landed the right to host the Summer Olympics in 1972 and the soccer World Cup finals in 1974. Holding the Olympic Games in Munich was meant to symbolize West Germany’s transformation and reemergence into the community of nations as a modern democratic power. Construction cranes were everywhere. The Olympic Stadium was already going up, as were new hotels and office buildings and apartments. All across the city were major excavations for the new subway system, designed to be the most modern and efficient in the world.

The Hauptbahnhof, or main station, where I was about to get off the train, was at the center of all this. The construction sites needed laborers, and they were streaming in from all over the Mediterranean and the Eastern bloc. In the station waiting rooms and on the platforms, you could hear Spanish, Italian, Slavic, and Turkish languages spoken more often than you heard German. The area around the station was a mix of hotels, nightclubs, shops, flophouses, and commercial buildings. The Universum Sport Studio, the gym where I’d been hired, was on the Schillerstrasse just five minutes from the station. Both sides of the street were lined with nightclubs and strip bars that stayed open till four in the morning. Then at five o’clock, the first breakfast places opened, where you could get sausage or drink beer or eat breakfast. You could always celebrate somewhere. It was the kind of place where a nineteen-year-old kid from the provinces had to get streetwise very fast.

Albert Busek had promised to have a couple of guys come meet me at the station, and as I walked up the platform, I saw the grinning face of a bodybuilder named Franz Dischinger. Franz had been the junior-division favorite in the Best Built Man in Europe competition in Stuttgart, the title I’d won the year before. He was a good-looking German kid, even taller than me, but his body had not filled out yet, which I think was why the judges had picked me instead. Franz was a joyful guy, and we’d hit it off really well, laughing a lot together. We’d agreed that if I ever came to Munich, we’d be training partners. After we grabbed something to eat at the station, he and his buddy, who had a car, dropped me off at an apartment on the outskirts of town where Rolf Putziger lived.

I had yet to meet my new boss, but I was glad he had offered to put me up, because I couldn’t afford to rent a room. Putziger turned out to be a heavy, unhealthy-looking old man in a business suit. He was almost bald and had bad teeth when he smiled. He gave me a friendly welcome and showed me around his place; there was a small extra room that he explained would be mine as soon as the bed that he’d ordered for me was delivered. In the meantime, would I mind sleeping on the living room couch? It didn’t bother me at all, I said.

I thought nothing about this arrangement until a few nights later, when Putziger came in late and instead of going into his bedroom lay down next to me. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable coming into the bedroom?” he asked. I felt his foot pressing up against mine. I was up off that couch like a shot, grabbing my stuff and heading for the door. My mind was going nuts: what had I gotten myself into? There were always gays among bodybuilders. In Graz, I’d known a guy who had a fantastic home gym where my friends and I would work out sometimes. He was very open about his attraction to men and showed us the section of the city park where the men and boys hung out. But he was a real gentleman and never imposed his sexual orientation on any of us. So I thought I knew what gay men were like. Putziger definitely didn’t seem gay; he looked like a businessman!

Putziger caught up with me on the street as I stood trying to process what had happened and figure out where to go. He apologized and promised not to bother me if I came back in the house. “You are my guest,” he said. Back inside, of course, he tried to close the deal again, telling me he could understand that I preferred women, but if I’d be his friend, he could get me a car and help my career and so on. Of course, I could have used a real mentor at that point, but not at that cost. I was relieved to get out of there for good the next morning.

The reason Putziger didn’t fire me was that he needed a star for his gym even more than he needed a lover. Bodybuilding was such an obscure sport that there were only two gyms in Munich, and the larger of the two belonged to Reinhard Smolana, who in 1960 was the first Mr. Germany and who had won Mr. Europe in 1963. Smolana had also already placed third in Mr. Universe competition, so he was without any doubt the best-ranked German bodybuilder and the obvious authority on weight training. His gym was better equipped and more modern than Putziger’s. Customers gravitated to Smolana; my job as the new sensation was to help the Universum Sport Studio compete. Albert Busek, the editor of Sportrevue, who had set all this in motion by suggesting me, turned out to be as honorable as Rolf Putziger was sleazy. When I told him about what had happened, he was disgusted. Since I now had no place to stay, he helped me convert a storeroom in the gym into sleeping quarters. He and I quickly became good friends.

Albert would have been a doctor or scientist or intellectual if anyone had ever told him to go to the university. Instead, he’d gone to engineering school. He discovered working out and then realized that he had talents for writing and photography. He asked Putziger if he could do some work for the magazine. “Yeah, give me an article, write something,” Putziger said. After Albert and his wife had twins, and his student funding was cut, he ended up working for Putziger full time. Before long, Albert was running the magazine and had established himself as an expert on the bodybuilding scene. He was sure that I would become the next big thing, and because he wanted to see me succeed, he was willing to be the buffer between Putziger and me.

