IRON ICON: A bona fide Living Legend looks backward and forward
17 April 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
A sizeable portion of the informed, lifting public has no idea who Bill Pearl is, or was, or why he remains such an important, seminal, transitional figure. Ask a thirty-something athlete about Pearl and his exploits and you get the same blank look you get asking someone under thirty about Bill Russell or Joe DiMaggio. Make no mistake about it, there was a window in time when Bill Pearl strode the bodybuilding world like a Colossus and loomed as large in his chosen sport as either the great shot blocker or the Yankee Clipper did in their particular athletic arena of expertise. Born on an Indian reservation in Prineville, Oregon in 1930, Pearl, a Native American, began lifting at age 12 and began competing in bodybuilding in the 1950’s. He captured his first major title exactly fifty years ago when in 1953 Bill won Mr. America and later that same year captured Mr. Universe. Now at age 73 he is vibrant, vital, lucid and as assertive as ever. He remains a paragon of health, fitness and power and is as much a role model in his twilight years as he was in his youth.
Bill Pearl is important because he actualizes the physical possibilities. In his youth he inspired young athletes worldwide to stretch existing boundaries; now in his mid-seventies he continues to inspire contemporaries – only instead of leading the charge to breach the walls of physical limitation, as a golden oldie he now shows aging boomers how to extend and improve the quality of life. As Mae West once observed, “It ain’t the age, it’s the mileage.” Bill lends continued credence to Mae’s assertion. Bill stands 5 foot 10 inches, weighs 231-pounds and still packs more muscle than any two twenty-something American males. He lives on a farmette in rural Oregon and has a complete home gym in the reconverted barn out back of the house he and his wife Judy have lived in for the past thirty years. Bill is the old Zen Master, still in complete control of his physical and psychological self. He is a totally free man living life exactly the way he chooses.
“The man and wife were in keeping with their surroundings: the air, the flowers, and the dwelling. Health appeared to overflow in this fertile region; old age and childhood thrived there. There seems to be about this type of existence the freedom and carelessness of the primitive life; a happiness of use and wont that gave lie to all our philosophic platitudes and provided a cure for all the swelling passions of the heart. His bearing was that of an absolutely free man.”
Honoree’ Balzac
Bill Pearl is a slender singular thread that links men and events of a bye-gone era to the present day. Pearl has been in the iron game for sixty-one years and he has been in the uppermost echelon of the iron game for half of a century. Pearl knew and competed against ghosts; mythical men of iron, names now vague and distant and reduced to trivia fodder…Jack Dellinger, Steve Reeves, Clancy Ross, Marvin Eder, Arnold, Franco, Sergio, John Grimek…Bill knew these men as competitors and brothers-in-arms and lifted with and competed against some of them and forged alliances and friendships with countless others. Bill came of age just as the modern era of barbell-related sports dawned at the conclusion of World War II. The Greatest Generation, having gone through successive agonies of economic depression followed by world war, (‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’) looked forward to living life to the fullest. Many returning servicemen and women ended up in Southern California. Bill Pearl happened to be stationed in San Diego while in the Navy in 1952 and meet Leo Stern who mentored the fledgling bodybuilder. Upon discharge from the Navy Bill decided to open a gym somewhere in California instead of returning to his boyhood home in Yakima, Washington.
Bill selected Sacramento as the location for his fitness club and opened in 1954. It was the first in a series of commercial gyms Bill owned and operated. Every gym Bill has ever been connected with has been a success and after eight fruitful years in Northern California, Bill decided to move south to Los Angeles. In 1962 Pearl relocated to Los Angeles which had become a hotbed of iron-related activity. Vince’s (Gironda) Gym and Muscle Beach were thriving and bustling. Bill ‘Peanuts’ West garage gym in West LA became a powerlifting incubator where power immortals were hatched with astonishing regularity: Frenn, Casey, West, Ingro, Marjanian, Thurber…Bob Hise was a one-man dynamo on the LA Olympic lift scene and his son Bob Jr. became one of the best light heavyweight lifters in the United States in the late sixties. Los Angeles was populated with a wide and plentiful assortment of bodybuilders, Olympic lifters, powerlifters and fitness freaks. Pearl settled in and was inspired by his new clientele and new surroundings and began to lift and eat in earnest. He grew gargantuan, adding 20-pounds of pure muscle in a year. Pearl kicked his physique up to the next level. Soon he tipped the beam at 240-pounds, this at a time when 195 was considered big.
