U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL LOS ANGELES 1991 : Big Abilities in Big Package : Lifter Mark Henry, 20, Sets Sights on ’96 Olympics, NFL

Mark Henry approaches the bar and pauses before he exerts himself, eyes glancing toward the ceiling. Every muscle in his 6-foot-3, 364-pound frame strains as he snatches 479 1/2 pounds overhead.

He lets out a yell after he completes the lift, which breaks the world record of 476 1/4 pounds. After Henry sets another world record in the clean and jerk, tears roll down his face as he accepts his gold medal in the super-heavyweight division at the 1996 Olympic Games.

The first American to win the super-heavyweight division in Olympic weightlifting since the late Paul Anderson at Melbourne in 1956, Henry is proclaimed the strongest man in the world.

As he stands at attention while the American flag is raised, a TV camera catches his mother, Barbara Mass, wiping tears. from her eyes.

At a news conference after the competition, Henry announces that he is retiring from lifting at 26 to play in the NFL.

After signing with the Raiders, coached by Art Shell, his boyhood idol, Henry also becomes an actor and will make his Hollywood debut in “Terminator 4,” opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Henry dwarfs Schwarzenegger. Henry has a 48-inch waist, a 64-inch chest, 22-inch biceps, 34-inch thighs and a 22-inch neck. Everything about Henry is massive, including his feet, size 16 EEE.

Not only can he lift Schwarzenegger with ease, Henry says he is able to bench press 550 pounds and squat 1,010 pounds.

Mark Henry’s dream ends when he wakes up from his afternoon nap and hurries off to the gym for his second workout of the day. To help realize his ambitions, he pumps iron twice a day.

Henry, who turned 20 last month, has made remarkable progress since switching from powerlifting to Olympic weightlifting eight months ago, setting a national junior record of 343 3/4 pounds in the snatch. After winning the National Junior title last March, he was fourth in the national championships the following month and sixth in the World Junior Championships in May, lifting a total of 716 1/4 pounds.

Henry, who will lift in the Olympic Festival Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, has personal records of 343 3/4 pounds in the snatch and 364 pounds in the clean and jerk. He has snatched 352 pounds and clean and jerked 440 3/4 pounds in practice.

Although Henry’s totals are well under the snatch world record of 476 1/4 pounds, set by Bulgaria’s Antonio Krastev in 1987; the clean and jerk world record of 586 1/2 pounds, set by Leonid Taranenko of the Soviet Union in 1988; and Taranenko’s world record total of 1,047 1/4 pounds, Henry has made rapid progress.

“Mark is the greatest raw talent we’ve come across in a long time,” said Jim Schmitz, president of the U.S. Olympic Weightlifting Federation.

Although weightlifting, like track and field, has been marred by its share of steroid scandals, Henry said he has never taken steroids.

“I really didn’t hear about steroids until 2 1/2 years ago,” Henry said. “Now I hear about it everyday because people ask me about it and I see it on TV--people dying from it.

“I’ll take a drug test every week to show people I’m not on steroids.”

Tommy Kono, a former U.S. Olympic weightlifter who won gold medals in 1952 and ‘56, a silver medal in ’60 and later coached the Mexican, West German and U.S. Olympic weightlifting teams in three other Games, says Henry could be the best American super-heavyweight since Anderson.

“Mark has great potential,” Kono said. “He really doesn’t know what he’s capable of doing yet. If he’s guided correctly, I’m sure he can be a world-class weightlifter.”

Selected to live and train at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, Colo., Henry, who weighed 407 pounds when left his home in Sillsbee, Tex., last March, has shed 43 pounds.

After losing weight when he decided to concentrate on Olympic lifting, Henry had to secure the proper equipment. His lifting shoes had to be custom-made because of the size of his feet.

“We faxed an order to Adidas in Germany and they thought it was a joke,” Henry said. “We had to send them three pictures of my feet and a picture of myself before they sent the shoes.”

Henry is coached by Dragomir Cioroslan, a former Romanian Olympic weightlifter who earned the bronze medal in the 165-pound division at the 1984 Olympics and won 10 world titles.

“He is a very special talent,” Cioroslan said. “His physical capacity is outstanding. I’ve never seen anything like it before. He’s only 20, but he can lift 400 pounds in a gym.

“What he really needs to do is to adjust to the high intensity and volume work in the gym. When he gets that, his results are going to go up.”

Cioroslan, who coached the Romanian national team before defecting to the United States, is cautious in assessing Henry’s potential.

“My philosophy of coaching is fact first, talking after,” Cioroslan said. “I would like to show you some results, and I’d be very happy to talk after that. But I’m very optimistic about his potential.”

Henry also needs to improve his technique.

Unlike powerlifting, which requires only brute strength and slow, controlled movements, Olympic lifting combines technique, flexibility, explosive speed and concentration.

“You have to learn not only technique, but how to compete,” Schmitz said. “More people play softball than baseball because it’s easier. More people are powerlifters than Olympic lifters because it’s easier.”

It can take years to perfect the two Olympic lifts, the snatch and the clean and jerk.

