Minimalist trainers I have known Part II: Ken Fantano
9 May 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I moved to New England in 1988 to take a job running a warehouse. The inmates were running the asylum and Richard asked if I could move to Milford for a year to help straighten out the corporate mess. He was a close personal friend and used to take me and my rock star buddy on deep sea fishing trips in his sixty foot yacht that he kept docked at the Sailfish Marina in West Palm Beach Florida. Every summer we’d move the boat from Florida to Connecticut and back again at the end of the summer season: up the Inner Coastal then along the Atlantic Seaboard, back and forth. He’d enlist the help of brother (and my true friend, RIP) Bobby plus Bobby’s teenage son, me and my rock star pal. We’d crew the boat and take four full days. Day I was the killer as we’d push from Florida to the 14th Street Marina in Ocean City. Day II we’d sail from OC to Jersey and dock at Harrah’s Marina in Atlantic City. On Day III we travel from Harrah’s to a Marina next to the United Nation’s building in Manhattan. On Day IV we dock at the final destination, the Bridgeport Marina in Connecticut. Richard had enough money to burn a wet elephant and every day we’d push the monster boat hard and serious and every night we’d party hard and serious, like Pirates on shore leave. The boat was so big the rescue dingy kept upside down on the front deck was an inverted Boston Whaler. I remember being continually shocked when he’d refuel the beast and it would cost $500 for a fill-up at .80-cents a gallon. High times up and down the Atlantic; many a giant fish was landed sitting in the tricked-out fishing chair trolling the deep blue waters off the Florida and New England coast.
I agreed to help Richard out and relocated to Milford, Connecticut. Richard owned an 80,000 foot steel warehouse and had an exclusive contract with the Irish Government to offload and store steel girders. Richard lived in Florida and had continual employee problems with the crew of rough necks that worked in the warehouse. There was a liquor store across the street from the warehouse and at lunchtime half the warehouse workers would walk across the street buy 40-ounce quarts of malt liquor or pints of Wild Irish Rose, sit on the curb and guzzle them down. They would stagger back across the road to go back to work moving steel. Ever seen a drunken warehouseman operate an overhead crane with a 10,000 pound steel beam attached? Quite frightening. The warehouse supervisor was a politically-correct politically connected guy (his brother ran SUCO, the largest port in the area) that Richard had hired him as a favor. As foreman he was nice to a fault and believed that “what the men did on their lunch hour off property was beyond his control.” His politically correct stance was heartfelt and he always “stood up” for “his men.” The last straw was when a belligerent drunken warehouseman hooked up a forty foot I-beam and while transporting the monster down one of the bays had it bust loose and fall 25-feet. It fell onto one of the 50-rows of stacked steel and set off a domino effect that caused one stacked row to crash into the next and the next and the next…no one was killed or injured but an entire bay was shut down for an entire month as 2,000 30-40 foot steel beams had to be picked up, sorted and restacked, one stinking beam at a time. This required three men working all day everyday and the foreman refused to fire the guy who caused it. “You can’t accuse him of being drunk – you have no proof!” Richard had enough of this jailhouse lawyer and kicked him upstairs. Enter Marty and Biggie W.
I was bought in along with “Biggie W” the infamous Longshoreman and enforcer known around the Baltimore docks as “one punch.” We cleaned house. I arrived in Connecticut for work on a Sunday and Richard and Bobby took Biggie and I to the Bridgeport Marina for a deck party. Every summer Sunday afternoon a reggae band would kick it on the deck and the place would be jammed with 200 people getting wasted on dollar drinks while trance dancing to the infectious music. We arrived around noon and found a table overlooking the party scene. As we nursed our drinks Bobby elbowed me, “Hey! You must know that monster.” It was an odd comment. I was new to this town and knew no one. Bobby gestured towards a gaggle of people in a semicircle on the deck to the right of the band. At the epicenter was a giant guy, 6-4 300-plus pounds and incredibly shapely for someone so huge. Obviously Italian, the monster had a pretty, scantily dressed girl under each arm and a beer in each paw. I looked hard at him and said, “I do know that guy!” It was Dino D, one of the nation’s best up-and-coming super heavyweight powerlifters. I had coached a training partner of mine named Elliot Smith at the APF Junior Nationals in Daytona Beach that past April. Elliot had taken 2nd place and Dino had taken 3rd in the super heavy division. After the competition there had been a huge post-competition keg party on the beach and Elliot and I had struck up a conversation with Dino and his crew. We all hit it off and stayed up all night drinking beer, swapping lies and trading training tips.
I made my way over to the concentric circle of party animals on the deck at the Bridgeport Marina and as I walked into the circle Dino looked me up and down, coldly accessing if I was a threat. I smiled and his expression went from hostile to puzzlement to quizzical recognition to boisterous laughter - all inside three seconds, “MARTY!” He yelled as he clapped me on the back with a meaty arm, “What in the HELL are YOU doing HERE???!” I related that I had moved to Milford and asked, “So Dino…where’s the action? Where do WE train?” He drew me close so only I could hear; he got super serious and said, “Ain’t but one place Marty…Kenny’s joint, The Muscle Factory. I’ll tell Ken you’re coming.”
Next: Fantano’s hardcore house of brutalization – no poseurs or weaklings accepted
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