Apart from my troubles with the owner, the job was ideal. Putziger’s establishment consisted of the gym, the magazine, and a mail-order business that sold nutritional supplements. The gym itself had several rooms instead of one big hall; it also had windows and natural light rather than the damp concrete walls I had gotten used to at the stadium in Graz. The equipment was more sophisticated than any I’d ever had access to. Besides weights, there was a full set of machines for shoulders, back, and legs. That gave me the opportunity to add exercises that would single out muscles, add definition, and refine my body in ways that are impossible to achieve with free weights alone.

I’d learned in the army that I loved helping people train, so that part of the job came easily. Over the course of the day, I would teach small groups and do one-on-one sessions with a wild assortment of guys: cops, construction workers, businessmen, intellectuals, athletes, entertainers, Germans and foreigners, young and old, gay and straight. I encouraged American soldiers from the nearby base to train there; the Universum Sport Studio was the first place I’d ever met a black person. Many of our customers were there simply to boost their fitness and health, but we had a core group of competitive weight lifters and bodybuilders whom I could imagine as serious training partners. And I realized that I knew how to rally and challenge guys like that. “Yeah, you can be my training partner; you need help,” I’d joke. As the trainer, I liked being the ringleader, and even though I had very little money, I would take them out for lunch or dinner and pay.

Being busy helping customers meant that I had no time to train the way I was used to, with an intense four- or five-hour workout each day. So I adopted the idea of training twice a day, two hours before work and two hours from seven to nine in the evening, when business slacked off and only the serious lifters were left. Split workouts seemed like an annoyance at first, but I realized I was onto something when I saw the results: I was concentrating better and recovering faster while grinding out longer and harder sets. On many days I would add a third training session at lunchtime. I’d isolate a body part that I thought was weak and give it thirty or forty minutes of my full attention, blasting twenty sets of calf raises, say, or one hundred triceps extensions. I did the same thing some nights after dinner, coming back to train for an hour at eleven o’clock. As I went to sleep in my snug little room, I’d often feel one or another muscle that I’d traumatized that day jumping and twitching—just a side effect of a successful workout and very pleasing, because I knew those fibers would now recover and grow.

I was training flat out because in less than two months I knew I would be going up against some of the best bodybuilders alive. I’d signed up for Europe’s biggest bodybuilding event, Mr. Universe, in London. This was a brash thing to do. Ordinarily, a relative novice like me wouldn’t have dreamed of taking on London. I’d have competed for Mr. Austria first, and then if I won, I’d have aimed for Mr. Europe. But at that rate, being “ready” for London would have taken years. I was too impatient for that. I wanted the toughest competition I could get, and this was the most aggressive career move I could make. Of course, I wasn’t an idiot about it. I didn’t expect to win in London—not this time. For now, though, I was determined to find out where I stood. Albert loved the idea, and since he knew English, he helped me fill out the application.

For a regimen as fanatical as mine, I needed more than one training partner. Luckily, there were enough serious bodybuilders in Munich who got a kick out of my Mr. Universe dream, even if they thought I was a little nuts. Franz Dischinger trained with me regularly, and so did Fritz Kroher, who was a country boy like me, from a small town in the Bavarian woods. Even Reinhard Smolana, owner of the rival gym, joined in. Sometimes he invited me to train at his gym or he came to mine to work out after hours. After just a few weeks, I felt like I’d found my buddies, and Munich was starting to seem like home.

My favorite training partner was Franco Columbu, who quickly became my best friend. I’d met him in Stuttgart the year before; he’d won the European championship in power lifting on the same day that I won Mr. Junior Europe. Franco was an Italian from the island of Sardinia, where he grew up on a farm in a tiny mountain village that sounded even more primitive than Thal when he described it to me. He spent much of his boyhood herding sheep, and at age ten or eleven, he’d be out in the wilderness alone for days at a time, finding his own food and fending for himself.

Franco had to drop out of school at thirteen to help on the family farm, but he was very hardworking and smart. He’d started out as a bricklayer and amateur boxer and made his way north to Germany to earn his living in construction. In Munich, he learned the language and the city so well that he qualified to be a taxi driver. The Munich taxi driver exam was hard even for natives, and for an Italian to pass it amazed everyone.

Franco was a power lifter, I was a bodybuilder, and we both understood that these sports were complementary. I wanted to add bulk to my body, which meant having to work with heavy weights, and Franco knew how to do that. Meanwhile, I understood bodybuilding, which Franco wanted to learn. He told me, “I want to be Mr. Universe.” Others laughed at him—he was only five foot five—but in bodybuilding, perfection and symmetry can beat sheer size. I liked the idea of us training together.