The snatch is performed in one continuous motion in which the bar is raised from the platform overhead in one fluid motion. The lifter pulls the bar to about chest height and then, in the moment before the bar starts to descend, pulls his body into a squat position under the bar, securing it overhead.

The clean and jerk involves two separate movements. For the clean, the lifter lifts the weight from the floor to his shoulders in one movement. The bar is pulled to about waist level and before the bar starts to descend, the lifter gets underneath the bar, secures it on his chest or shoulders and stands. The lifter then jerks the bar from his shoulders to an overhead position in one movement and splits his legs. The lifter brings his feet together and awaits a signal from the referee to lower the bar.

It is complicated enough to explain, more difficult to master.

“Olympic lifting is a sport of technique, not only of physical quality,” Cioroslan said. “It’s a dynamic sport based on progressive technique and very scientific work.

“Mark really needs to improve his technique and his confidence. He has the chance to be a great athlete.”

The fourth-ranked U.S. super-heavyweight lifter behind Mario Martinez of South San Francisco, Jeff Michels of Chicago and Dean Simpson of Baton Rouge, La., Henry hopes to compete in the 1992 Olympics even though he hasn’t met the qualifying standards. But if he continues to improve, Henry has a more realistic shot at lifting in the 1996 Olympics, when he will be 26.

“The only thing better than winning a gold medal is going to heaven,” Henry said. “That’s the truth. I put getting the gold medal right up there with going to heaven.

“The way people talk about Paul Anderson, they’ll talk about me, because I’m going to break every world record in the super-heavyweight division.”

But there are those who think that Henry, the subject of a recent profile in Sports Illustrated, has received too much attention.

“I think Mark can be fantastic,” Schmitz said. “I’m a little nervous about giving him all this advance publicity. He came on the scene and was really doing well, but he hasn’t improved. He was totaling 716 1/4 pounds in April, and he hasn’t improved. Maybe all this publicity has distracted him.

“He has the physical tools to be a medal winner at the World Championship and Olympic level. Getting him to put in the time and pay the price of the pain, agony and defeat that happen along the way is the key. There’s no shortcut for that. That will be a real test of his character, which I think he has.”

A star guard and offensive tackle at Sillsbee High, Henry dreamed of playing college football like his older brother, Pat, a defensive lineman at Texas A&M.;

Henry has good speed for his size, running the 40-yard dash in 5.19 seconds, and also is agile enough to dunk a basketball. But college football recruiters backed off because Henry, who has dyslexia, failed to meet NCAA eligibility standards on the SAT, scoring 620--80 points under the NCAA minimum.

“I had to decide whether I should try to play pro football after high school or try to pursue my powerlifting career,” Henry said.

He decided to become a lifter.

An all-state powerlifter, Henry won three state prep weightlifting championships. Encouraged by Terry Todd, a former Olympic lifter, Henry decided to concentrate on Olympic lifting.

“Terry Todd told me that I could make money in powerlifting, but I could make a lot more money if I won an Olympic gold medal,” Henry said.

But Henry still dreams of playing in the NFL.

“I want to lift as long as I can, but once I start to decline, I’ll go into football because I’ll still have my strength,” he said. “I’ll be stronger than most NFL players, which is already evident, and I’ll be more explosive than most NFL players.”

On the surface, it might seem unrealistic for Henry to think he can compete in pro football after not playing in college. If he follows through with his master plan, he will have been out of football for eight years before he makes his NFL debut.

But Henry is determined.

“When somebody says I can’t do something, it motivates me to do it,” Henry said.

Henry was introduced to weightlifting when his mother bought a beginner weight set for him and his brother.

“I used to watch “Wide World of Sports” a lot at the time when Vasily Alexeyev of the Soviet Union was the super-heavyweight Olympic champion, and I’d go in the yard and try to do the stuff they showed him doing in the TV clips,” Henry said. “But it was so hard that I’d just go back to bench pressing.”

Henry was a natural because of his size.

He was 5-10 and 225 when he was 12, and by the time he started high school, he was 6-3 and 350.

“We always knew he was very strong as a child,” said his mother, Barbara. “He had to be careful just when giving the girls in the family hugs. He just didn’t know his own strength.

“Mark was kept out of a lot of sports when he was younger because he was bigger than the other kids. He played football, but I don’t think that was his calling. He really took to weightlifting.”

After graduating from high school, Henry bulked up by consuming 10,000 calories a day in an attempt to improve his powerlifting.

“I got tired of eating,” Henry said. “It made me sick some days from having to eat to get up to 400 pounds so I could squat 1,000 pounds. I used to eat red meat and cheese from in the morning until I went to bed.

“I’d have two or three steaks between breakfast and lunch, and all through the day I’d be eating chicken and fish. I’d mix it up because I wanted to try everything.”

Is it difficult to cook for Henry?

“It wasn’t difficult at all,” his mother said. “I just cook a lot of old-time country cooking, like chicken and dumplings and biscuits. Mark and his brother can go through a whole big pan of biscuits.”

Although Henry isn’t sensitive about his bulk, he resents the attention it draws in public.

“I don’t mind older people or girls staring at me,” Henry said. “But sometimes guys will look at me funny and say stupid things.

“I’m not fat. There’s a difference between being big and being fat.”