CARYN ROUSSEAU
Associated Press
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. “Once the sport of hustlers and barroom brawlers, arm-wrestling has gone from makeshift competitions in local taverns to organized tournaments at posh hotels.
With tournaments airing on cable sports networks, fans are beginning to wonder: Will arm-wrestling, like poker before it, become the next mainstream sport?
“I believe we’re on the verge of having the same thing happen to us that Texas Hold ’em had happen to them,” said Leonard Harkless, president of the U.S. Armwrestling Association. “Everybody has arm-wrestled. Almost everybody stuck their arm up there and tested how strong they were.”
Harkless has been competing since 1978 and is now the sport’s top referee. He wants to change the sport’s barroom bent that paints arm-wrestlers as drunken, brutish and ready to fight.
“I knew guys who wrestled in bars for a couple hundred dollars,” Harkless said. “It’s no different than a pool shark. You can see how it escalates very quickly, especially if there’s money involved. That’s how our sport had a little bit of a rough reputation.”
But the Internet changed that, he said. Organizing tournaments was easier, and its appeal spread.
“It’s about locking and exploding on the ‘Go,’ “ he said. “When that ref says ‘Go,’ your whole body, you wanna move, shifting all of your body weight. The harder and faster you can hit with that body weight, the more power you have.”
Like boxing, arm-wrestling has various associations. About 400 members from each group gathered recently in Little Rock for the Unified National Armwrestling Championship.
The stress starts at the weigh-ins, which have competitors sweating in steam rooms “or, like eight-time national champion Michael Todd of Sheridan, Ark., eating 5,000 calories a day to bulk up.
“I realistically eat every hour and 15 minutes,” Todd said, sitting down to a bowl filled with an entire box of macaroni and cheese and two cans of tuna. “I watch the clock to see when I eat again.”
Lee Freeman, a bodyguard and bouncer from Omaha who started promoting tournaments in 1972, says there are special exercises that build the forearm, the crucial muscle in arm-wrestling.
“It’s a legitimate sporting event like football, baseball, anybody else,” Freeman said. “These guys train just as hard.”
Arguably arm-wrestling’s most famous competitor, John Brzenk of Sandy, Utah, says he grows tired of stereotypes that mark it as a joke sport. Brzenk claimed fame when he won a $100,000 tractor-trailer in the 1986 Las Vegas tournament that served as backdrop for Sylvester Stallone’s 1987 cult arm-wrestling film “Over the Top.”
“These are guys who have dedicated their lives to arm-wrestling,” said Brzenk, an airline mechanic. “They train. They lift. They analyze the sport.”
Brzenk wins about $10,000 a year competing in tournaments. But he says if you average that out over his training time, “It comes out to 25 cents an hour. I’m thinking about it 24/7.”
Tournaments such as the one in Arkansas give Brzenk the chance to test that devotion against the best in the country.
Before matches, competitors chalk their hands and elbows to prevent slippage. Referees set opponents’ hands, sometimes finger-by-finger, to make sure no one has an advantage. Competitors can’t move their hands until the referee yells “Ready, go!” Even a tiny muscle twist can lead to a false start.
There are right- and left-handed competitions, with wrestlers grasping a wooden peg with their opposite hand for balance.
“You can break your arm if you’re not ready,” Freeman said. “When it snaps, you’ll know. It sounds like a piece of celery breaking.”
From 110-pound women to 400-plus-pound men, competitors hold their breath with veins popping, shoulders shaking and knees wrapped around the table legs to brace themselves. When the action gets hot, wrestlers writhe and wiggle while knuckles turn white.
Perfect drama. The American mainstream loves matches like that, Harkless said.
“It’s a ‘how good are you?’ sort of thing,” he said. “That’s what draws the attention to Texas Hold ’em. It’s the individual. How good a player are they? And that’s what arm-wrestling has.”
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