Maybe because he’d spent so much time in the wild, Franco was quick to pick up on new ideas. He loved my theory of “shocking the muscle,” for instance. It always seemed to me that the biggest obstacle to successful training is that the body adjusts so quickly. Do the same sequence of lifts every day, and even if you keep adding weight, you’ll see your muscle growth slow and then stop; the muscles become very efficient at performing the sequence they expect. The way to wake up the muscle and make it grow again is to jolt it with the message “You will never know what’s coming. It will always be different from what you expect. Today it’s this, tomorrow it’s something else.” One day it’s ultraheavy weights; the next day high reps.

A method we developed to shock the muscle was “stripping.” In a normal weight training sequence, you do your first set with lighter weight and then work your way up. But in stripping, you do the reverse. For example, in preparation for London, I needed to bulk up my deltoids. So I’d do dumbbell presses, where you hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height and then raise them up above your head. With stripping, I’d start at my top weight: six repetitions with 100-pound dumbbells. Put those down, take the 90-pound dumbbells and do six reps. And so on, all the way down the rack. By the time I reached the 40s, my shoulders would be on fire and six reps would feel like each arm was lifting 110 pounds, not 40. But before putting down the weights, I’d shock the deltoids further by doing lateral raises, lifting the 40s from hip level out to shoulder height. After that, my shoulder muscles would be so totally berserk that I did not know where to put my hands. It was agony to let them hang by my sides and impossible to lift them. All I could do was drape my arms on a table or a piece of equipment to relieve the excruciating pain. The deltoids were screaming from the unexpected sequence of sets. I’d shown them who was boss. Their only option now was to heal and grow.

After training hard all day I wanted to have fun at night. And in Munich in 1966, fun meant beer halls, and beer halls meant fights. I’d go with my buddies to these places where every night people would be sitting at long tables laughing and arguing and waving their mugs. And getting drunk, of course. People started fights all the time, but it was never like “I’m going to murder this guy.” As soon as a fight ended, one guy would say, “Oh, let’s have a pretzel. Can I buy you a beer?” And the other guy would say, “Yeah, I lost, so you can at least buy me a beer. I don’t have any money anyway.” Soon you’d be drinking together as if nothing had happened.

The beer itself didn’t really appeal to me because it would interfere with training; I rarely drank more than one in a night. But I was totally into the fights. I felt like I was discovering new power every day and was huge and strong and unstoppable. There was not a lot of thinking involved. If a guy looked at me in a weird way or challenged me for whatever reason, I’d be in his face. I’d give him the shock treatment: I’d rip off my shirt to reveal my tank top underneath and then I’d punch him out. Or sometimes when he saw me he’d just say, “Oh, what the hell. Why don’t we just get a beer?”

My friends and I backed each other up, of course, if the fight turned into a brawl. The next day, we’d pass around the stories at the gym and laugh. “Oh, you should’ve seen Arnold. He banged these two guys’ heads together and then their friend came at him with a beer mug, but I caught him with a chair from behind, that fucker …” We were fortunate because even when the police came, which happened several times, they would just dismiss us. The only time I remember ever being taken in to the police station was when a guy claimed it was going to cost a lot of money to replace his teeth. We were arguing so much about what the teeth would cost that the police thought we’d start fighting again. So they took us in and held us until we agreed on an amount.

Even better than the fights were the girls. Right across the Schillerstrasse from the gym was the Hotel Diplomat, where airline stewardesses stayed. Franco and I would lean out the window in our tank tops and flirt with them when they spotted us from the street. “What are you doing up there?” they’d call out. “Well, we have a gym here. Do you want to train? Come on up.”

I also would go across to the hotel lobby and introduce myself to the little groups of stewardesses as they came and went. To get them interested, I would combine my very best methods from the Thalersee and from years of selling hardware. “We have a gym across the street,” I’d say, and I’d compliment the girl and tell her how she might enjoy working out. In fact, I thought it was foolish and stupid that gyms almost never encouraged women to train. So we would let them work out for free. And whether they came because they were interested in the men or purely to train, I was happy either way.

The girls came mostly at night. Our regular customers were usually gone by eight, but you could use the equipment until nine. I would be doing my second workout with my partners. If the girls just wanted to train, they could take a shower and be out by eight thirty. Otherwise they were welcome to stay, and we’d go out or have a party. Sometimes Smolana would show up with some girls, and then the night could get quite wild.

For the first few months in Munich, I let myself get carried away by nightlife and fun. But then I realized I was losing focus, and I started disciplining myself. The goal was not to have fun but to become the world champion in bodybuilding. If I was going to get my seven hours of sleep, I had to be in bed by eleven. There was always time to have fun, and we always had fun anyway.

My boss turned out to be a bigger threat to my Mr. Universe prospects than any beer hall drunk swinging a stein. With just a few weeks to go, I still hadn’t heard back about my application to the contest. Finally, Albert called London, and the organizers said they’d never gotten anything from me. Finally, Albert confronted Putziger, who admitted that he’d found my application in the outgoing mail and thrown it away. He was jealous that I would get discovered and move to England or America before he could make money off me. I’d have been sunk except for Albert’s command of English and his desire to stick up for me. He called London again and persuaded the organizers to consider my application, even though the deadline had passed. They agreed. Just days before the contest, the papers came through, and I was added to the list.

