High Profile
Dallas Morning News
Sunday, Oct 3, 1999
Ronnie Coleman
Nobody messes with this Arlington cop, a.k.a. Mr. Olympia
by Nancy Kruh

Arlington -- picture a 45-pound plate of solid iron the diameter of a large-size pizza. Now multiply it by 30. That's the weight -- 1350 pounds -- that Ronnie Coleman puts on the machine for his leg presses. Not for one or two presses, but for 15 in a row. "Twelve easy ones," as the 35-year-old Arlington police officer announces to himself before he starts, then three more for good measure. Mr. Coleman has never tried to see how much more he could press. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't; that's all the weight the machine at his gym will hold.

These aren't just legs. They are factory pistons; they are battering rams; they are skyscraper girders of reinforced steel. And last October, at the very moment that Mr. Coleman was named the top professional bodybuilder in the world, they turned to jelly.
Whump. There he went, collapsing in a heap onstage, his face buried in his hands, his massive range of shoulders trembling like butterfly wings. And there he stayed for a full three minutes -- the editor of a bodybuilding magazine sitting out in the audience actually timed it -- because he couldn't get up even when he tried. That's what it meant to Ronnie Coleman to be told he was the best in the world at the sport he loves.

"I still haven't recovered," Mr. Coleman says now, almost a year after becoming Mr. Olympia. "I can watch the tape now and start crying."
"It's so overwhelming. It's almost better than winning the lottery, because you worked for it. It's like something you want all your life, but you never thought it would happen, and all of a sudden it did."

Mr. Coleman wasn't supposed to win this Superbowl of bodybuilding, and he knew it. The annual event was expected to be the coronation of a California glam-man with a body considered among the most "genetically gifted" in the sport and a name that a Hollywood screenwriter couldn't have improved upon: Flex Wheeler.

Just like in the movies, Mr. Wheeler arrived at the Mr. Olympia competition wound too tightly and off his peak. And Mr. Coleman, a working Joe who had finished so low in previous competitions it would be generous to call him an underdog, had trained harder and smarter than he ever had before in his life. The only thing missing in his improbable, emotional victory was the Bill Conti soundtrack.
Surely Mr. Coleman can see the similarities between his story and a Rocky movie? He laughs. "Naw," he says. "I never really thought about it that way. I always try to live out a 'Ronnie' movie. I don't ever copare my life to nothing or nobody."

A year-round sport
He could say the same thing about his body -- 5 feet 11 inches of perfectly molded muscle mass that makes just about every other male specimen of the species look like the "before" picture in the old Charles Atlas ads. he competes with around 260 finely cheseled pounds, with only 2 % body fat. In bodybuilding parlance, the look is "cut", "shredded", "crazy", "freaky."

If you've never been to a men's bodybuilding competition -- and the vast majority of people haven't -- then perhaps you've surfed past one on TV. And perhaps you've paused to gawk and wonder: What are those guys doing?

Even the competitors themselves concede the sight of all these men shaped like cartoon superheroes, tends to baffle the first-time viewer. "With all those muscles and veins popping out, it's probably pretty strange if you're not used to it," says Dorian Yates, the six-time Mr. Olympia who retired the year before Mr. Coleman won.

This sport, with neither ball, nor clock, nor playing field, really takes place year-round, in sweaty gyms and at training tables. Hour upon hour, day after day, year after year, participants move literally millions of pounds of dead weight and consume mammoth amounts of protein, all in the pursuit of a few more inches of symmetrically sculpted muscle.

For Ronnie Coleman, being a bodybuilder is the constant challenge of this grueling discipline -- "to be the best you can be, always." From his point of view, each day offers him the most basic, elemental quest: to find out what he's made of as a man. It's the same quest that has driven men over the centuries to push themselves to the limit. But while some men have climbed mountains, Mr. Coleman has simply become one

Strong work ethic
Don't even think Mr. Coleman ever went through a 98-pound-weakling phase. The last time he had anything approximating an average build was at birth, when he weighed in at a healthy 8 pounds, 13 ounces.

"He was always the biggest kid in school," says his mother, Jessie Benton, who reared Ronnie and his three younger siblings in Bastrop, La.

But Mr. Coleman also was a shy boy, who got picked on sometimes by the class bullies. Forbidden by his mother to fight, he took up weightlifting in junior high to toughen his appearance.

