Rock of Ages

It’s 8 o’clock on a Wednesday morning at Bally’s Total Fitness in White Marsh, Md., and the free-weight area has all the calm of a logging camp.

Rock music blares, metal plates clang against barbells, beefy guys in tank tops grunt and strain against various hellish-looking exercise machines, while other beefy guys check themselves out in the full-length mirrors.

Then you notice the four guys working on the decline bench.

Three things strike you immediately:

No. 1: Each one of these guys is old enough to be somebody’s grandfather.

No. 2: It’s probably not wise to use that grandfather line in their presence, since each is built like a stevedore.

And No. 3: Unlike many of the others working out, who wear an expression suggesting that a relative just went down in a plane crash, these guys are having fun.

“Whoo-ee! Now we’re rockin’ and rollin’!” shouts Joe Clapers, a white-haired, retired optician who will be 74 in December and who has just pressed over his head a barbell groaning with 300 pounds.

Clapers, it turns out, is the inspirational focus for this group, which is generally known as the “Old Guys” and whose other members are Bob Franklin, 63, Ray Noppinger, 69, and Phil Smeak, who is only 51 and therefore would probably get carded if he went out with the others for beers.

Three days a week, they meet to move around inhuman amounts of weight, to inspire and insult each other, and to bask in the camaraderie of a dedicated band of men unwilling to let age dictate how much they can lift.

Despite good-natured ribbing by other regulars (“Slow down. I don’t feel like being a pallbearer.”), their rigorous 90-minute workouts are viewed with awe by the crowd at Bally’s.

“We probably out-lift 90% of the people in this gym,” says Smeak, a former Baltimore police officer and now a Conrail cop. “We’ve had young guys come here, work out with us and be stepping on their tongues.”

Who knows what compels a man in the autumn of his life to begin his day in a crowded weight room, straining with 90-pound dumbbells while Franklin, a retired captain in the Baltimore County Fire Department, screams: “C’mon, fat boy! Do it or I’ll smack you right in the mouth!”

Noppinger, a retired manager for a steel fabricating firm, once tried to explain it to his wife, Elizabeth.

“You don’t understand,” he told “Boots” Noppinger. “You go to the gym, talk bad to each other, push yourself on the weights past where you thought you could go, come home sore as hell. Man, you gotta love it!”

There was silence for a moment.

Finally Boots said: “You’re right. I don’t understand it.”

*

On this gray Wednesday at Bally’s, the Old Guys are in the midst of a typical workout, a torturous three sets each of warmup bench presses (160-185 pounds), bench presses (up to 310), decline bench presses (up to 325), dumbbell bench presses (90 pounds in each hand), tricep bench presses (up to 160), lat pulldowns (up to 150), tricep pushdown exercises (up to 200), barbell curls (up to 110) and cross-cable flys (up to 80).

Clearly, it’s a workout that could leave a 25-year-old sprawled on the couch for days.

In addition, Clapers does abdominal work and walks three miles daily. Smeak walks and runs around the upstairs track. Franklin swims a half-mile in the pool and does water exercises.

The four have been working out together for two years now. There was no formal beginning, they say; they all just sort of got together.

Yet watching them, you see that each plays a clearly defined role within the group.

Clapers, who’s been lifting since his Navy days on a destroyer escort in World War II, is the calm, experienced guru, of whom Smeak says reverently: “Joe was not a waiter at the Last Supper, as many people think. He was a busboy.”

A former three-time state bench-press champion, Clapers is not a particularly big man (5-feet-10, 185 pounds).

But he has arms like bridge piers and a thick, powerful upper body. At 50, he was still bench-pressing 410 pounds. He says he’s never been sick, never had a broken bone and within weeks of an angioplasty last year to clear out an artery that was 80% blocked, he was back in the gym, all but whistling on the treadmill.

Clapers is also a Christian, deeply spiritual (“I say the joy of the Lord is my strength”). When the jokes get a little too raw, he is clearly uncomfortable.

*

Bob Franklin, a blocky Korean War veteran with thinning hair, a quick smile and big tattoos on each bicep from his days in the Navy, is perhaps the hardest worker of the four. He’s the guy who gets everyone pumped up for a workout, the guy who pushes them all to their limits.