The Pearl approach was contrary to the prevailing West Coast orthodoxy. Bill preferred to walk a path of his own choosing and gravitated towards a training approach that stressed power and strength. Obtaining the two key attributes, strength and power, Bill mulled and mused, always resulted in an increase in muscle size. This approach flew in the face of all that was chic and popular and ran counter to the “pump-and-cramp” style of bodybuilding then all the rage. Pearl stood apart from the crowd, like a wild white buffalo on a bluff overlooking a domesticated herd. The en vogue method of the day involved high-reps, high sets, light (relatively speaking) weight, and training sessions that were long and often. Pearl preferred bar-bending poundage for relatively low reps and his workouts were uncomplicated, direct and to the point. Bill sought to gain strength and proficiency in a wide variety of movements and kept his exercises in heavy rotation. All exercises were done using pristine technique and incorporated a full-range-of-motion. Pearl pioneered the power approach before the power approach was popular.
Bill noted that all the truly massive and powerful men he’d come in contact with seemed to train in a similar fashion: big weights, moderate to low reps, perfect technique. Lifting guru John McCallum once described a Reg Park training session that echoed the patented Pearl approach.
“I remember watching Reg Park work out one time. He was doing squats. He had half the weight in the gym draped across his shoulders and the owner biting his nails in case the floor broke. You never saw such intense effort. Park did rep after rep and each one looked like the last. One of the guys watching nudged me, ‘Good grief did you ever see anybody work harder than that?’ No – I said, I hadn’t. And I’d never seen anybody with more muscle either.”
Bill Pearl made the same correlation between strength and size Reg Park and John McCallum observed. It is taken for granted nowadays but back in the day this was a profound revelation. To grow truly big, Bill reasoned, he would need to become truly strong in a variety of exercises. Strongmen have many discernable training commonalities, and being an observer and an innovator, Bill effortlessly absorbed, adapted and utilized the best of the pure power approach. He modified and adjusted the procedures over time and eventually developed his own specific training methodology. His unique approach struck a resonant counter-chord among many iron devotees and the message went out: forget lithe and lean, forget endless pumping using pee-wee poundage, retro-everything! Lift big, eat big, rest big, grow big! Over at Vince’s Gym, the training lair of Mr. Olympia Larry Scott, they were advising competitive bodybuilders not to squat at all! (‘Grows a big ugly butt.’) Pearl preached power and sweat and pain and struggle and stood in bold relief and marked contrast. His gym gained a toehold then a foothold and eventually garnered a sizable market share of the lucrative LA gym scene. His business thrived while his competitive career soared.
Round and round it went; the 60’s went by in blur…
“Who was the strongest man I ever saw? Without the slightest hesitation I would say Doug Hepburn. I did some posing exhibitions in Vancouver in the 1970’s and I saw Hepburn do things that I’ve never seen another human duplicate. Not all of them exactly strength related; some strange things…some odd things. He once asked me for a quarter; I took one out and handed it to him. He put it against the corner of a steel cabinet and bent it. I was so amazed I asked him to do it again – this time he did it with a fifty-cent piece; this was American coinage…he possessed unbelievable hand strength. He had had polio in one leg so his whole physiology and psychology were off a bit as a result. He could press 400-pounds overhead anytime and he stood maybe 5’9” and I’d guess right around 285-pounds in body weight. At a joint posing/strongman exhibition we gave one evening he finished off his strongman routine by climbing up to the top of a 6 or 8 foot stepladder and jumping off head first. He swan dove down, landed in the handstand position and held his balance perfectly. It blew my mind.”
“The audience went nuts and the applause was ear-splitting. How do you free-fall 10-feet onto a concrete floor and land in a handstand without breaking your wrists? Later that same night we met him at a Vancouver Chinese restaurant/nightclub where he had a job as a bouncer. A drunken customer got into a regular Pier 9 fist-swinging brawl with Hepburn. Doug grabbed the guy with those small, ultra-powerful hands and literally tore holes through the man’s jacket and shirt…he dug into the guy’s skin with his fingers. Doug’s right hand actually dug little crater holes into the guy’s chest. His fingers were like eagle talons. He threw the guy ten feet in the air, landing him on concrete with his shirt shredded and five finger holes in his right pec. He landed hard and went into shock. Someone called an ambulance.”
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