"I bought him some weights," says Mrs. Benton, who now lives in Arlington. "Then when he got to high school, it had a gym and he worked out there...It just became a part of his life."

So did a work ethic. While going to school and playing football, Mr. Coleman also was holding down at least one after-school job, and often two. His sports team-mates, he says, "used to always vote me 'most dedicated' because I was the only one in the summertime who would go to the weight room and work out."

His arms, in particular, responded dramatically to the weights, so much so that his elbows haven't had even a glancing acquaintance with his sides since childhood. Playing football at Grambling State, he earned the nickname "Big Arm" -- and he won a campus contest for best male physique -- but he still hadn't discovered bodybuilding.

After earning a degree in accounting, Mr. Coleman set out for Dallas, hoping to find a business career in the big city. But with the economy's nose-dive in the mid-'80s, the only work he could find was at a Domino's, making and delivering pizzas. Two years later, and no closer to a job in his field, he was searching the classifieds for anything that caught his eye when he came across an ad for the Arlington Police Department. That's how he decided to become a cop.

Mr. Coleman quickly took to having a job where no day was the same as the next, and despite his degree, he discovered he was happy not to be stuck behind a desk. He also had a schedule that allowed for weightlifting. "It was a hobby," he says.

Taking the challenge
Brian Dobson knew instantly it could be much more than that the day Mr. Coleman -- weighing 215 and toting 21-inch biceps -- first walked into his Metroflex Gym back in 1990. Another rookie cop had brought him by Mr. Dobson's Arlington sweatshop, which caters to weight trainers.

"As soon as he walked in, I could see the unbelievable potential," says Mr. Dobson, a longtime amateur bodybuilder. "I could see his veins through his sweatpants. He didn't train very seriously, and I told him he could make a good living at this. He didn't believe me at first."

What finally swayed Mr. Coleman was the offer of a free lifetime membership -- "I'll do that to anyone with the potential," says Mr. Dobson -- and he began to train in earnest.

"When he first started, he didn't know 'super-setting' -- combining three or four exercises -- and everyone used to make fun of how small his calves were," Mr. Dobson says. "He knew all the basic lifts, but there are a lot of tricks -- different ways to position the feet or your wrists to bring your peaks."

Four months later, Mr. Dobson had talked the shy young police officer into donning bikini briefs, slathering oil all over his bulging muscles and flexing before an audience at a local bodybuilding competition. (Once onstage, says Mr. Coleman, "you get over your shyness real quick.") He ended up winning the contest, beating out, among others, Mr. Dobson. By this point, Mr. Coleman was hooked.
In 1991, he won the sport's top amateur title, Mr. Universe, an achievement that allowed him into the exclusive world of six-figure profit potential: the professional competitions.

Genetically endowed
Though bodybuilding is a popular pastime for millions of men, no more than about a hundred possess the ability to make a good living at it through appearances, endorsements, and competition purses, says Peter McGough, editor-in-chief of Flex, a bodybuilding magazine.
How do you become one of the top bodybuilders in the world? It all depends on what you're born with and what you choose to do with it, say experts in muscle physiology. Though scientists haven't figured out exactly why, some people are naturally endowed not only with more muscle, but also muscle with more growth potential.

"Anybody can be really, really good with dedication and hard work," says Dr. Ben Levine, director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. "But to be the best, you have to have some gene endowment, as well as appropriate work ethic."

And, yes, say Dr. Levine and other experts, a body like Mr. Coleman's is possible without benefit of anabolic steroids. Mr. Coleman says he has never resorted to steroids, and he has passed every drug test he's ever taken, according to a spokesman for the International Federation of Bodybuilding.

The very nature of bodybuilding invites more public suspicions about steroid abuse -- a fact that annoys Mr. Coleman. Last year he quit reading Sports Illustrated after it ran a story calling steroids "the Wheaties of most pro bodybuilders."

"Once you're labeled with something, it's kind of hard to change that," he says. "It irritates us all, not just me....I'm not looking for any shortcuts."

Iron by the ton
The gym where he trains certainly offers none. Metroflex doesn't even have air conditioning. It's what's known among bodybuilders as a "hard-core" gym -- heavy on the weights (including 200-pound barbells) and light on the ambiance. It's actually a converted warehouse space with concrete floors covered with patchy paint and cobwebs drifting down from the ceiling.