Nothing Gold Can Stay

I’m not much for press events–I’ve spent most of my two decades as a journalist avoiding them–but I sure wish I could’ve attended this one. (No one invited me, but that’s beside the point.)

Friends of the late Joe Gold, who died last month at 82, gathered for a commemorative service last Friday in Marina del Rey.

Here’s the opening of the story in the L.A. Times:

“The first time Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger walked into the original Gold’s Gym in Venice, in 1968, its legendary proprietor greeted the young bodybuilder warmly: ‘Arnold, anything you want, it’s yours.’

“But Joe Gold wasn’t done. He quickly added: ‘You’re just a stupid farmer from Austria and you got a balloon belly. It will take us a year to work on that.

“‘Hey, you need an apartment?

“‘You need a car?’”

How would you like to go back in time to hear someone call Schwarzenegger a “stupid farmer from Austria”?

If you want to hear more stories about Schwarzenegger and some of the other legends of bodybuilding’s golden age (a phrase I use without irony), I recommend The New High-Intensity Training, by Ellington Darden.

Editing this book was one of my last projects for Rodale, and I can attest that it’s fun to read. (That doesn’t mean I believe in the one-set-to-failure strength-training methodology; I think, most of the time, it takes several sets of an exercise to get all the potential benefits.) Darden met all the major players back in the day, and has anecdotes about Schwarzenegger you won’t read anywhere else.

Tags: Tags: strength