The other bodybuilders in Munich also rallied in my support. Putziger should have paid my way to London, of course, because any success I might have there would bring attention to his gym. But when word of his sabotage got around, it was his competitor Smolana who passed the hat and raised the three hundred marks I needed for a ticket. On September 23, 1966, I boarded a London-bound flight. I was nineteen, and it was the first time I’d ever taken an airplane. I’d been expecting to take a train, so I was ecstatic. I was sure that nobody I’d gone to school with had flown at this point. I was sitting on an airliner with businessmen, and it had all happened through bodybuilding.

The first Mr. Universe contest was held the year after I was born, 1948. It took place in London every September. The English speakers dominated, as in all of bodybuilding—especially the Americans, who probably won eight out of every ten years. All the great bodybuilders I’d idolized growing up had won the Mr. Universe title: Steve Reeves, Reg Park, Bill Pearl, Jack Delinger, Tommy Sansone, Paul Winter. I remembered seeing a photograph from the contest when I was a kid. The winner stood on a pedestal, trophy in hand, while everyone else stood below him on the stage. Being on that pedestal was always my vision of where I would end up. It was very clear: I knew what it was going to feel like and look like. It would be like heaven to make that real, but I didn’t expect to win this year. I’d gotten the list of the bodybuilders I’d be competing against in the amateur class, looked at photos of them, and thought, “Jesus.” Their bodies were better defined than mine. I wanted to finish in the top six because I felt like I couldn’t beat the numbers two, three, and four from the last year. I felt they were too defined and I was not quite there. I was still in the slow process of building up to my ideal muscle mass; the idea was to get the size and then cut down and chisel and perfect it.

They held the competition in the Victoria Palace Theatre, an old ornate place decorated with marble and statues a few blocks from Victoria Station. Major competitions always followed a set routine. In the morning would be the preliminaries, or technical rounds. The bodybuilders and judges assembled in the auditorium—reporters could sit in, but the public wasn’t allowed. The aim was to give the judges the chance to evaluate the contestants’ muscular development and definition, body part by body part, and systematically compare each man with the rest. You’d stand in a line, along the back of the stage, with all the other men of your class (mine was “amateur tall”). Everyone had numbers pinned to their posing briefs. A judge would say, “Number fourteen and number eight, please step forward, give us a quadriceps.” Those two bodybuilders would walk to the center of the stage and strike a standard pose that showed off the four muscles at the front of the thigh as the judges made notes. The results of these technical rounds were factored into the decisions later in the day. Then, of course, the big show would be the finals in the afternoon: a posing competition for each of the classes and ultimately a pose-off among the class winners to crown the overall amateur and professional champs.

Compared to the other competitions I’d seen, Mr. Universe was the big time. The Victoria Palace was completely sold out: more than fifteen hundred seats filled with applauding and cheering bodybuilding fans, and dozens more outside hoping to squeeze in. The show itself was as much circus as contest. The stage was professionally lit, with spotlights and floods, and they’d brought in a whole orchestra to help set the mood. The two-hour program included entertainment between the rounds of competition, like a bikini contest, acrobats, contortionists, and two troupes of women in leotards and mod boots who paraded and struck poses holding little barbells and weights.

To my amazement, in the technical round that morning, I’d discovered that I’d overestimated my competition. The top “tall amateur” bodybuilders were indeed better defined, but put us all together on stage, and I still stood out. The truth is that not all bodybuilders are strong, especially those who have done most of their training with weight machines. But years of power lifting and working with free weights had given me massive biceps and shoulders and back muscles and thighs. I simply looked bigger and stronger than the rest.

By showtime, word had gotten around that this monster teenager had shown up from out of nowhere with an unpronounceable name, and he was a goddamn giant. So the crowd was especially noisy and enthusiastic when our group came on. I didn’t win, but I came much closer than I or anyone else would have expected. By the final pose-off, the contest was down to me and an American named Chester Yorton, and the judges decided for Chet. I had to admit that was the right call: although Chet was at least twenty pounds lighter than me, he was truly chiseled and beautifully proportioned, and his posing was smoother and more practiced than mine. Besides, he had a great suntan that made me look like bread dough next to him.

I was ecstatic being the surprise runner-up; I felt like I’d won. It threw me into the spotlight, so much so that people started to say, “Next year he’s going to win.” Muscle magazines in English started mentioning me, which was extremely important because I had to become known in England and America to reach my goal.

The giddiness lasted only until I had time to think. Then it hit me: Chet Yorton had ended up on that pedestal, not me. He’d earned the victory, but I thought I’d made a big mistake. What if I had gone to London intending to win? Would I have prepared better? Would I have performed better? Would I have won and now be Mr. Universe? Instead, I’d underestimated my chances. I didn’t like the way this made me feel and worked myself into quite a state. It really taught me a lesson.

