In This Case, Just the Body Is Willing

I was going to enter the Mr. Olympia contest at the Universal Amphitheatre Saturday, but to tell you the truth, my abs are in deplorable shape. No definition.

My pects are even worse. All definition. My glutes are saggy and I wouldn’t look good at all in a bikini. I don’t look too good in a three-piece suit. I’ve been eating bacon again. I wouldn’t oil my body unless I had to escape from a submarine

You have to be in love with your own body to be a world-class body builder and a contender in the Mr. Olympia contest, which is the Super Bowl of body building. I love my body all right but it’s not requited. My body hates me.

It’s because of all those pizzas with everything I put into it. It feels that, if I really loved it, I wouldn’t give it potato chips. My body hates Cool Whip. I love it. I’m always insisting it have coffee.

My body wants eight hours’ sleep. I want to watch Johnny Carson. My body hates to watch television. It would much rather get on an exercise bike.

My body and I are adversaries. It would leave me if it could. It can’t understand why God didn’t give it to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It would like to belong to somebody who didn’t eat ballpark hot-dogs and Mars bars. My body is a vegetarian. My body would like to be so full of lettuce it would look like a truck from Salinas or I would be just one big Caesar salad. I feed it Big Macs with fries.

My body would like to be on a surfboard. I put it in a golf cart. My body would like to look good in tennis shorts. I even wear pajamas to bed. My body is narcissistic. I hate mirrors. My body wants carrot juice. I give it malts and the hell with it. My body pouts when it goes by health food stores. My idea of health food is a banana split.

Just to torture it, I had lunch the other day with the Body, the most spectacular hunk of muscles this side of Apollo. That would be Lee Haney, the four-time Mr. Olympia. Only Schwarzenegger has won the title more times, seven.

Lee Haney has abs and pects and lats and cuts so superbly chiseled that, lying down, he looks like a relief map of the Alps. He looks like a team, just sitting there. When he grabs his arms and strains his neck, you can see every artery and vein in his body. Body builders don’t need X-rays. They just pump up and you can see right into them. All the insides come to the surface till they look like a road map of Georgia or one of those wire statues in a museum.

Lee Haney may be the best of them. He’s trying to win his fifth Mr. Olympia title this weekend and he’s already been Mr. Universe, Mr. South, Mr. Teen-Age America. He looks like something they dug out of a Greek ruin. Michelangelo couldn’t do this with a chisel.

I got to the lunch early because I didn’t want Lee to see me loading up on dinner rolls. I just knew he would disapprove. I don’t think Lee has eaten any refined flour in 20 years. And the butter was sure to have salt in it.

I didn’t think it would be a good idea to have the Belgian waffles in front of Lee. So I sacrificed and ordered something called a California salad. I’m sure my body kept waiting for me to pour maple syrup on it but I figured I could get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when we got home.

Lee looked at the menu and frowned. “They won’t have what I want, they never do,” he predicted. He turned to the waiter. “Do you have any boiled chicken? Just the chicken, no salt or additives?”

The waiter hesitated.

“Never mind,” said Lee. “Do you have baked potato?”

The waiter shook his head. “We have steamed potato,” he offered.

Lee grimaced. “Steamed in butter, right? Never mind. I’ll just have a glass of Perrier.”

He looked at me. “I’m going into my carbohydrate load,” he explained. “I carbo-load at this time. Pasta, potatoes, that kind of thing. You see, when I’m going into a competition, I take three days to deplete the body. Then I reload and go to 700 or 800 grams of carbohydrates every day. This sends the muscle cells into shock and they tend to overcompensate on the carbo load. You see, since they shrink in the depletion period, they get oversized in the load period, because they’re afraid another depletion period is going to happen.”

My muscle cells, of course, were going into shock over the salad. They couldn’t understand what happened to the French fries.

“Some people say body building is a form of narcissism,” I said boldly. I took a chance because, in spite of his menacing appearance, they say Lee is a gentle man, a father (one son) and a pussycat around the house and his gym in Atlanta. “Did you do it to look good at the beach?”

“I did it to play football,” Lee explained cheerfully. “I did it to look good to the guy across the line of scrimmage from me. I wanted him to think ‘Wow! Lookit the muscles on this guy! I could get killed!’ ”

It didn’t always work that way. Football gave him two broken legs. If you know body builders, you know they don’t even like a pimple on their bodies, never mind a fracture. Lee got out of pads and into a bikini. Football lost a nose tackle but body building gained a great profile. Football is definitely not good for the pects, to say nothing of the glutes.

Every man’s body is a temple. To these guys, it’s a shrine. Not too many years ago, society took them to be just quaint kooks. Bernarr Macfadden made a fortune hanging by his teeth from airplanes, and selling fitness magazines. Jack LaLanne spends his 70th birthday pulling a load of barges from Alcatraz along San Francisco Bay. Charles Atlas got a whole generation of kids into his mail-order program by promising to turn them from 97-pound weaklings into Strangler Lewis.

The whole notion of health foods, regular workouts, diet fads stemmed from Muscle Beach and the original California muscleheads. They worried about their cholesterol even before the AMA began to.

“What’s so wrong about feeling good and knowing you’re doing right by your body?” challenged Lee Haney.

I thought I heard a small voice within me crying, “Why don’t you listen to him, Puffy?” I decided to take him home and punish him--with a hot fudge sundae.

It’s a question of who’s going to be boss here, me or the pects and lats and abs.