Warning, guys...this will be a long post. Skip if you have a low attention span
Just watched a vid the other day. Some low level bodybuilder / drug dealer who used to live and train with mentzer in the late 80's claims Mike was gay. Said Mike loved meth and hated training but continued to train people to afford his drug habbit. Larry something or other. Seemed like a sleazy dude, talks about going to prison, but apparently was Mikes roommate when mike was about at his lowest. Was paying mikes rent and chauffeuring him around so that Mike would train him.
Funny how some people revere Mentzer almost like he was mythological. Then others....not so much.
Larry Pollock?
This is the interview:
The poor guy talking to Larry is dumber than a sack of doorknobs, but the things Pollock told him are interesting:
*The workouts he did with Mike were almost identical to the routine outlined in the '92 edition of _Heavy Duty_. The primary difference was every work set was taken to positive failure, followed by forced reps until negative failure. He said Mike transformed from skinny-fat to pro size within two or three months. Choice of AAS?
I can't remember, and I'm not watching that whole shit show again...if I hear the dummy host say "Woooow!" one more time, I will stab myself into Sto'Vo'Kor. However, I know Mike LOVED Deca.
*Yes, Mike wouldn't train unless amped up on amphetamines. He basically admitted that himself in other articles. Ell Darden said he never saw Mike train, or train hard (?), during the time Mike and Ray were in Jones' employ at Nautilus.
*The gay thing? I don't know about all that. He had girlfriends, and from what I'm told, they weren't just beards. Maybe his meth habit twisted his mind such that he'd take it in the jaw for a fix? I dunno, but I kind of doubt it.
See, what a lot of people don't know about Mike is that he enjoyed trolling others about his mental state, possibly especially when high and/or drunk (he loved vodka).
For example, when I was in my mid to late teens, I'd followed his '92 HD routine to the letter. I actually made great gains and won the teenage class of a local NPC show, the Tri-county, drug-free. I wanted to step up to the open class and knew I would either have to up my training game or forget about the natural schtick.
The older bodybuilders at my gym, including an NPC state champ (name rhymes with Podney Launders), all told me no: stay natural, just keep training -- yadda yadda.
About that time, Mentzer was published in FLEX, writing about rest-pause training, static contractions and so forth. I naively thought those "secrets" were my magic pill!
In my excitement, I called the phone number listed at the end of Mike's articles.
The first time he answered, he identified himself as "Wood Jones," and said he'd take a message for me.
The second time I called, he launched into this weird bit about "who created the 'heavenly bodies,'" namely, Arnold and Claudia Schiffer. He went on to say Arthur Jones was God and had "turned a man into a whale" at Jones' Ocala facility.
He also asked me if I was "hung," whereupon I scoffed and asked him if he was queer.
He laughed and said, I quote, "No, but I am a little odd."
In fairness, I was trying to glean advice from him sans any cost to myself; he saw that and tried to run me off by acting weird. Just the same, he said similarly weird shit to Lee Priest about "Art Jones is a god," and I've known a few other guys who said he'd do bizarre shit to extricate himself from conversations.
I had further conversations with him much later, talks in which he was lucid, no longer bitter about the '80 Olympia ("water under the bridge," he said) and, while he came to ridiculous conclusions about training, he himself wanted Marcus Reinhardt to train *him* for a comeback.
While that's both laughable and sad at the same time -- Mike, near death, thinking about training again -- it says something that he'd put such confidence in Marcus who, albeit a HIT guy, advocates plenty more work than Mike's latter day methods.
