A Pig Farmer Puts Arm on Hollywood and Everybody Else

Sunday was another day in Hollywood. A 475-pound Georgia pig farmer and cotton plucker lumbered into a lavish Beverly Hills hotel ballroom, won an arm wrestling tournament by twisting some of the world’s most imposing arms without breaking a sweat, was briefed on his starring role in a Sly Stallone movie by a superstar screenwriter, squeezed into the back seat of a limo and hurried back home to grease up the cotton harvester.

The farmer-plucker-wrestler is Cleve Dean. He is the filet mignon of arm wrestlers. All the rest are hot dogs.

Such as Rick Zumwalt, a 350-pound, body-beautiful dockworker from Hisperia with a long list of arm wrestling titles. Zumwalt stood across the ballroom and glowered as Dean ambled over to the scales, a mere formality since this scales pegged at 300 pounds.

“I’d like to see the sport get a new champion,” Zumwalt said. “He’s about as impressive as a bag of (vomit). I’m mad about those scales. I wanted to see what the fat . . . weighs. I’m a lot faster than him, and I’m damn sure a lot better lookin’. We’re gonna close the place down tonight, and I’m gonna send Cleve to the doctors. I’m gonna shock him.”

This particular tournament was not so much a sporting event as it was a gigantic screen test and publicity gimmick for the Stallone movie, in which “Rockyrambosly” plays a truck-driving arm wrestler with a heart of gold and a pack of thugs hot on his tail. I won’t give away the ending, except to say that Stallone, sweating blood, wins the world title by pinning Cleve Dean’s arm.

It will only happen in Hollywood. In real life, Dean doesn’t lose. OK, once. He took up professional arm wrestling in 1977 and has lost one match. How many victories? Who counts? Thousands. Going into Sunday, he was 8-0 against Zumwalt. Going against Dean is like arm wrestling a drawbridge.

“I’m not undefeatable,” Dean said. “Just close to it.”

In one hokey promotion a couple of years ago, Dean took on all comers, guys off the street, hour upon hour. He put down 500 arms, and nobody lasted a full second.

Big? Dean makes pro football rookie William (the Refrigerator) Perry look like a portable six-pack cooler. Dean is 6 feet 6 inches tall and 6 feet 6 inches wide. His caboose is as big as a caboose, and he could use a hula hoop for a belt.

But it’s Dean’s right arm that draws the attention of opponents. From top to bottom, that arm measures 23 inches at the biceps, 22 inches at the forearm and 10 3/4 inches at the wrist. Then there are the hands. His right hand would just about cover a standard-size magazine.

Dean was always big, although his parents are average size. “My brother only made it to 5-10, 225,” he said. He started working the farm at age 9, when he was already the size of an adult.

“I reckon it’s the way I lifted the bags of hog feed,” Dean said when asked to account for his strength. “They weigh 100 pounds. Most people bend over and wrap their arms around ‘em. I catch a bag by the two ears and lift it right straight up.”

Just for fun, sometimes Dean picks up the rear end of his seven-ton John Deere tractor. He moves through a room about as slow as a parade, but is agile enough to do back flips off a diving board, and is as quick on the arm wrestling table as any of those pocket-watch 300 pounders who challenge him.

Before Dean injured his back on the farm and ballooned from 325 to his present weight, he dropped into the Miami Dolphins training camp one day and stirred up some interest by running a 40-yard-dash in about 5.3.

He’s also an amiable fellow, a clean-living family man, and no hick. Dean, 31, is much traveled and widely recognized.

“I have to be honest with you, I eat the attention up,” he said. “Kids, they say what’s on their mind and they’ll say, ‘Look at the fat man.’ But most folks are very friendly. Besides, I know I’m overweight, and I also know why, and I know I want to do something about it.”

But please, Cleve, not until after the movie. You are a screenwriter’s dream, baby. Sunday, Stirling Silliphant, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of “In the Heat of the Night,” was on hand to check out the scene. Silliphant is working on the Stallone movie script. Silliphant’s eyes got as big as a diesel truck’s hub caps when he saw Dean.

Silliphant cornered Dean--a meeting of superstars--and outlined a scene in the movie where Cleve rescues Stallone from the thugs.

“There are two of them,” Silliphant explained. “You pick them up like this (like a man hoisting a cat in each hand, at arms’ length), and bang them against the truck. Bam, bam.”

One more sensitive Stallone drama, coming up.

Meanwhile, in the publicity-gimmick tournament, Dean mowed down opponents as he mows through the high cotton back home--steady and relentless.

“When the cotton is ready, you pick until you (the machinery) break down or the dew falls,” Dean said.

The dew fell early for Zumwalt on Sunday night in the fancy ballroom. He lost to Dean in an early round, and didn’t make the final.

Dean went undefeated. Hollywood was his.