After that, I never went to a competition to compete. I went to win. Even though I didn’t win every time, that was my mind-set. I became a total animal. If you tuned into my thoughts before a competition, you would hear something like: “I deserve that pedestal, I own it, and the sea ought to part for me. Just get out of the fucking way, I’m on a mission. So just step aside and gimme the trophy.”

I pictured myself high up on the pedestal, trophy in hand. Everyone else would be standing below. And I would look down.

Three months later, I was back in London, laughing and horsing around on a living room rug with a jumble of kids. They belonged to Wag and Dianne Bennett, who owned two gyms and were at the center of the UK bodybuilding scene. Wag had been a judge at the Mr. Universe contest, and he’d invited me to stay with him and Dianne in their house in the Forest Gate section of London for a few weeks of training. Although they had six kids of their own, they took me under their wing and became like parents to me.

Wag had made it clear that he thought I needed a lot of work. At the top of his list was my posing routine. I knew there is a huge difference between hitting poses successfully and having a compelling routine. Poses are the snapshots, and the routine is the movie. To hypnotize and carry away an audience, you need the poses to flow. What do you do between one pose and the next? How do the hands move? How does the face look? I’d never had a chance to figure very much of this out. Wag showed me how to slow down and make it like ballet: a matter of posture, the straightness of the back, keeping the head up, not down.

This I could understand, but it was harder to swallow the idea of actually posing to music. Wag would put the dramatic theme from the movie Exodus on the hi-fi and cue me to start my routine. At first I couldn’t think of anything more distracting or less hip. But after a while I started to see how I could choreograph my moves and ride the melody like a wave—quiet moments for a concentrated, beautiful three-quarter back pose, flowing into a side chest pose as the music rose and then wham!, a stunning most muscular pose at the crescendo.

Dianne concentrated on filling me up with protein and improving my manners. Sometimes she must have thought I’d been raised by wolves. I didn’t know the right way to handle a knife and fork or that you should help clear up after dinner. Dianne picked up where my parents and Fredi Gerstl and Frau Matscher had left off. One of the few times she ever got mad at me was when she saw me shove my way through a crowd of fans after a competition. The thought in my head was “I won. Now I’m going to party.” But Dianne grabbed me and said, “Arnold, you don’t do that. These are people who came to see you. They spent their money, and some of them traveled a long way. You can take a few minutes and give them your autograph.” That scolding changed my life. I’d never thought about the fans, only about my competitors. But from then on, I always made time for the fans.

Even the kids got in on the Educating Arnold project. There’s probably no better way to learn English than to join a lively, happy London household where nobody understands German and where you sleep on the couch and have six little siblings. They treated me like a giant new puppy and loved teaching me words.

A photo of me during that trip shows me meeting my boyhood idol Reg Park for the first time. He’s wearing sweats, looking relaxed and tan, and I’m wearing my posing trunks looking starstruck and pale. I was in the presence of Hercules, of the three-time Mr. Universe, of the star whose picture I kept on my wall, of the man on whom I’d modeled my life plan. I could barely stammer out a word. All the English I’d learned flew right out of my head.

Reg now lived in Johannesburg, where he owned a chain of gyms, but he came back to England on business several times a year. He was friends with the Bennetts and had generously agreed to help show me the ropes. Wag and Dianne felt that the best way for me to have a good shot at the Mr. Universe title was to became better known in the United Kingdom. Bodybuilders did that in those days by getting on the exhibition circuit—promoters all over the British Isles would organize local events, and by agreeing to appear, you could make a little money and spread your name. Reg, as it happened, was on his way to an exhibition in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and offered to bring me along. Making a name for yourself in bodybuilding is a lot like politics. You go from town to town, hoping word will spread. This grassroots approach worked, and the enthusiasm it created would eventually help me to win Mr. Universe.

One night I found myself standing in the wings and watching Reg pose onstage for a crowd of several hundred cheering exhibition fans. Then he went to the microphone and called me to the stage. He moderated while I showed off my strength: I would perform a two-arm curl of 275 pounds and deadlift 500 pounds five times. I finished by posing and received a standing ovation. I was ready to leave the stage when I heard Reg say, “Arnold, come over here.” When I got to the microphone, he said, “Say something to the people.”

So I said, “No, no, no.”

“Why not?”

I said, “I don’t speak English that well.”

“Hey!” he says. “That’s very good! Let’s give a little applause. That takes a lot of nerve for a guy who doesn’t speak English to say a sentence like that.” He started clapping, and then they were all applauding.

All of a sudden I felt, “Gee, this is amazing. They liked what I said!”

Reg went on: “Say to them, ‘I like Ireland.’ ”

“I like Ireland.” Applause again. He said, “I remember you telling me earlier that this is the first time you’re in Belfast, and you couldn’t wait to get here. Right?”

