The body pneumatic

Part 5

by Stephen Heuser

I'm watching this from out in the audience, where O'Hearn looks as big as he needs to. Which is about as big as the guys around me.

The potential energy at a bodybuilding show is discomfitingly high: the auditorium is full of people who move very slowly and look like they could bury an elbow in your stomach by mistake. For the outsider, it's more strange than scary. Here is a room full of people who are, each of them, accustomed to being the biggest person in the room. Now none of them is the biggest person in the room. The biggest person in the room is the slowest-moving one of all, the Englishman with a head like Fred Flintstone sitting at a table signing photographs as fast as he can move his Parma ham of a forearm across the table, which isn't all that fast.

Dorian Yates is the reigning Mr. Olympia, the most famous professional bodybuilder in the world. Yates is being flown in and paid almost $8000 to guest-pose at the event, and his photograph occupies the center of the poster advertising the show.

At 310 pounds, Yates weighs roughly the same as an NFL lineman, only he's about half a foot shorter and has no body fat. Yates is the archetype of what bodybuilders call the thick look, which means that he has a relatively untapered waistline, and that the distance between his navel and his spine could probably be measured in feet.

"He's not the prettiest-lookin' dude," Maynard tells me, with a kind of understatement you might not expect in a man who is himself 5-8, 230 pounds. "Aesthetically he's not the most eye-pleasing, but the guy is just massive, an animal. He's a freak."

His time will come late in the show, after most of the posedowns have taken place and the weight-class trophies awarded. O'Hearn will be in the audience at this point, having finished third among light-heavies -- not bad at all for a rookie.

Dorian Yates, Mr. Olympia, will appear on stage to the opening chords of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" played at cochlea-straightening volume. He will pose as slowly and deliberately as he signed pictures in the lobby, as though simply flexing that much muscle leaves almost no energy for locomotion. The audience will clog the aisle with flash cameras. Yates will stomp his foot on the ground, his calf muscle will erupt at a 90-degree angle from the back of his lower leg, and the musclehead behind me will say, in an expression of unalloyed awe, "What the fuck is that?" His friend will say, "That just ain't right." Nothing is right about Dorian Yates, not his butterfly back, not his barrel abdomen, not his giant hemispherical navel. He is the thickest, biggest, weirdest human being I have ever seen in person, and by the time he has finished his geologically-paced posing routine, and then repeated it, move for move, to the same song, he will say into the microphone, out of breath: "I'm a great believer in action being louder than words." And the audience will scream in lust and envy and love.

After Dorian Yates, everything is anticlimax. The crowd begins filing out as the final posedown gets under way, the one that determines the overall winner of the New Englands. People are sticking around, because a posedown is fun to watch, but there's no suspense. It's an open secret that while judges pay lip service to proportion, mass usually takes the trophies. The light-heavyweight champion probably has the best-balanced physique on display today, but incontestably the most muscle in the show hangs on the back and torso of Anthony DeRizzo, a Rhode Islander whose body shape is roughly that of an inflated pumpkin balanced on bowling pins.

He does not have "symmetry" or "aesthetics" or any of the other things aficionados claim to admire. But he does have a ridiculously large back, ridiculously larger traps, and pecs that could crush my head. The crowd, here to see muscle, loves him. The judges clearly love him, too, because he wins his weight class and wins the entire competition, qualifying to go on to a national meet. After receiving his trophy -- and bodybuilding trophies are about the size of a lectern -- he makes a speech. He is surprisingly soft-spoken, and he apologizes for not being in top condition.

"It was enough!" someone yells from the audience. (Someone is always yelling from the audience at a bodybuilding show.)

Then another voice rings out -- "You're a freak!" -- and DeRizzo looks abashed.

"Thank you," he says.

Back to part 4

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.