Mortals needn’t apply

Bring on the Power Ball!

At the FitExpo event held mid-February in the Los Angeles Convention Center, I joined about 6,000 people from around the country who’d taken the four-minute “tryout,” the first step in becoming a contestant on the newly resurrected NBC spectacle of strength, speed and coordination, “American Gladiators.”

“Gladiators,” which originally ran from 1989 to 1996, features two dozen fit men and women competing against one another and a cast of huge, frighteningly buffed “gladiators” in an array of odd, strenuous physical challenges. There’s Joust, in which contestant and gladiator try to knock each other off a platform with padded, 7-foot-long poles. There’s Hit and Run, crossing a flimsy bridge without getting knocked off by swinging demolition balls. And Power Ball -- full-contact basketball in which gladiators try to prevent contestants from inserting balls into barrels.

Contestants ultimately battle each other in the Eliminator, an obstacle course with a wall climb, a swim under a fiery pyre, a climb up a 30-foot cargo net, a chasm crossing on a rope with a hand bike, a pyramid climb with a descent via zip line, and a run up a reversed escalator.

Four minutes doesn’t seem like much, but it’s plenty of time to weed out the extremely fit from the merely fit, according to “Gladiators” executive producer David A. Hurwitz, who cut his teeth on wacky physical challenges while producing 120 episodes of “Fear Factor” over six seasons. If you can’t do a pull-up, he asks, how are you going to do Hang Tough -- where contestants try to get around the gladiators while swinging on gymnastic rings?

“Strength, speed, coordination, stamina, lots of cardio -- that’s what we look for, and this is a combination of all of that,” he said of the tryout. “I was amazed when we held tryouts a few weeks earlier at Gold’s Gym [in Venice]. We saw guys with great builds who can bench 300 pounds 10 times but couldn’t do five burpees. . . . They were sucking and wheezing.”

Edwin Tinoco, a physical therapist at the Phase IV training center in Santa Monica who has watched “American Gladiators,” agreed that the producers did their job with the four-exercise/four-minute test.

“It provides an efficient assessment of quickness, agility, power, muscular endurance and strength,” he said. The test, he added, reminded him of an abbreviated version of the NFL Combine, the two-day physical evaluation for 330 top-rated graduating collegiate football players, which was coincidentally held a week later.

Not coincidentally, the Gladiators themselves look like linebackers.

Jessie “Justice” Smith, 35, an actor-kickboxer who played power forward on the basketball team at Alcorn State University and four years professionally in Europe, is 6 foot 8, 285 pounds and has a 7-foot-3 wingspan. Alex “Militia” Castro, 37, is 6 foot 3 and 220 pounds, a Cuban refugee, former U.S. Marine, tae kwon do black belt, with a dozen years as an aerialist at Cirque du Soleil.

Both are giant, menacing, Terminator-like specimens constructed of rippling slabs of vein-spackled sinew. I didn’t know whether to shake their hands or climb them.

“We are the ultimate athletes,” said Don “Wolf” Yates, 37, a 6-foot-4, 235-pound man-mountain with halfway-down-the-back Fabio hair and a decade as a rodeo clown bullfighter. “We eat eight meals a day. We train all day. You can’t overpower us. Your only hope is speed -- to avoid us. But we’re super-fast and quick, too. And when we catch you, you hurt.”

“But,” I said, “you seem like such a nice, fun, pleasant guy.”

“I’m not as nice out there,” he said. “When the contestants watch this on reruns in 10 years, I want them to cringe.”

Injuries are, in fact, frequent on the show, although producer Hurwitz said they have been limited to “twisted knees” on the Power Ball game.

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Will they root for you?

An impressive performance on the four-minute test is no guarantee that someone will be selected to go on to the next round, of course.

“Your looks, your story, a TV-friendly personality -- that’s as important as athletic ability,” says Louis Caric, senior NBC casting producer. “We look for somebody America can root for.”

Cops, postal workers and firefighters are examples of professions that are root-able, he said. “And they have to have a reason for doing this, beyond just winning the $100,000 first prize and going on vacation. Touching stories, like losing your father to cancer, are part of the inspiration.”

Lack of a compelling story is why Andy Petranek thinks he didn’t get called back after his tryout last fall for the just-completed “Gladiators.” The 41-year-old owner of the Santa Monica CrossFit Center said he did great on the tryout and could have cleaned up on the final Eliminator, on Feb. 17. “But I guess I didn’t impress them in the 90-second interview after the tryout,” he said.

Rebecca Borawski did. A 33-year-old personal trainer with a background in kung fu kickboxing and Brazilian jujitsu who works with Petranek, says she thinks she got called back because she cried.

“My brother was being shipped off to Iraq, and I lost it,” she said. She cried again in the more extensive second interview and was then asked to take the next step in the process: make a 10-minute tape of herself working out and showing off any colorful personal history and hobbies.

That stopped it for Borawski, who, like all prospects, had to include 30 seconds of swimming on her video, given that so many of the challengers on the show drop into a giant pool. “I can’t swim,” she said. “I tried to learn in a couple days, but it was no use.”

Now if I got that far, that wouldn’t happen to me. I’m a triathlete, among other things. But as I caught my breath, took a swig from my water bottle and walked over to the interview table, I came face to face with my biggest challenge: Showing I had personality.