“Yes.”

“So tell them! ‘I couldn’t wait …’ ”

“I couldn’t wait …”

“ ‘… to get here.’ ”

“… to get here.” Wow, again applause. And every sentence he said for me to repeat, I got applause.

If he had told me the day before, “I’m going to bring you onstage and ask you to say a few words,” I would have been scared to death. But here I was able to practice public speaking without the pressure. I didn’t have to sweat about the audience accepting me or caring what I said. That fear was not there, because the body was the focus. I was lifting, I was posing. I knew they accepted me. This was just extra.

After that, I studied Reg at a bunch of shows. The way he spoke was unbelievable. He could entertain people. He was outgoing. He told stories. And he was Hercules! He was Mr. Universe! He knew about wine, he knew about food, he spoke French, he spoke Italian. He was one of those guys who really had his act together. I watched the way he held the mike, and I said to myself, “That’s what you’ve got to do. You can’t just pose on stage like a robot and then walk off so people never get to know your personality. Reg Park talks to them. He’s the only bodybuilder I’ve seen who talks to people. That’s why they love him. That’s why he’s Reg Park.”

Back in Munich, I concentrated on building up business at the gym. Old man Putziger was almost never around, which was totally fine with Albert and me. He and I made a great team. Albert managed everything—the mail-order nutritional supplements business, the magazine, and the gym—doing the work of several men. My job, besides training, was to recruit new members. Our business goal, of course, was to overtake Smolana’s and become the city’s top gym. Advertising was an obvious first step, but we couldn’t afford much of it, so we had some posters printed up. We’d wait until late at night and then work our way across the city—pasting them up at construction sites, where we figured the workers would be interested in bodybuilding.

But this strategy wasn’t as successful as we hoped. We were scratching our heads about why until Albert passed one of the construction sites in daylight and noticed a Smolana poster on the wall in the exact spot where one of ours had been. It turned out that Smolana had been sending his guys around town pasting their posters over ours before the glue could dry. So we changed our routine. We’d poster once at midnight and then make a second pass at four in the morning to make sure that when the construction workers showed up for work, our gym would be the poster on top. Everybody got a kick out of the poster war, and slowly our membership started to grow.

Our pitch was that while Smolana’s had more room, we had more spirit and more fun. We also had the wrestlers going for us. Today professional wrestling is a giant TV sport, but back then wrestlers would travel from city to city and put on bouts. When they came to Munich, they’d perform at the Circus Krone, which had a huge permanent arena as its home base. Whenever there was a wrestling match, the place was packed.

The wrestlers were always looking for somewhere to work out, and they picked our gym when they heard about me. I trained with guys like Harold Sakata, from Hawaii, who’d played the villain Oddjob in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger. Like a lot of professional wrestlers, Harold started out as a lifter; he’d won a silver medal for the United States at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. We also had Hungarian wrestlers, French wrestlers—guys from all over the world. I’d open up the gym at times when it was normally closed just to accommodate them, and at night I would go watch their matches. They wanted in the worst way to make me a wrestler too, but of course that was not my agenda.

Still, I was proud that our gym was becoming a little like the United Nations, because I planned to go global with everything that I wanted to do. American and British bodybuilders passing through town would stop by, and word got around among the American troops stationed nearby that the Universum Sport Studio was a good place to train.

Having a big range of customers was the perfect sales tool. If someone said to me, “Well, I was over at Smolana’s gym, and they have more machines than you,” I would say, “Well, they have one more room than we have, you’re absolutely right. But think about why it is that everyone wants to come here. When any American bodybuilder comes from overseas, they train here. When the military looks for a gymnasium, they train here. When the professional wrestlers come into town, they train here. We even have women wanting to join!” I built it into a whole routine.

My initial success in London had reassured me that I was on the right track and that my goals were not crazy. Every time I won, I became more certain. After the 1966 Mr. Universe contest, I won several more titles, including Mr. Europe. Even more important for my local reputation, during the March beer festival I won a round of the Löwenbräukeller’s stone-lifting competition, hoisting the old beer hall’s 558-pound stone block higher than every other contestant that day. (The weight was in German pounds, equivalent to 254 kilos, or 558 English pounds.)

I knew I was already the favorite to win the 1967 Mr. Universe competition. But that didn’t feel like enough—I wanted to dominate totally. If I’d wowed them with my size and strength before, my plan now was to show up unbelievably bigger and stronger and really blow their minds.

So I poured my energy and attention into a training plan I’d worked out with Wag Bennett. For months I spent most of my earnings on food and vitamins and protein tablets designed to build muscle mass. The drink of choice in this diet was like a nightmarish opposite of beer: pure brewer’s yeast, milk, and raw eggs. It smelled and tasted so vile that Albert sampled it once and threw up. But I was convinced that it worked, and maybe it did.

