A Star Profile: George Farah - Mr. Bulletproof

Part 1

It isn’t very often that I get to talk to a bodybuilder who has had a truly eventful life.  Aside from playing sports as a kid and having a rare ability to build muscle, a lot of the pro’s haven’t done much that’s dramatic or exciting.  George Farah is a notable exception. Growing up in war-torn Beirut, his early years were bathed in violence and tragedy.  Several years after immigrating to the United States, he was shot three times in  a brutal robbery attempt and barely managed to survive.  Rather than give up on bodybuilding after this incident, he redoubled his resolve and somehow managed to turn professional on his very first attempt, a feat that would be remarkable enough without the extenuating circumstances.  Written off as too small to make an impact in the land of the giants we call the IFBB, he placed third at his pro debut in Texas and qualified for the Olympia, defeating a slew of men with far more size and competitive experience.  George Farah’s whole life has been based on beating the odds stacked against him, which in my mind makes him one hell of an inspiration to all of us who face the myriad adversities life hands us.   

The following interview was conducted in 2003.

For those who don’t know their recent history too well, can you briefly explain what the civil war in Lebanon was all about and how long it went on for?

GF:  It started in 1975, and it was all about religion – the Moslems against the Christians all over again.  It began when a large group of Palestinian refugees came to Lebanon and had violent clashes with the Christian militia.  Within a year it had erupted into a civil war.  Beirut became a divided city.  West Beirut was the Moslem side, and the East side was Christian, where my family lived.  The war went on until 1992 and a lot of people died needlessly.

How large of a country is Lebanon?

GF:  The population is about five million, and it’s 10,455 kilometers square.

My metric system skills are a bit hazy. . .

GF: That’s about the size of Connecticut.

In what ways did the war affect you and your family from early childhood on?

GF:  I lost a lot of family and friends.  It was really tough.  I feel terrible for both sides.  People were being killed based on their names.  If you went into East Beirut and your name was Abdul, they would kill you.  If you wandered into West Beirut and your name was George, same thing.  The bombing was constant and Beirut was always full of smoke, dust, and rubble.  One time a church on my street was bombed and it destroyed half of the block.  My family lived on the third floor of an eight-story building, and the top five floors were blown off in that blast.  My life story would have to be a book, there were so many things I saw and experienced that I will never be able to forget. 

At what age did you join the military, and what was your role in fighting the war? 

GF:  I was twelve, almost thirteen.  All boys had to bear arms at that age.  We were brainwashed to believe that our religion needed us to fight for it.  I remember that the machine gun I carried was bigger than me.  By the time I was fifteen I was in the regular military and held the rank of sergeant.  They had to falsify my age to allow that.  I had been working as a translator for the US Marines since they arrived in ’83.  It’s so ironic that all those years I never got shot, but when I came to the USA and thought I was safe, that’s when I did.

So you never were injured or had any seriously close calls?

GF: No, I didn’t say that.  Once a piece of shrapnel from an explosion hit a major artery in my leg and I passed out from the blood loss and shock.  Some soldiers were going around picking up the dead and throwing them inside a tank to transport them out of the combat zone.  They thought I was dead and tossed me in with a bunch of corpses.  Luckily my best friend was looking for me and found me, otherwise I would have died in there with them.  Another time I went off on my motorcycle to pick up breakfast for me and my friends. I was a couple blocks away when I heard a huge explosion.  All of my friends were killed, and if I hadn’t been the one to go get the food, I would have been too.  Honestly, I could talk all day about these things and still not get all of it out.  Anyone who had been through a war knows what I mean.

Lebanese culture goes back a couple thousand years, doesn’t it?  Were they the Phoenicians of ancient times?

GF: Yes, they were the first to sail on the ocean.  The Old Testament of the Bible talks about them. They made their ships from the cedars of Lebanon and were a very advanced society.

How did you discover bodybuilding?

GF:  I remember in 1983 when I was twelve, I got a copy of the Arabic version of Flex magazine. Immediately I knew I wanted to look like these men, as small as I was.  I really think I was born to bodybuild.  The training, even the posing came naturally to me.  I could hit a front lat spread when I was only 130 pounds and people were like, “wow!”  I had always been athletic, doing kickboxing and karate since I was four or five years old, so I was lean and somewhat muscular already.  I even ate healthy from a young age.  People are shocked when I tell them I have never had a sip of alcohol, smoked a cigarette, or done recreational drugs.

How did you manage that?  Didn’t you have friends who got drunk or high?

