Barroom Behind, Arm-Wrestlers Go for Grip on Respectability

You’ll never guess what Marie Osmond, Sylvester Stallone, James Caan, Billie Jean King, Trini Lopez and Mr. and Mrs. Fisher of La Mesa have in common.

They’re all arm-wrestlers. They all like gritting their teeth and locking hands, anchoring their elbows, wrenching their wrists and burning their biceps until one of them gets slammed, or the other guy slowly, inexorably compresses him back to horizontal as if he were setting a giant mousetrap. Clunk. Down.

But those stars are strictly weekend arm-wrestlers.

Allen and Carolyn Fisher are different. Arm-wrestling’s their life. The reason they found each other. The cement in their marriage, the main furniture in their apartment, the god that consumes their mornings, nights, weekends and annual vacations, delineates their friends and writes the scripts for their dreams at night.

The last place you probably arm-wrestled was in a sixth-grade classroom or in a bar on a bet.

The Fishers get up in the morning, brush their teeth, then lock arms on one of their specially constructed arm-wrestling tables. Neighbors used to wonder about the tortured hisses coming up from the young couple’s apartment. Now, they know it’s just Al and Carolyn “top-rolling” at the table. They’re serious, all right.

And they’ve gotten serious results. Allen has nine world championships; Carolyn, one.

There are maybe 1,000 serious arm-wrestlers in the United States. Five hundred to 600 usually turn up for the major tournaments like the famous Petaluma Wrist-Wrestle near San Francisco. The sport is also known in such countries as Greece, China, Italy, Germany and India. Canadian women seem to excel in the sport, as do American men. And on top of the top in his class, Allen is one of the most consistent winners.

But to look at him in a crowd, you would say he’s fairly standard build. Not your gym-freak hunk. About 5-foot-11, 165 pounds, 30 years old . . . and then you notice his hands. Huge! Lateral muscles cross like burrowing moles under the skin of the top of his hand from his pinkie (which looks like your thumb) to his thumb (the size of your wrist, almost).

Now, look at his arms. The forearms are like thighs, the nearest thing to Popeye outside the comic book. You can’t help casting your eyes about for bitten-off spinach cans. You take measurements. Bicep: 15 3/4. Forearm: 16 1/2.

Then, you look at Carolyn. About 5-foot-7, 138 pounds, 24 years old and somehow looking slim, petite, delicate. Until you look closer at her arms. They’re not huge, by any measure. But the muscles are lean, mean, hard, the shoulders like a robot’s ball-joints.

They’ve both turned professional in arm-wrestling, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to work at other jobs. Allen is a metal-and-glass worker. Carolyn, who’s Canadian, is a physical therapist’s aide, gymnastics coach and mime teacher.

Right now, they should be in Reno, Nev., competing in the Canadian-American championships, but they couldn’t afford to go. It’s about $300 to get up there, and even if they win, the prize is only $500. They have sponsors (Unipro, a company that makes vitamin pills and energy drinks), but sponsorship just means a free supply of the vitamins. No financing. Which shows where the sport’s at. The big money, the coverage, is not there.

The world still sees it as just one level above the barroom brawl. For Allen and Carolyn, that’s an insult. They see it as a serious sport that should be in the Olympics. But for now, the Can-Am contest has to take a back seat to mortgage payments.

So today, they do what they do maybe twice a week.

Everybody has come around to the Fishers’ place here in La Mesa for an afternoon of training and competing. A dozen or so people are milling inside a small living room already crowded with exercise machines, a table of food, a large video setup showing old arm-wrestling contests, and an old upright piano creaking under a battalion of trophies.

“Hey! Who’s first? Come on, you guys, enough watching the glory days. I want a few good men,” Allen calls. He’s standing ready at a kind of stand-up bar-table with a joy stick at each, two cushions (“losers’ cushions”) on each side, and a couple of red plastic doughnuts in the middle. His elbow is jammed into one, his left hand is gripped around the left joy stick, and his right leg is curled around one of the table legs.

An assortment of generally big fellows comes ambling out from where Carolyn has been feeding them and showing the videos. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers mostly. Obviously, guys who have spread the word at work and like the idea of a sport that doesn’t make you go out and spend hundreds of bucks on equipment and training.

Richard Zawlacki, a big, loping Little John character, strides up to the table. His hand clasps Allen’s large mitt. They swing around, working for an advantage in the hand grip. A guy called Thayer Brehn stands at one end of the table, watching the play. “Shoulders, shoulders,” he says. He pushes Allen’s shoulder back so it’s on a more even keel.

“Go!”