As I introduced myself, my mind raced: What’s my motivation? Last season’s women’s winner, 32-year-old dancer/model/hairdresser Monica Carlson of Portland, Ore., did “Gladiators” to be a role model for her cute 8-year-old twin daughters.

The men’s winner, 25-year-old Evan Dollard of Chicago, a youth athletic instructor and rock climber who swung on the show’s gymnastic rings like a circus performer and climbed the final 30-foot wall like a human fly, did it in memory of his mom.

“Six years ago, she died of brain cancer,” he said. “First it was four years of breast cancer, then detoxing, then it spread. It was a difficult thing for all of us. She was so strong.”

Motivation . . . motivation. I thought about Beverly Wallack, my vivacious, red-haired, muumuu-wearing, mah-jongg-playing, TV-watching, shopaholic mom, with her outsized personality and outsized appetite for chocolate, pastrami and marbled veal. She died of diabetes four years ago, at age 70 -- a few years after her older brother (my athletic Uncle Marshall, who everyone says I look exactly like), died of the same thing.

So I’m scared. Diabetes can happen to me. That’s one reason I work out ceaselessly and gobble fruits and vegetables. My mom, mainlining apple fritters and chocolate bonbons in heaven, would chuckle with eternal joy thinking I got on national TV because of her.

But to be honest (sorry, Mom), bigger than the threat of diabetes for me is a different motivator that haunts us all: The fear of aging.

I’m 51. I like all-day mountain bike rides with epic, 3,000-foot climbs; playing all-out, one-on-one basketball with my nephew; diving on the tennis court to return shots; and finishing in the top 20% of the field at 10K runs. And realistic or not, I plan to be doing the same stuff when I’m 100. It’s been on my mind for a long time -- long enough to have written a lot of stories about fit aging and even a book that’s a game plan for just that.

I had my shtick, and I was sticking to it. “I want to be on the show because I want to be an example for every baby boomer in America,” I said to my interviewer. “I want to show them that you don’t have to slow down at 50. You don’t have to accept age-related deterioration. Yes, we’ll fall apart if we sit down too long -- but work out frequently and hard and intelligently, and you can go long and strong.

“Every boomer in America will root for me,” I said, making my closing argument. “I’m going to show them that someone over 50 can beat young bloods half their age. Heck, I do it all the time.”

If the interviewer was blown away, he didn’t show it. An eyelid barely twitched. “Thanks. We’ll be calling people back in a couple days,” he said, expressionless.

“But you like my angle, right? The baby boomer thing?” I said, pleading. “I was even born in the year with more births than any other year, 1956. More people are my age than . . . “

“Yes. Thank you,” he said.

Oh, well. My personality could use some help. And I’m a journalist. Definitely not a job Americans can root for.

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Getting on the short list

The callbacks come quickly. In the NBC casting offices in Toluca Lake the next Thursday sits Abdul Fassiz Jallojamboria, a 31-year-old phone collections agent from Chino who dodged rebel bullets and wild animal teeth in his precarious childhood in Sierra Leone.

Muscular, 5 foot 7, he looks fit enough to win it. “And his story is so amazing,” gushes the receptionist.

Next to him sits another callback, Tommy Knox, a chiropractor and gym owner from Huntington Beach who trains a lot of professional volleyball players -- and looks as fit and young as them. He’s handsome, boyish-looking, 47. He can do 29 pull-ups. So much for my own “fit baby boomer” angle.

And Knox may have an even better angle than that: He appeared on the first “American Gladiators” 17 years ago, losing in the semifinals. (“I fell off the cylinder in the Eliminator,” he says.) But the notoriety made him famous in his hometown, and he started his Fast Twitch gym with some cutting-edge equipment he learned about from that season’s winner. “Now I’m at a whole new level,” he says. Who wouldn’t want to witness his comeback?

Next to Knox sits Anthony Gonzales, a 29-year-old Hollywood bar worker with a massive shoulder-to-forearm tribal tattoo on his right side who coaches a high school dance team in jazz, ballet and hip-hop.

He lifts, swims, hikes Runyon Canyon, and has aerial skills that once landed him a tryout with Cirque du Soleil.

“How’d you do on the “Gladiators” tryout?” I ask.

“Oh, I love the show, but I didn’t go to the tryout. I didn’t even know about it,” he says. “I got a call yesterday. They needed to have a couple gay guys on the show.”

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Roy got a callback too. (He’s sure it has nothing to do with his media relationship.) But one week after turning in his video, he hasn’t received any word from NBC.

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Gladiator tryouts: Can he hack it?

“Go!” said the man with the stopwatch. I grabbed the bar and exploded upward.

Pull-ups -- 19, 20, maybe 21 in 30 seconds. Then 10 burpees -- squat, throw your legs out into a plank, do a push-up, stand up and do it again.

Next, a “karaoke” -- twisting and stepping sideways through a line of squares, legs scissoring back and forth. Finally, the “shuttle run” -- 20 full-speed, 40-foot sprints between two orange cones, like a rat on crack.

I’m heaving, heart rate through the roof, exhausted. Elapsed time: About four minutes.

“Wow, that was a lot of pull-ups,” the stopwatch guy said. I nodded between gulps of air.

But was it enough to get me on “American Gladiators”?

Full story, Page 10