GF:  About eighty percent of my friends in the war smoked hashish every day to deal with the stress and escape reality, but I just knew it wasn’t good for my body.  I was into feeling healthy and having a six-pack.  Even as a teenager I ate five to seven meals a day.  I loved reading about nutrition and all that kept me from being tempted.  It wasn’t that I had a moral problem with drugs or alcohol, just that I knew they were poison to the body.

Were you inspired by Mr. Olympia Samir Bannout, the Lion of Lebanon?

GF:  Oh, of course.  Even though he left Lebanon before I got into bodybuilding, he still came over to Beirut every year to visit friends and family and give exhibitions at our contests.  When I was only ten or eleven years old I saw him training at a gym down the street from where I lived, and I was in awe of his development.  He had already turned pro at the IFBB World, and then in ’83 he won the Mr. Olympia.  That was such an incredible thing, for someone from such a small place as Lebanon to become the world’s greatest bodybuilder.  It gave me a lot of hope and made me think, ‘maybe I could do that too.’

How did you start competing, and what was your first show like?

GF:  In 1989 when I was fifteen there was a local show I had heard about called the Mr. Mount Lebanon and I knew I wanted to win it.  I became the youngest man to ever win it shortly after, and that was an incredible feeling.  People were already telling me how good I could be if I stuck with bodybuilding, and that encouraged me.  I was only 145 pounds, but the basic shape I have now was there in a smaller version.

Have you always been able to beat heavier men on shape and conditioning?

GF:  Yes, for years I was always at the bottom of my weight class.  At age 19 I did my first contest in the USA, the Mr. Lake Ontario.  I was only a 164-pound middleweight, but I won the Men’s open middleweight and then the overall.  The first show I did after I got shot was the ’99 NPC New York State.  I was only 169 pounds, but I was beyond shredded.  I won the overall there and beat guys as much as seventy pounds heavier.  Backstage at my first pro show, the 2002 Southwest Pro, I remember looking around at all these huge guys backstage like Paul Dillet and Craig Titus and saying to myself, “George, what are you doing here?  These guys are monsters!”  I was barely 200 pounds and here is Paul at 270 looking three times my size.  But thankfully bodybuilding is about more than just size.  I ended up beating most of the big guys there except for my buddy Bob Cicherillo.

What was it like in the first couple months you arrived in the USA?  Was it a massive culture shock?  Did you fit in immediately, or were you an outsider?  Did you speak English?

GF: I came here at age seventeen, and I didn’t speak much English at all. I had been educated in French and also spoke fluent Lebanese and Arabic.  The biggest culture shock was all the laws here in the USA.  Growing up in a war, you sort of made your own rules.  I had been driving a car since I was thirteen, for instance, and we didn’t really have all the traffic and speeding laws like you do here.  We didn’t have police to keep the peace and enforce justice, either.  But I loved the USA, it was where I had always wanted to live.  The first week I was here I went to the gym and that helped me feel a little more comfortable right away.

Was this in Rochester?

GF: No, when I first came here I stayed with my brother in Arizona.  But I am different, when I want something I work hard.  My brother always spoke Lebanese around me and I knew I would never learn to speak English well unless I left.  So I moved with some friends to Chicago and shared an apartment.  It was tough, but it was what I needed to do.

Okay, so how did you end up in Rochester?  Did your parents move there or something?

GF:  My mom and dad come over to visit every year, but they still live in Beirut.  A friend of mine who had been in the military with me invited me to stay with him in Rochester and he would get me a job.  It didn’t work out and I decided to leave.  I was at the supermarket buying apples to eat on the drive back to Chicago when I met a girl in the produce section.  That ended up being my girlfriend for the next six years, and I have been in Rochester ever since.  I’ve been here fifteen or sixteen years.

Okay, it’s time to talk about how you were shot.  Tell me exactly how it all went down.

GF:  Alright.  I had a wholesale car business, and I was meeting a couple friends at a car auction.  The auction was in a pretty bad part of downtown that I never went to, and I wanted to stop into a convenience store to buy a bottle of water.  These auctions can go on for hours and I didn’t want to dehydrate.  As I was walking in, I saw this guy behind me in the window reflection, pointing a gun at me.  Before I had time to even think or turn around, he shot me twice in the back.  One bullet hit me in the kidney and the other one came very close to my spine.

Wait a minute, he didn’t ask you for your wallet, nothing, he just started shooting?

GF:  Exactly.  I don’t know if he wanted my gold chain or what, but I would have given anything to him if he had asked.  Then his friend comes up with a gun right in front of me and I started fighting with him.  His gun went off pointing into my waist, the bullet actually went through my belt. There was a third gunman who never fired.

