I’m pretty drunk, so finding it hard to type but beleive IH press got tough to run as a contest as guys basically laid down whiol standing up if that makes wense.
Goann get a sammich.
Pro wrestling… Yeah, we used to head to the gym on Saturday mornings right after the WWF broadcast on the TV. Guys with physiques just started to emerge: Jimmy Snuka, Tony Atlas, and of course later on the Ultimate Warrior.
Ted Arcidi is a great inspiration. I remember the cover of PL USA in college when he did 705 in the bench.
During the summer of my last year in high school, I worked grounds at a motel owned by a Greek family. One of their cousins, Tony, was over visiting from Greece, and they put him on ground duty with me. Tony was about 35 years old, slim, but had a pretty decent physique. He had good arms. I asked him if he trained & he said that he lifted weights. I said, “Oh great” and we talked about going to my gym and taking a training session together sometime. (This was in 1982, during the age of the Weider Muscle Confusion Principle and “All you” benching). Tony said he used to lift “lots of weights” and said he’d try and find some photos of himself back when he was training hard.
One day he came up with a photo, and it was a B&W shot of him wearing a singlet standing outside somewhere in a mountainous landscape with the ocean behind him hoisting a loaded barbell over his head as if he just finished C&J or overhead press. It was obviously taken in Greece somehere. Just then I realized his “lots of weights” was a totally different type of weightlifting than what kids from the American suburbs did. We never went to my gym together.
You have to remember, this was during a time in the US when those lifts were dead and buried. But it stuck with me that that this must be a pure type of lifting…more bad-ass, a type of lifting that goes back to ancient Greece. I knew I was not wrong.
Glad to see it is back.