I read everything I could find about the training methods of the East Germans and the Soviets. Increasingly, there were rumors that they were using performance-enhancing drugs to get superior results from their weight lifters, shot-putters, and swimmers. As soon as I figured out that steroids were the drugs in question, I went to the doctor to try them myself. There were no rules against using anabolic steroids then, and you could get them by prescription, yet already people seemed to feel two ways about their use. Bodybuilders didn’t talk about steroids as freely as they talked about weight routines and nutritional supplements, and there was an argument about whether the bodybuilding magazines should educate people about the drugs or ignore the trend.

All I needed to know was that the top international champions were taking steroids, something I confirmed by asking the guys in London. I would not go into a competition with a disadvantage. “Leave no stone unturned” was my rule. And while there wasn’t any evidence of danger—research into steroids’ side effects was only getting under way—even if there had been, I’m not sure I would have cared. Downhill ski champions and Formula One race drivers know they can get killed, but they compete anyway. Because if you don’t get killed, you win. Besides, I was twenty years old, and I thought I would never die.

To get the drugs, I simply went to see a local general practitioner. “I heard this will help muscle growth,” I said.

“It’s supposed to, but I wouldn’t oversell it,” he replied. “It’s meant for people in rehab after surgery.”

“Can you let me try it?” I asked, and he said sure. He prescribed an injection every two weeks and pills to take in between. He told me, “Take these for three months and stop the day the competition is over.”

Steroids made me hungrier and thirstier and helped me gain weight, though it was mostly water weight, which was not ideal because it interfered with definition. I learned to use the drugs in the final six or eight weeks leading up to a major competition. They could help you win, but the advantage they gave was about the same as 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 one thousand pounds.

“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 Bürgerbräukeller, 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 Bräu, 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 question. In the Austrian army, for example, when I found out that they were sending tank drivers to the States for advanced training, I fantasized about staying in uniform for that. The problem, of course, was that when the training in America ended, I’d have to come back to Austria, and I’d still be in the army.

So I stuck with my original vision: a letter or a telegram would come, calling me to America. It was up to me to perform well and do something extraordinary, because if Reg Park had gotten to go there by doing something extraordinary, then I also would get to go by doing something extraordinary. In judging my progress, I used him and Steve Reeves as my benchmarks. Just like Reg, I’d gotten a very early start—earlier even than him, because he’d begun at seventeen just before he went into the military, and I’d started at fifteen. Winning Mr. Universe at the age of twenty got me this initial bang of publicity in the bodybuilding world, because I’d beaten Reg’s long-standing record—he’d won at twenty-three, back in 1951.

When I first became obsessed with bodybuilding, I dreamed that winning Mr. Universe in London would guarantee my fame and immortality. But in reality, the competitive scene had grown much more complex. Like boxing today, bodybuilding had multiple federations that were constantly competing for control of the sport. They ran the championships that attracted bodybuilding’s elite: the Mr. Universe contest in Britain; the Mr. World competition, which moved from country to country; the Mr. Universe contest in the United States; and the Mr. Olympia, a new event intended to crown the professional bodybuilding champion of the world. Fans needed scorecards to keep track of all this, and the important point for me was that not all the top bodybuilders competed at a given event. Some of the top Americans skipped the Mr. Universe competition in London and competed only in the American version, for instance. So the only real way for a bodybuilder to become the undisputed world champ was to rack up titles in all the federations. Only after he had challenged and defeated all rivals would he be universally acknowledged as the best. Reg Park had dominated in his day by winning the London Mr. Universe competition three times in fourteen years. Bill Pearl, a great California bodybuilder, had dominated by winning three Mr. Universe titles at that point plus Mr. America and Mr. USA. Steve Reeves had been Mr. America, Mr. Universe, and Mr. World. I was anxious not to just beat their records but also to run over them; if somebody could win Mr. Universe three times, I wanted to win it six times. I was young enough to do it, and I felt like I could.

Those were my dreams as I trained for the Mr. Universe contest to be held in London in 1968. To get to America, first I would have to thoroughly dominate the European bodybuilding scene. Having won Mr. Universe in the amateur class the year before was a great start. But it automatically elevated me to professional status, opening a whole new field of competitors. That meant that I had to go back and win the professional title even more decisively than I’d won as an amateur. That would make me a two-time Mr. Universe, and I’d really be on my way.

I made sure nothing else interfered. Not recreation, not my job, not travel, not girls, not organizing the Mr. Europe contest. I took time for all those things, of course, but my first priority remained working out a hard four or five hours per day, six days per week.

While I used the tips I’d learned from Wag Bennett and Reg Park, the focus of my training stayed the same. I was still growing physically, and I wanted to take advantage of my natural gift: a body frame that could handle more mass than the frames of any of the guys I was going to face. My goal was to show up at the Victoria Palace even bigger and stronger than the year before and just blow away the competition. At six foot two and 250 pounds, I was more impressive than I’d ever been.