The two heft into two S-twist heaves. Their left hands are hanging onto their joy sticks as if they were all that stood between them and falling off a cliff. Their legs are twisted around the table legs, throttling them like pythons.

“Over the top, Al!” shouts Carolyn, his greatest fan. “Get the cadence. Wrist! Hey, you guys, shoulders!”

She moves in and, with the two big men looking apoplectic from the strain, each with tongue between teeth, cheeks blotchy, popping eyes staring laser beams through the other’s hand, she starts manhandling Allen’s shoulders.

“Come on, back now, use these things. Push. Leverage, Allen.”

Gradually, Big Richard starts cracking. He has the master at his freshest. He watches his hand, leaning back, falling in slow motion, like a great tree being sawed off at its base.

He gives one last desperate stand, with his arm three-quarters down. As if he were waving to someone over his shoulder.

“Careful, Richard, careful,” says Carolyn. “That’s the break-arm position.”

Brehn knows all about this. He broke someone’s arm in a contest like this. Well, he didn’t break it. The guy broke it himself. When your arm doesn’t have your shoulder behind it, your muscles, if you’re strong, are stronger than the bone. They’ll force the bone to hold on until it breaks.

Allen solves Richard’s dilemma for him with a final grunt and shove. The giant’s wrist is on the little red pillow.

Next up is Mark Taylor, a carpenter. He was at a Baxter’s bar one night when Allen was holding a contest to increase interest in the sport. He tried his luck, and the whole thing interested him.

But what impressed him was the interest Allen took. He told him he had potential and asked him if he wanted help to develop his technique. That impressed him. That a guy would put himself out for some complete unknown like that. He was more impressed the day he drove home after Allen’s first training session with his right arm hanging sore and useless.

Taylor’s no match for Allen. No one’s a match for Allen until four or five rounds have tired him out.

But then Allen has been in it for a while. About seven years. That makes him almost a pioneer. “Well, not actually a pioneer,” Carolyn says. “This sport has been around at least since the American Indians.”

Indians, she says, held the contests to resolve serious disputes. The penalties for losing were serious, too: Scorpions, knife blades or hot coals would be placed where either arm came down. A real winning incentive.

For Allen, arm-wrestling has been a major influence on his life. He had abandoned his religion and was into drugs in 1979 when he entered an arm-wrestling contest for the hell of it. That was at Magic Mountain. He came in fifth. There, he met Jack (Popeye) Wynn, who took one look at his hands and said, “With those, and a bit of technique, you could go to the top.”

“But it wasn’t just my hands. I found I had good arm strength, though I have never worked out with weights,” he said. “And also there are other things that count. I have fast-twitch muscles. Good for slams, good for locking when the other fellow is trying to slam you. I’ve got good tendon strength. And that’s almost as important as strong muscles and bones.

“It’s done me a lot of good. Through it, I have found my wife, and I have rediscovered God’s glory. Now everything I do with this sport--it’s not for ego any more. I use it as a vehicle to spread the word of God.”

He pulls at an elastic exercise rope dangling from a bar across the passage door. Next to him is a frightening-looking machine called an Orthotron, all dials and bars and strong struts. Carolyn says it’s the only thing strong enough for him to pull against. None of the guys can match him now.

She and Allen met at a Canadian-American tournament. She had always liked gymnastics back in Toronto, where she was brought up. But when she won an arm-wrestling competition there, she surprised herself, and didn’t exactly thrill her mom.

“She was used to me teaching handicapped kids. That wasn’t the kind of thing she expected her little girl to do,” Carolyn said. It was Allen’s commitment to Christianity and knowledge of the Bible that eventually attracted her to him. Months of letters, talking mostly about the Bible, and frequent meetings at arm-wrestling competitions eventually sealed the deal.

“I’d been having difficulties with guys I went out with ever since I’d taken up arm-wrestling,” she said. “They didn’t know how to handle me. It made them insecure. They felt they didn’t have to be gentlemen any more. They wouldn’t open doors for me.

“They were awkward and gross because I wasn’t the helpless woman. They didn’t know how to cope.

“With Allen, I at last felt a balance. And apart from his Christianity, I was impressed by the fact that he had no pride. He didn’t mind losing. He wasn’t the big mouth. He just kept on winning, and all the time helping out others.”

Allen Fisher has helped most of the guys who compete at his place. Combining his sport with some evangelizing, he is also changing lives.

“Terry Shapiro--he was good, but at first he had a problem with women and smoking. Now, he gives me a good pull,” Allen said. “You don’t have to be a giant, either. Steve Lusby, he weighs 155 pounds, but he’s soooo good. There’s guys like John Brzenk. He’s no monster, but he’s beating everybody.”

