Shop
The eBay Store is open for business!
Visit the Tatlock Gallery on eBay.
Or order by phone: (508)993-1192 or email us.
Please don't send your credit card information in an email.
Weightlifting Books
by John D. Fair
Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell
Pennsylvania State University Press, 420 pages, paperback, 1999.
Sports books never seem to achieve the attention they deserve, partly for their sheer tonnage - baseball picture books, books dedicated to forgotten sports stars, winter Olympics of Lake Placid, high moments all – all falling from the shelf into cardboard boxes for summertime library sales. This includes a whole decade of the 1970’s, with the grainy shots of Beatles cuts, fuzzy tennis rackets, and polka-dotted bellbottoms, stuff you’ll find along side LP’s of ‘The Kinston Trio’. This book, “Muscletown USA’, is different. After reading it, we hope you buy this splendid evocation to American Olympic weightlifting in America. The cover is one of the famous images of the 20th century, a “manly” looking John Grimek, Mr. America of 1940, seated on a pedestal ,arm held high, fist clinched.
Weightlifting, like motorcycling, had been generally ignored in the American media, preferring the major sports figures, always available for Camel cigarettes advertisements. For reasons apart, the country at-large has reacted with indifference to “the iron game”.You should think about these reasons, the mechanics of media scapegoating, as you read of the history of the weight sports. Behind the scenes too is the inept organization, the AAU, America’s ruling body of amateur sports, whose unimaginative vision helped ensure the demise of an untold number of deserving athletes.
In 1972, the Olympic lifts were cut from three to two. I have one of those photo albums from that dark Olympics; the weightlifting segment shows one of the last deep splits ever done in international competition (the manner of settling underneath the heavy barbell weight pulled off the platform), and also – a pure waste – showing in other photos only the grimace of the face of the straining lifters, rather than the grace of a magnificent lift. For a variety of long-overdue reasons, the controversial standing press was abandoned. What had once been a strict “military press” had deteriorated into becoming a “standing bench press”, with record lifts whose authenticity became a bouncing rubber ball between western and eastern block judges. In addition, lifting contests were far too long. Lifters could pace indefinitely before approaching the barbell, leaving the audience in agony. There are now two lifts, and the contests better organized. There was then, as now, the always present issue of “doping.”
What in earlier days had been termed “Physical Culture”, holds in microcosm America’s alter-ego, that of Champion. Here was a myth handily fitting America’s image of rule on the world.In pole vaulting, for example, the best performers tended to come from Russia, or in the case of weightlifting, from China.
We have at our gallery 50 copies of John Fair’s book, himself a weightlifter and academic historian. Riddled with photographs of legendary American weightlifting figures like Tommy Kono, Dave Shephard, and a host of Polish strongmen who were part and parcel of the York Barbell empire. There’s the story of its masthead, “Strength & Health” magazine, and the Hi Protein supplements so dear to Hoffman’s vision of a nation of muscle men stirring his magic powder into explosive milkshakes.
And most of all, it was Bob Hoffman, the father of American weightlifting, whose drive, not so much his egocentric performance, or his womanizing, who gave meaning to thousands of young men whose lives were uplifted by his example.
The nuance is all here, Hoffman’s feuding with rival Joe Weider, embarrassingly played out in their magazines, America’s weightlifting teams from the 1930’s through the rise of the late 40’s and 50’s to the 1980’s, when the sport seemed to flee our shores, became the hegemony of eastern countries, steroids, and state-funded lifting programs. America’s last gold medal winner was featherweight (123 lb.) Chuck Vinci, and an “accidental” silver medal by Georgian Lee James.
That business was not always perfect at the York Barbell company should not be a reason to ignore the only serious literary attempt ever attempted at a slice of muscular American reality, and you will read and gaze at this wonderful book, so filled with vitality and famous pictures of our weightlifting firmament, long after you’ve put your ‘Tale of Two Cities” up on the shelf to rot.
This is a fascinateing read, and like the old days of eagerly awaiting the arrival of the next ‘Strength & Health’ magazine, to gaze with longing and inspiration at a comeback record 363 ¾ lb. Snatch by Norbert Schemansky in 1962, and the clutch lifting of Hawian Tommy Kono, for the book, through the slightly tarnished lenses, is also good history, tracking the “cross-cultural” trends of the hippie days that “infiltrated” the ranks of a conservative Pennsylvania shrine.
We have at the gallery a brand new York Olympic barbell, very colorful, and we are eager to re-popularize a noble sport, highly technical in its execution, noble in its lonely discipline. We are looking to introduce you to other weightlifting books, and hoping you will take a hand in helping us spread the word, again…
$29.95 plus shipping via media rate mail.
