Horsing Around with Ronnie Coleman
Horsing Around with Ronnie Coleman
So whenever a proper writer (and me as well) sits down to script a story they try to come up with a hook. For this effort the hook is more complicated than the one Captain Ahab attempted to snare Moby Dick with, but was prompted by the countdown to the Kentucky Derby of May 2nd.
Dateline: March 3, 2013, Columbus, Ohio: It was the day after Dexter Jackson took his fourth Arnold Classic (2013) and your intrepid reporter was making his way to the Expo when I bumped into eight-time Mr. Olympia Ronnie. “How you doing Ronnie?” was my greeting. Nothing came back and he pointed to his throat and mouthed, “I’m horse.” Well its often been said he’s as strong as a horse, but my immediate thought was, Wow! Ronnie’s starting to believe his own publicity. Then it dawned on me that he was intimating that he had lost his voice and was “hoarse” due to a case of laryngitis. Still the word (here comes the hook) evoked memories of the first time I ever met the man who put the flex in Metroflex gym, in his hometown of Arlington, Texas.
That initial interaction was when we both attended the 1991 IFBB World Amateur Championships being staged in Katowice, Poland. I had a dual role for the event; as reporter and as captain of the English Federation of Bodybuilders team. In fact my team comprised only one: Light heavyweight Mike Williams, a fabulous guy who tragically passed away in 2006 at only 50 years of age. Ronnie was there as the USA heavyweight representative. He’d only been training a couple of years and had just finished fourth in the NPC Nationals in a line-up that was deeper than a Kai Greene monologue. Here’s the top nine: 1, Kevin Levrone; 2, Flex Wheeler; 3, Paul DeMayo; 4, Ronnie; 5, Matt Mendenhall; 6, Bob Cicherillo; 7, Chris Cormier; 8, Edgar Fletcher; 9, Dean Caputo. You don’t see line-ups like that anymore.
WHERE’S THE BLOODY HORSE?
Anyway, we digress, and we haven’t got to the horse connection yet. With the World Championships being a drug-tested event, Ronnie was the highest placing Nationals heavyweight to accept an invitation to Poland. His teammates were light-heavyweight Ron Coleman, middleweight Yohnnie Shambourger, lightweight Jose Guzman and bantamweight Earl Snyder, who finished fourth, second, first and fourth in their respective World Championship divisions.
My English “team” met up with the USA team at Warsaw airport and we all clambered on a bus for a four-hour nighttime drive to Katowice. It was late October in Poland, which in no way can be confused, with Malibu in July. The bus was unheated, there was no food on board, and the drive was as uncomfortable and as miserable as ….. well, travelling through Poland in winter with a bunch of freezing, hungry, jet-lagged, carb-depleted and irritable bodybuilders. Halfway through
the journey, which comprised mostly wooded terrain, we came into a clearing where there was an old battered van doubling as a refreshment and food hostelry. We got out and tried the coffee; nobody was hungry enough or brave enough to try the food. It was spooky, and the three locals milling around looked like they were auditioning for the re-make of Deliverance: Somewhere in the background I’m sure I heard the strains of Dueling Banjos.
Also travelling with us was legendary photographer Chris Lund who asked if I knew any words of Polish? I answered, “Yes, Windex and Pledge.” When I came round, the bus had just reached Katowice.
At the championships, I struck up a conversation with Ronnie and found him to be amiable and fun loving – he hasn’t changed. He easily won his class and his pro card, but wasn't hailed as the next great Olympia threat. (In fact, in 1992, at his Olympia debut, he finished out of the top 15.) Incidentally the light heavyweight division saw one of the worst decisions these peepers have ever seen when local favorite Miroslaw Daszkiewicz was declared the winner ahead of Darrem Charles, representing Trinidad & Tobago. I felt like calling the police to report a robbery.
On the return trip, we endured the same bus drive back to the Warsaw airport and once there tried to find something to eat. One of the American team spied a hamburger stand, and we all ordered their special with French fries. Everyone was munching away when Yohnnie Shambourger and Jose Guzman got into a discussion as to what "Kon" (spelled boldly on the stand's front) meant. A local was asked and he replied that it meant "horse." Yohnnie and Jose stopped munching as they looked wide-eyed in horror at their burgers. Ronnie? Ronnie continued eating. He broke everyone up by saying, "Y’all said you were so hungry you could eat a horse – so what’s the problem? Don't matter, it's all good."
AFTER POLAND
As stated earlier in his first six years as a pro Ronnie was never considered to be Mr. Olympia winning material. The first inkling that he would move away from journeyman status was when he defeated Kevin Levrone at the 1997 Russian Grand Prix, the last of a seven-leg post Olympia tour in which Levrone had won the first six. Then in May 1998 he finished second to Levrone at
the San Francisco Invitational, before turning the tables on the Maryland Muscle Machine at the Toronto Invitational and Night of Champions. With Dorian Yates announcing he wouldn’t contest the1998 Mr. Olympia bash the title was up for grabs, with Flex Wheeler being installed as the favorite to succeed the Brit. In fact besides Wheeler, the only other three thought capable of taking that year’s title were Nasser El Sonbaty, Kevin Levrone and Shawn Ray. However in an Olympia preview yours truly raised a few eyebrows by adding Ronnie to the preceding quartet, warning, “Coleman has one clear advantage over the other leading contenders. He is the only one who can take on and beat Wheeler in a back double-biceps comparison.”
And that’s kind of the way it worked out at Madison Square Garden on October 10, 1998, with a hard-as-nails Ronnie beating a Flex, who was not quite as his best, to take the first of eight successive Sandows. Later came the trademark Ronnieisms: The falling flat on the floor when winning; suits so loud they needed a volume control; the apples and oranges analogies; the “ain’t nuthin’ but a peanut” declarations; and the “Everybody wants to get big, but nobody wants to lift no big-ass weights” riff.
From the Polish horse incident in October 1991 to the Columbus hoarse episode of March 2013, to today with the Kentucky Derby imminent I suppose it was written in the stars that Ronnie and I would have a few horselaughs along the way.
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