Do you know what caliber guns these were?

GF:  Both .45’s.  They make a big hole. 

Jeez.  What happened after that?

GF: I managed to dial 911 on my cell phone.  The police showed up and had a little shoot-out with these kids.  Then the ambulance was there.  They put me in the back and all of a sudden the pain hit me all at once.  The pain – I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.  It felt like my back was gonna crack wide open.  I was bleeding everywhere, and not just from the gunshots.  I was hemorrhaging, or bleeding internally.  Blood was coming out of my mouth, my nose, my ass, my penis, it was just horrible and frightening. 

What happened to the assailants?

GF:  I don’t like to talk about that for a couple reasons.  For one, they were only fifteen to seventeen years old.  Secondly, they were members of a gang and these groups are always looking for revenge when anything happens to their own.  When I got shot, the kid who shot me in the back was shot by the police.

Was he killed?

GF: I would rather not say. The other two kids got away, but the next week they tried to rob a bank and they were caught then.

Wow, I had no idea Rochester was such a rough place.

GF: It’s everywhere, any major city has problems like this.

How long were you in the hospital and what was done to you?

GF: First they performed surgery to repair my kidney, bladder, and lower spine.  Part of one bullet was too close to the spine so they had to leave it in there.  They removed half my bowels and brought my small intestine out to a pouch above my right groin, a procedure called an iliostomy.  I went into cardiac arrest seven times during all of this.  I was in intensive care for five weeks and spent a total of five months in the hospital.  My bodyweight dropped from 200 to 130 pounds.  The day I was discharged was very depressing.  I was happy to be alive, but my muscles were gone, I felt weak and tired, and I had a bag outside where my waste went into to care for. It was a very low point for me to say the least.

After losing so much bodyweight, how were you mentally and physically able to come back and win your state title just six months after having surgery to reconnect your bowels?

GF: I actually got my weight back up to 180 before I had that final surgery, but after that I went right back down to 129-130.  When that surgery was done, I needed something positive to focus on, a challenge.  I decided to do the NPC New York that was six months away and win it.  The news channels did a story on my comeback and asked people to come to the show and support me.  Everyone at my gym thought I was crazy for thinking I could come back so soon from all this and win.  I stayed covered up the whole time so nobody could see what was going on with my physique, but it was all coming together. I was gaining muscle and losing fat every day and training my tail off.  The day of the show, a thousand people were in the audience and half of them were there to cheer for me.  It was a great feeling, and I won hands-down.  I knew I could, it was just a matter of not letting the shooting and the surgeries being an excuse to slack in any way.

I don’t mean to be disgusting, but what was it like having to wear an iliostomy bag?  How long did you have it?

GF:  I had that thing a little over a year, and it was so inconvenient and unpleasant.  I literally had nightmares that I would be stuck with it the rest of my life.  You have no idea what a relief it was just to be able to use the bathroom again like a normal person.  Something like that we all take for granted unless it’s taken away from us. 

Do you still have difficulties absorbing the food you eat?  Are there any foods that give you more problems than others?

GF:  I have adapted pretty well to having a shorter digestive tract.  Food goes through me faster than it used to, so I have to eat a little more often than the average bodybuilder – about every hour to hour and a half instead of the usual two to three hours.  Certain foods irritate me and cause pain, like fat or junk foods. 

So I guess you don’t have pizza after a contest like everyone else?

GF: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I never eat junk food.  I’m human.  After a show I will have pancakes and peanut butter, but eating a pizza would be a bad idea.

You still have one more hernia operation to go through, right?  Have they figured out a way to repair it that won’t disfigure your abdominals?

GF: I was supposed to get it this year, but it would end my competitive career if they do it the way they propose.  A mesh will be placed over my abdominals, and when I diet down and get that thin skin it would look like a screen door.  I am looking for another way to repair the hernia that won’t destroy my abs like that. 

Obviously the hernia can’t be limiting your training too much, from the looks of your physique.

GF:  I have found ways to work around it.  The main thing is that I can’t wear a weight belt when I train because we all push out our abdominal walls against a belt in exercises like squats.  That would only make the hernia worse.  It’s not easy to train hard and smart at the same time, but that’s what I do.  Before this happened I could squat 500 or 600 pounds.  Now that I can’t wear a belt the heaviest I go is 405 for fifteen.  But it’s fine, the legs grow from high reps as well as low reps. The bullet in my back hurts occasionally too. I do have to work a lot harder than most guys to get in shape.

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