National Post (National Edition)
MONTREALER LIFTED ARNIE TO STARDOM
Montreal bodybuilding mogul dies at 93
When bodybuilding mogul Joe Weider was trying to get a young unknown weightlifter named Arnold Schwarzenegger a part in the schlocky 1969 film Hercules in New York, he overcame the 22year-old Austrian’s near total lack of English by convincing producers he was, in fact, a German Shakespearean actor.
He got the job, though more for the muscles than the soliloquies.
Mr. Weider, who died on Saturday of heart failure aged 93, grew up on the tough streets of Depression-era Montreal, on Avenue Coloniale in the Plateau.
He left school as a child to deliver groceries, and his small stature led to a sense of physical vulnerability that he overcame by weightlifting with home-made weights, including a barbell made of a car axle.
Soon a barrel-chested teenager with a self-mimeographed 15-cent magazine called Your Physique, Joe Weider went on to expand a weight-manufacturing company into a diverse bodybuilding empire.
At its peak, he was reaching millions of readers through 16 magazines like Muscle & Fitness, Men’s Fitness, Flex and Shape, and selling them mail-order nutritional supplements to speed the dream of rippling muscles.
By the 1980s he was marketing his weight-lifting equipment in 6,000 retail outlets and nutritional products in 12,000 stores in the United States alone.
By the 1990s, he was selling in at least 60 countries and grossing hundreds of millions of dollars annually for his Los Angeles-based enterprise, Weider America’s Total Fitness Company.
Boosted by major events like Mr. Olympia and Mr. Universe, in which Mr. Schwarzenegger was a perennial contender, Mr. Weider and his brother Ben made their fortunes before bodybuilding’s popularity was eclipsed by the richer drama of professional wrestling.
Lou Ferrigno, who played the Incredible Hulk on television, also came through the ranks of Weider star bodybuilders.
The brothers sold the magazines for more than US$350-million in 2002. Ben Weider died in 2008.
Praising Joe Weider’s “fantastic legacy of a fitter world,” Mr. Schwarzenegger — who went on to be a Hollywood star and former governor of California — said he was the man who made his dreams come true, by inviting him to Los Angeles as a professional bodybuilder.
“I knew about Joe Weider long before I met him — he was the godfather of fitness who told all of us to ‘ Be Somebody with a Body,’” Mr. Schwarzenegger said.
“He taught us that through hard work and training we could all be champions. When I was a young boy in Austria, his muscle magazines provided me with the inspiration and the blueprint to push myself beyond my limits and imagine a much bigger future.... Ver y few
His muscle magazines provided me with inspiration
people can claim to have influenced as many lives as Joe did through his magazines, his supplements, his training equipment, and his bighearted personality.”
Jokingly known as the Master Blaster, Mr. Weider had a knack for similarly torqued names for the supplements you could buy from his magazines.
These included “Solid Steel Tricep Bomber,” “Carbo-Energizer Chewables,” or “Anabolic Mega-Paks,” exaggerated claims which led to tension with regulators, and occasional retractions or refunds.
“Nowadays, people want what a professional athlete would eat,” Mr. Weider told The New York Times in 1989. “So we developed these booster pancakes that give you extra amino acids, which are important in protein synthesis and the building of muscle tissue.”
He also had a tendency toward inflated descriptions of himself as the Jesus, Marx, or Gandhi of bodybuilding, who sought inspiration in other major historical figures who literally changed the world, like Moses, Churchill, even Hitler.
“I wanted to know, for example, how Hitler was able to manipulate the world and bring such destruction on Western civilization,” he once told an interviewer.
His younger brother Ben similarly became an authority on Napoleonic history. The Jewish Community Centre in Montreal’s Westmount is named for him.
Jointly, they founded the International Federation of Body Builders, of which Ben was president.
The IFBB remains the marquee international bodybuilding organization, and awards Mr. Olympia annually.
A CBC documentary, The Weider Brothers: Men of Iron, told the story of their rise and how Joe made his first barbell from an old car axle.
Though the Weiders dreamed it would become an Olympic sport, and petitioned for its inclusion at the 2004 Athens Games, the competitive bodybuilding industry has remained closer to entertainment than sport.
In an early version of Your Physique, before the empire was built, Mr. Weider made a series of predictions.
He wrote that “Civilization will speed up in every phase and the stresses and strains on mankind will continue to increase,” and that “bodybuilding will be looked upon as one of the great forces in the field of preventive medicine.”
Mr. Weider was divorced from his first wife Vicky around 1960, and in 1961 married Betty, who survives him. He had one daughter from his first marriage and three grandchildren.