Smeak calls him a “despot.” Nevertheless, Franklin wakes up Smeak better than a blast of amyl nitrate, and is always exhorting the others on proper technique.

“Bob feels if you’re gonna come out here and bust your butt, you might as well get the most out of it,” says Smeak. “And he’s right.”

Noppinger says Franklin, who’s been lifting since he first wandered from the racquetball court into the dank Towson YMCA weight room in 1980, is “pound for pound, the strongest guy over there.”

But at 5-feet-8 and 175 pounds, Franklin admits he has a classic “little-guy complex.”

“I’m very competitive,” he says. Then he tells you about this Caribbean cruise he took with his wife of 41 years, JoAnn. One day on board, there was a pseudo-athletic competition for the guests, one of those get-togethers designed to get people mingling and burning a few calories before they start swilling their Mai Tais and lining up for the next buffet.

The first event called for each competitor to dive into the water and retrieve as many spoons as possible from the bottom without coming up for air.

Franklin, immediately shifting into hyper-competitive mode, was the only one to retrieve all eight spoons. He won the next few events, too.

In fact, he didn’t lose until they came up with some really bogus competition in which participants had to swim the length of the pool, chew five saltine crackers and whistle “Dixie.” Franklin says he’s finally over that loss.

Noppinger, another Korean War vet, acts as the calming influence when Clapers and Franklin get revved up and the veins in their necks stand out like culvert pipes and the workouts start to get too frenetic.

Amiable, even-tempered, he has the stride of an athlete (he earned 14 letters in high school soccer, basketball, baseball and track). An inveterate socializer, he kibitzes with the men at Bally’s and flirts with the women.

Like the rest of the group, Noppinger works hard; bumping into him is like bumping into a chimney. Still, he seems above the macho posturing that often permeates the weight room. Not long ago, Clapers and Franklin were doing 90-pound dumbbell presses with each arm. Noppinger felt this was an ungodly amount of weight to lift and wanted no part of it. Settling onto the weight bench, he announced he would work only with the 70-pounders.

“All right, here you go,” said Franklin, handing him a couple of dumbbells.

Noppinger promptly knocked off a half-dozen repetitions. When he was through, he stretched, shook his head and remarked that the weights were sure feeling heavier that day.

“They should,” said Franklin. “They’re 90s.”

This set off great gales of laughter.

*

Smeak is clearly in charge of comic relief, a stand-up act who works the room from the moment warm-up reps begin.

Yet it is Smeak who has undergone the most startling physical transformation as the result of these workouts.

He weighed 285 when he started two years ago; now he’s down to 240. He had a 48-inch waist back then; it now measures 38. Meanwhile, his chest has expanded to 49 inches. Striding through Bally’s, he resembles nothing so much as a stand-up freezer with legs.

“In the beginning, it was frustrating,” Smeak says. “You’re lifting with Joe and he’s 73 years old and lifting these phenomenal weights. I couldn’t even spot him. I couldn’t even lift it off his chest.”

Still, he stayed with it, and when once he could barely bench 135 pounds, he now lifts 345 on the decline bench. It is, he says, part of a metamorphosis that is as much spiritual as it is physical.

At 29, he became a Christian. But it’s not a pretty story.

One night, police Officer Smeak was in a sub shop on Greenmount Avenue when a woman, whom Smeak thought of as a local holy-roller, asked if she could talk to him about Jesus.

“The last thing I need,” Smeak replied sweetly, “is a loser like you telling me about a loser like Jesus.” The woman, Lois Gorlat, prayed for him anyway--for nearly three years. The prayers must have worked; he started attending services at Perry Hall Baptist Church. “I came to the gradual realization,” says Smeak, “that I needed everything they were talking about.”

*

It is a little past 9:30 and the Old Guys are wrapping up their workout with 110-pound barbell curls.

Clapers has just banged the curling bar into the rack after a lot of reps when a young guy with a ponytail, maybe 28, comes up to him. He has been watching Clapers from the squat rack, and now there is something he must share with Clapers immediately.

“I just hope I’m doing that when I’m your age,” the young guy says, shaking Clapers’ hand solemnly. “You guys are my heroes.”

The Old Guys nod and smile. They’ve heard it before, dozens of times, but it still sounds just as sweet.