Bean is a massive, radiant, heavy-booted man in his 50s, with a white handlebar mustache and, like other senior pullers whose hands I have shaken, a walnut-sized bolus of muscle at the base of his right thumb — a hard, irreducible little power-tumor developed by a lifetime of crushing the other guy’s paw. With referee Jan Schmeichel and Schmeichel’s son, Carl, Bean schooled me in stance, grip, timing. So much to learn! “I don’t want to tell you a whole lot and get you all messed up,” he cautioned, but it was too late. My game, such as it was, was blown. As Alexander Pope reminds us: a little learning is a dangerous thing.
Bars, beer, boom!
Three weeks ago I took a trip into the lore of pulling. I drove down to Lakeville, Massachusetts, to visit with Bill Cox. Cox is from arm wrestling’s Bronze Age: a truck driver for 45 years, he armwrestled in bars up and down the country, for beer. “I never paid for one! I could sit there and drink all night for free.” In 1977, he found himself at a tournament in a Boston club. “I walked in, and all I could smell was smoke and Ben-Gay. I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna beat all these guys no problem.’ I’m used to beating guys 70 or 80 pounds heavier than me. But the first guy I go against, a smaller guy, he takes my hand away like that. Boom! Top roll! And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell just happened?!’ So then I realize there’s some technique to it.”
Now a 66-year-old retiree, Cox is the founder and president of the International Armwrestling Federation, one of the sport’s more prestigious bodies, and he’ll drive anywhere to referee a tournament. In the enlarged sinews of his right forearm are the folkways of arm wrestling. We watch films of Utah’s John Brzenk, whom Cox considers to be the greatest competitor in the world, and he tells me about Norm Devio, the freakishly strong puller who taught physical education at Brookline High. “Know how big his forearms are? Fifteen and a half inches!” As preparation for the upcoming tourney, Cox recommends repeated sets of hammer curls and some exercises for hand strength. (It turns out that his advice is moot. In a mysterious accident, I sprain my left shoulder reading “Rapunzel” to my son, and the intervening weeks are passed in a training-free fugue of self-pity.)
The author kisses his well-earned trophy |
The pull of pulling
In 1997, the Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery, with florid understatement, recommended that arm wrestling “not be considered a totally benign sport.” My own private arm-wrestling nightmare involves an aneurysm or minor stroke at the table. Has Cox ever seen anything like that? Ever seen a puller struck down by cerebral blowout? “Nope,” he says. “But I’ve seen 37 broken arms.” The kind of fracture sustained by an armwrestler is typically rather nasty — the humerus collapses at several points, in a ragged spiral — and requires months of rehabilitation.
