Coming to Grips With His New Sport Was Half the Battle

Jay Lyttle “got dusted,” as he calls it, in his first arm-wrestling contest. “I also got my eyes open real quick.”

The well-muscled Garden Grove machinist, who drew the current champion and a former champion for his two matches, got trounced in short order. He also discovered that both opponents were professionals.

“I was always big and physical, so I thought I could do it,” said Lyttle, who was 22 at the time.

Although he has never entered another professional tournament, “I think now I can beat the pros,” said Lyttle, 33, the current world amateur heavyweight arm-wrestling champion.

He will defend that title Sunday during Silverado Days at Peak Park in Buena Park. Regardless of the outcome, next year he plans to turn professional.

“But I don’t think I will lose,” said Lyttle, who weighs 240 pounds. “I’ve been working out three hours a day for nine months, and I’m in real good shape.”

Besides workouts, he is forever squeezing a set of hand grips.

“I squeeze them on the way to work, at the gym, at lunchtime, on work breaks and at home,” said the graduate of Savanna High School in Anaheim, where he played football. “I do 2,000 of them every day.”

His positive thinking comes from his winning-is-everything attitude: “I’ve always been a physical person, and I didn’t know how to lose. . . . I’ve never entered a contest to play. Only to win.”

Lyttle still remembers an error he made in Little League that caused his team to lose. “That made me a loser, and I can’t forget it,” he said.

While he has shared the glory playing team sports, “I’m in charge when I’m arm-wrestling,” he said. “Winning is up to me. I have full control of my destiny.”

When he left high school, “there was nothing for me to do. I didn’t go to college, so there was no more baseball, track or football. Nothing. Everything just dried up, and that was tough because I had always been an athlete and a real physical person.”

Then an ad in a local newspaper about the arm-wrestling tournament got him started.

Debbie Lyttle, his wife of 11 years, is his biggest supporter. Before quitting to work full time, she was a world’s amateur woman’s lightweight arm-wrestling champion.

“In 1982, we were the first husband and wife to win world titles on the same day,” he said. He later lost his title, only to win it back last year.

Lyttle said he expects arm-wrestling to become an Olympic event someday, but not in his time: “It certainly is getting to be a more popular sport.”

He said arm-wrestling does rely greatly upon strength, but “it sometimes bothers me when people talk about the sport and say you don’t have to have brains to compete.”

Lyttle said arm-wrestling is actually a common-sense thinking game: “You have to think fast, because it can be over in a split second.”

Besides his wife and parents, “my friends at work are behind me and will be there Sunday,” he said. “I need something to fuel me, and they get the fire built up in me.”

He may also need them later.

“I’ve got something on the back burners,” Lyttle said. “I’m thinking about bull riding.”

A few years back, a cruise director asked artist Hilda Pierce to teach painting on a ship in exchange for a free trip.

The Laguna Niguel resident agreed. Two of her first students happened to be the wife and daughter of the chairman of the cruise line, who liked her artwork--so much, in fact, that the chairman chose the abstract impressionist artist as one of three painters paid a total of $2 million for their work, which now hangs in the Carnival Cruise Lines’ 2,600-passenger liner Fantasy.

Pierce said she created 1,296 original pieces of art. “I worked seven days a week for three years,” the former Art Institute of Chicago student said.