The day before the contest did not start well. On my way to the airport, I went to the gym expecting Rolf Putziger to hand me my regular pay, which I was counting on as spending money for London. Instead, he presented a piece of paper and a pen. “Sign this, and you’ll get your money,” he said. It was a contract that named him as my agent and guaranteed him a cut of all my future earnings! I got over my shock enough to say no, but I left the gym reeling. I had only the money in my pocket and wasn’t even sure I still had a job. Albert had to lend me five hundred marks so I could go to London. Of course, the trip ended much better than it began, with me winning Mr. Universe for the second time, decisively, the next day. There were photos of me in the muscle magazines hoisting a bikini-clad girl on my left arm while showing off my right biceps. But even better was the telegram I found waiting for me back at the hotel. It was from Joe Weider.

“Congratulations on your victory,” it read. “You are the new young sensation. You are going to become the greatest bodybuilder of all time.” It went on to invite me to come to America the next weekend to compete in his federation’s Mr. Universe contest in Miami. “We will cover expenses,” the telegram said. “Colonel Schuster will provide details.”

I was thrilled to get a telegram from the undisputed kingmaker of bodybuilding champions. Being the biggest impresario in American bodybuilding meant that Joe Weider was the biggest bodybuilding impresario in the world. He had built an international empire of muscle-building exhibitions, magazines, equipment, and nutritional supplements. I was getting closer to my dream, not just of being a champion but also of going to America. I couldn’t wait to call my parents and share the news that I was on my way. I hadn’t expected this, but maybe I could rack up a third Mr. Universe title! That would be incredible, at age twenty-one. I was in competition shape, I had the momentum. I would overwhelm them in Miami.

Colonel Schuster turned out to be a medium-sized guy in a business suit who came to my London hotel later that day. He was, in fact, a colonel in the US National Guard, and he made his living as the European marketing agent for Weider’s company. He gave me the airline ticket, but we hadn’t gotten very far talking about the trip plans when he realized that I had no US visa.

I stayed at Schuster’s house cooling my heels while the colonel went to the American embassy and pulled strings. The paperwork ended up taking a week. I filled the time as best I could, although I didn’t really have a proper diet or a gym where I could train for five hours a day. I made do by going to the Weider warehouse, where they assembled dumbbells and barbells, and worked out with those. But I was distracted, and it wasn’t the same.

The minute I set foot on the plane, all the frustration fell away. I had to change flights in New York, and circling over the city and seeing for the first time the skyscrapers, New York Harbor, and the Statue of Liberty was fantastic. With Miami, I wasn’t sure what to expect, and it was raining when I got there. But it was impressive too, not just the buildings and palm trees but also the October heat and how happy it seemed to make people feel. I loved the tourist places with their Latin music. And the mixture of Latinos and blacks and whites was fascinating: I’d seen it in bodybuilding circles but never in Austria growing up.

Joe Weider had launched the American version of Mr. Universe ten years before to boost the popularity of bodybuilding in the United States, but this was the first time the contest had been held in Florida. They’d taken over the Miami Beach Auditorium, a big, modern hall with 2,700 seats, which was normally home to TV’s popular Jackie Gleason Show. I’d missed the run-up to the event—the interviews, cocktail parties, film and TV shoots, and promotions—but even so, the production felt big and American sized. There were bodybuilding legends everywhere, like Dave Draper and Chuck Sipes, each of whom had been Mr. America and Mr. Universe.

For the first time, I laid eyes on the world bodybuilding champ, Sergio Oliva. Sergio was an immigrant to the United States from Cuba who was the first member of a minority to win Mr. America, Mr. World, Mr. International, Mr. Universe, and Mr. Olympia. He’d just won his second consecutive Mr. Olympia title the previous week. Even though I wasn’t yet in his league, Oliva knew we’d be competing soon. “He’s very, very good,” he told a reporter about me. “Next year will be tough. But that’s okay with me. I do not like to compete with babies.” When I heard about that, I thought, “Already the psych games are beginning.”

Two dozen guys were in the competition, divided into two groups, tall and short. In the daytime rounds of preliminary judging, I beat the other tall men easily. But the top guy in the short-men category was Mr. America, Frank Zane, and he’d shown up in the best shape of his career. He’d just won the Mr. America competition in New York the week before. I was as big, well shaped, and powerful as I’d been in London, with the same impressive mass. But a week of twiddling my thumbs waiting for my visa had left me a little heavier than my ideal, which meant that when I posed, my body looked smooth and less sharply defined. Worse, besides being perfectly proportioned, muscular, and cut up, Zane had a serious tan, while I was as white as a soccer ball. Going into the evening finals, he was ahead of me on points.

That night in front of the crowd, I felt I looked 100 percent better because flexing and posing under stage lights all day had melted off the excess pounds. That helped make the competition between Frank Zane and me so close that we tied in the judges’ final vote. But Frank’s higher point score from earlier in the day made him the 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.