He’d Pass on Biggest for Best

Mark Henry was introduced to Shannon Miller the other day. They are both Americans. They are both Olympians. Well, folks, so much for what they have in common. Shannon is 4 feet 6 inches. She weighs 69 pounds. You could wrap her up in this newspaper like a Maltese Falcon and carry her home as in-flight baggage. If anyone hangs one more Olympic medal around this teeny-weeny gymnast’s neck, she is going to topple over forward.

“Mark,” I said, “you outweigh her by 300 pounds.”

“Oh, no,” he said, looking doubtful. “Must be more than that.”

Actually, heavy-duty Henry comes from Texas packing, oh, 364, 365, maybe 366 pounds, depending on breakfast. Of course he did go 407 once. He wears an XXXXXL shirt. He wears 16EEEE shoes. He wants to become an Olympic champion weightlifter. He even thinks about playing football again someday. He makes Refrigerator Perry look like a toaster.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “Like to be a movie star.”

“What kind of movie star?”

“James Bond,” Henry said.

“You mean you’d like to be a bad guy who fights James Bond?”

“No,” Henry said. “James Bond.”

Well, now. Talk about a concept. Your basic 364-pound secret agent. Fighting crime in a tuxedo from British Big & Tall. The name is Henry--Mark Henry. Your Majesty’s Secret Service--Special Agent 0077777. Double-chocolate milk shake--shaken, not stirred. Assignment: To destroy the deadly Butterfinger before it’s too late. Look out! There’s a gun hidden inside that Twinkie!

It really made my day Tuesday, meeting Mark. He is everything I ever wanted out of a weightlifter and more. For starters--soon to be followed by seconds--at birth he weighed in at 7 pounds 1 ounce. And as his mother, Barbara Mass of Silsbee, Tex., proudly put it: “Real quick he made up for lost time.”

Like when he dragged a chair into the kitchen and climbed atop it so he could reach the gallon of milk--when he was 13 months old.

Like when he went to school and weighed 225 pounds and was larger than the principal--in fourth grade.

Like when he needed custom-made shoes for weightlifting and traced an outline of his foot and sent away to Adidas and got back this answer: “Funny joke.”

As they say back in Texas, he’s a big ‘un.

Flab-middled, flat-topped Mark J. Henry is a mere barbelling babe of 21 who gets himself all powdered up like a Pampered infant, then waddles a few steps across the carpet to scoop up a load of iron weighing several hundred pounds like a human forklift. He is the hulkster that America’s weightlifting coaches are counting on to carry home gold or silver or some color of ore from the 1996 Games in Atlanta, because they shudder to think how much Henry can do once he gets some experience.

If he hadn’t been shaking like a leaf Tuesday for his first Olympic experience, the big lug might have done even better than he did. In a supporting role for the first and last time to Mario Martinez, the 35-year-old seasoned veteran from San Francisco, it was all the rookie Henry could do to keep from dropping the bar on his quadruple-E foot.

“I was so nervous,” said Henry, who finished 10th. “I couldn’t think straight. All I wanted to do was not make a fool of myself. Kinda humbles you, you know?”

Henry does happen to be humble, which is part of his charm. He also is funny, sweet and everybody’s buddy. He’s the one who knocks on the door of his Olympic neighbor, whenever he hears a stereo playing, to say a big Texas howdy. He’s the one who takes doll-like Shannon Miller by the hand and is careful not to crush it, the one who tells tales of how he can dunk a basketball--Henry stands 6-2 1/2--or do the splits. He’s the one who passes a football around until the other minotaur-sized weightlifters agree to an impromptu game.

After the competition Tuesday, lifter Anders Bergstrom of Sweden pointed a finger at Henry and said: “You be there tonight.”

“What’s that about?” I asked.

“Oh, him and me and the others, we’re gonna wrestle,” Mark said.

Henry was a football player in high school and might have become as good a lineman as his brother Patrick, who starts for Texas A&M;, had he not done so poorly on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, scoring below 700. He also might not have had to take remedial-reading classes at Austin (Tex.) Community College had someone comprehended sooner that Mark is dyslexic.

He amused himself with weightlifting until it became clear that it was made for him, and he for it. By the time he got to Barcelona, he was fit to become the heaviest Olympian in history, outbeefing the 365 1/2-pound body of a Czech lifter four years ago.

Alas, after checking into town at 367 pounds, Henry somehow managed to shed three.

“Mark, you could have been the biggest Olympian ever,” I said.

“Maybe so,” Henry said, “but as you saw for yourself, the biggest ain’t necessarily the best.”

He could always become a gymnast.