“Yeah,” said someone, huffing and puffing from a nearby table. “He’s the one beat the Pig Farmer.”

Pig Farmer?

“That’s Cleve Dean. Weighed 697 pounds last count. Beat him, and you’re somebody.”

“Oh sure,” said Mark Taylor, “with a bit of technique--mind you, it can get dangerous, especially if you take on a big guy in a bar. I was betting drinks with this guy in a bar here, and each time, I flattened him. He’d say ‘One more!’ and before you knew, he owed me 128 beers. He got so mad he hit me on the back of my head and sent me flying into the wall.”

“Well, we’re trying to get the sport out of the bars,” said Carolyn, conscious of the sport’s image.

“And then, remember Mark Gastineau, (New York) Jets defensive lineman, 6-5 and 270 pounds. . . . An arm-wrestler, a good friend, (who) . . . weighed 175 and he flattened Gastineau’s arm at Studio 54. Zapped him. The papers got it and went crazy with it. David and Goliath. (Gastineau) denied it. He wouldn’t admit it.

“Technique, see. It’s not brawn. You’ve got to have concentration and intelligence and nerve. That’s the thing. People think it’s a kind of Stone Age trial of strength. We’ve somehow got to get the word out that it’s a lot more than that if we’re going to grow.”

The biggest hope for the growth of the sport will be out in February at your local movie theater. It’s a film starring Sylvester Stallone called “Over the Top,” and it’s all about a truck driver crossing America in search of his child and supporting himself by arm-wrestling. Last year, Allen and other arm-wrestlers were all asked if they wanted to be in the movie.

Allen turned it down because it interfered with the world title and its $5,000 prize, which he subsequently won. Fees for being in the film were $50 a day.

But Richard Zawlacki went in. And when the cameras were rolling and the lights were heating the Vegas venue to unbearable heat, he had to take on Stallone.

“The first thing he said to me was, ‘Now remember, this is my show, I win, OK?’ I saw straight off that he wouldn’t make a good arm-wrestler,” Zawlacki said. “He has small hands, soft skin, and he didn’t have technique. I don’t think he could beat anybody. But he said, ‘Make it look good.’ So I tried.

“It was all choreographed, of course. But he liked the sport, liked the fact that you don’t get your brains knocked out in arm-wrestling.”

Why the title “Over the Top”?

“That’s the technique when you get your hand over the other guy’s and can force him down,” Zawlacki said.

Everybody at the Fishers’ is behind the film because, for the first time, it will highlight their sport for all the world to see. They want it to become an Olympic sport, but until they can get it out of the bars and onto television, they know they’re a long way off.

The afternoon proceeds by grunts and groans and lots of chat in between. It’s a kind of family atmosphere. As the round robin continues, Allen gets knocked out--he’s tired--and the kid who drove all the way from Lake Elsinore does well. The whole scene looks somehow like seaweed waving in the current as the guys and a few girls grip and wave in motions made slow by the immense strain of the meeting of two immovable forces.

The strain takes its toll over the years. Lift the shirt off Allen’s back and you see an almost S-curved spine. The muscles on the right side are vastly more developed than those on the left side. He has had problems with nerves pinching, with loss of feeling in his fingers. He can’t straighten out his right arm.

His therapist is trying to tell him that he the longer he goes on, the greater the possibility that some of these problems might become big, permanent.

A therapist at Carolyn’s fitness center is trying to help her performance and minimize back and other problems with things called Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation Techniques. But the long-term consequences of years of muscle resistance aren’t clear.

“But I’m more worried about Allen,” Carolyn said. “The sport’s not that important. He can go on with coaching.”

Allen agrees, kind of. In principle. The Bible is his life, not arm-wrestling, but, well, just now, when the sport may be taking off, he’s not going to stop training. After all, nine world titles, that’s so close to 10.

The round robin has sort of collapsed. Some of the girlfriends are getting itchy to go. The stragglers are still talking pushovers, slams, pulls, over the tops, wrist-wrestling (where you hold left hands while you wrestle with your right).

The simple sport is just as full of lore and technical arguments as any other. Maybe with the help of “Over the Top” and the Fishers, we’ll be seeing all of these arguments competing for our ears with baseball and football on Saturday TV.

Hey, why not make the first big televised competition for ’87 a tournament with Marie Osmond, Sylvester Stallone, James Caan, Billie Jean King, Trini Lopez--and, with a suitable handicap, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher of La Mesa?