Sport gets to grips with shift in image
ATLANTA — Geoff Hale is a mild-mannered, bespectacled geologist by day, but he takes on a whole new persona when he steps into The Pit.
Eyes bulging. Muscles popping. Boasts flying. Adrenaline flowing.
He becomes the Hale Raiser.
“We all hold it in, because we’re a civilized society, but to be put in an environment where you can just go crazy out there ... it’s just freedom is what it is, “Hale said, his voice rising excitedly. “Freedom to be that animal, that beast, to let loose that natural killer instinct. That’s what comes out when you’re on the table.”
Hale competes in the World Armwrestling League, a fledgling organization that hopes to take this most basic of sports beyond the barroom, to make it something more than a simplistic way to determining who buys the next round of beers.
The WAL held its final event of the season last week in Atlanta, Georgia, doling out some $100,000 in prize money during a production that borrowed heavily from the theatrics of wrestling (an actual pile of cash was placed in the middle of the table for the matches) and the hype of a heavyweight title fight (an announcer’s booming introductions accompanied the athletes’ entrance into the small arena).
“I believe we’ve tapped into something really cool,” said Steve Kaplan, the league’s president. “In today’s world, there’s not a lot of things that bring people together. The sport of arm wrestling does that, unlike anything else. You see just brutal competition and strategy and moves and counter-moves and people that just want to rip each other’s arms off at the table. But afterward, there’s always an embrace.”
Strongest woman
Arm wrestling is merely a part-time job for these athletes, who traveled to the Atlanta from seven countries and a wide range of backgrounds.
There was Hale, who runs a petroleum consulting firm in Oklahoma with his wife and has a 13-month-old daughter.
There was Devon Larratt, a towering Canadian who is perhaps the sport’s biggest star. The 40-yearold has done seven tours of duty in Afghanistan as part of special forces.
And there was Fia Reisek, who grew up in far northern Sweden in a family of loggers, which made for a natural transition to arm wrestling. She has won several world titles and emerged as the strongest of four women competing in the WAL’s middleweight division.
Founded in 2014, the WAL held five tournaments around the country this year, leading up its Atlanta finale featuring the season’s top competitors. The matches were streamed online, but there are hopes that the sport will find more mainstream exposure and acceptance.