Sometimes sports journalists and writers suffer from a form of gigantism, or vicarious gigantism. They like to be seen at the big events, for it enhances their status. Interviewing big stars makes them big by association. If they are true to the implications of this gigantism, they will also use big words. For this makes them larger still.
To be more rounded, however, to know and understand all the pockets of activity in the republic of sport, you need to focus on the little sports, nominal sports, sports that are probably not sport at all. At least some of the time.
Now and again you should attend a sport in the disputed territory between being a sport and a past-time or hobby: marrow-tossing, for example, or giant-pumpkin hauling.
Why not get the big cheese rolling and go in for a colour piece about one of those provincial gouda-rolling derbies in the Netherlands?
If there’s no marrow in marrow-tossing, why not try jukskei (a sport not dissimilar to bocce) or sheep-shearing or tug-o-war, where men and women of opposing teams pull against one another by making sure they are pulling in the same direction.
Over the years, I’ve covered all these sports which might not be sports. I’ve enjoyed the sport of covering so-called “minor” sports and I’ve enjoyed the individual sports themselves.
I’ve also enjoyed the office banter that frets – or pretends to fret – over whether lifting a sledgehammer over the vertical with arm out-stretched is a sport, or simply a form of sanctioned madness. Sometimes you need to stop worrying about categories and simply go with the flow.
One of the oddest live events I’ve ever attended was the get-together of the Association of Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen at the Marriott Hotel in Newark in the US. For the record, that’s “Olde” as you’d spell it a long time ago, with an “e” on the end, which makes it sound as ancient and covered in moss, as an old Tudor Mansion.
It was 2017 and I was in Newark because I was writing a book and a series of articles on someone who was also there, an Irish strongman called John McGrath. The big Irishman was crazy, but in a blessed, easy-to-like, kind of way. To get a feel for how crazy, I understood too well at the time, you needed to watch the craziness in action.
John grew up in the hills above Waterford, south of Dublin in the Irish Republic, in a hamlet called Ballymuddy. According to John, his dear mother tried to pretend the McGraths had an alternative address, and they lived – instead – on Fountain Hill.
I never did get to the bottom of the Fountain Hill-Ballymuddy debate. But I became acquainted – and then fascinated – by John’s hard working-class life in a big family, so different to my own middle-class life growing up in apartheid South Africa in a small family.
This was rural Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, remember, and there were no Celtic Tigers roaring in the hills, that was to come only much, much later. John was badly bullied at school. He was often badly bullied at home, too. When he wasn’t being bullied, he was scraping together money, doing a variety of odd jobs, so he could make his great escape.
With a little cash in his pocket, he reckoned, he might just be able to catch a glimpse of a wider horizon rather than the view from Ballymuddy – or Fountain Hill.
After school was over he harvested onions and beets with a pike in the afternoons. He and his brother, Oisin, cut down whippy young trees used for baling hay called “scallops,” by wading into the shallows of the freezing river Bride.
The boys’ trudged to collect water from a well on the edge of O’Brien’s bog. Come late summer and autumn they’d pick blackberries. Sometimes they’d take a bucket, sometimes two. They didn’t dare come back until the buckets were overflowing.
With the proceeds from the blackberries – and a little help from dad – John bought his first bike from Bob Troy’s shop in Cappoquin. He was 12.
His new two-speed Raleigh was red and white, with a white seat. There were jaunts to nearby Cappoquin and longer rides to Youghal [pronounced Yawl] and Dungarvon.
He rode further afield. He and his brother once rode to see Tom Duffy’s Circus perform at the Tallow Horse Fair on the first Friday in September. In Tom Duffy’s Circus was a strongman who lifted a keg of beer above his head. Fifty pounds was on offer if any man from the audience could do better. That was a great deal of money in those days.
As a teenager, John was fascinated by such feats of strength. How could this be done? Could you train yourself to be strong if you weren’t strong already? What was involved? Did mind over matter really matter?
John didn’t immediately become a strongman. He became a rower on the Blackwater at the nearby Cappoquin Rowing Club instead. For John, it was not love at first sight. But over the years he persisted.
He grew used to being cold and wet; he grew used to his lungs burning. Very rarely, he experienced such clean joy on the water that he wanted to cry out in wonder.
He moved out of home and into digs of his own. Neither he nor his mates were gods in the kitchen but they could spot a packet of curry powder on the supermarket shelves when they saw one.
If you couldn’t cook, curry powder went well with pretty much everything because it swamped every other taste on the plate. And so the CCC – the Cappoquin Curry Club – was born.
When they weren’t drinking pints to take the edge off the heat their curried meals generated, John worked for the council. He mowed verges; he dug holes. He tried not to be miserable. He worked, for a time, in a sheet metal fabrication plant.
He and his brother, Oisin, rowed hard. As amateurs they competed in regattas in Ireland and regattas abroad. They narrowly missed out on qualification in an Irish boat for the Barcelona Olympics. Later, John injured his back. He had come to the end of his row.
But John wasn’t finished with sport. He tried a variety of things, kick-boxing and martial arts included. Eventually John found his calling. My calling is to bend words into shapes called stories. John’s calling is to bend nails into shape so they make an inverted “U”.
That’s what he was up on the stage in a conference room at the Marriott Hotel in Newark one October day in 2017. In point of fact, he planned to bend seven cold-rolled six inch steel nails in a minute. If he did so, he would find his way into the Guinness Book of Records.
John dealt with the first three nails quickly, decisively. He was on a bit of a bender. The fourth nail pushed back, but John successfully overcame its resistance. Nail five provided a sterner test, but again, John broke the back of that baby.
By the time the seventh nail came around, John was broken – a beaten and broken strong man. He took longer than he would have liked – time was ticking away – but eventually he bent that baby too. Seven nails in 60 seconds.
The 24-or so members of the audience clapped with gusto. What were they thinking? They were thinking that you don’t get to see top-of-the-tree nail-bending like that every day. Or every other day, for that matter.
As there are jazz standards, so you have strongman standards. One of them is to twist a horseshoe out of shape. Another is to hammer a nail through a plank of wood with one’s bare fist. Sometimes strongmen rip packs of playing cards. Or telephone directories. Or number-plates. Another standard still is to lift and anvil off the floor with chains suspended around your neck or attached via a sort of harness, to your head.
Some strongmen have pulled stationary cars with their hair. Others, welcoming the show man within the strong man, have prevented two motorcycles from speeding off in opposite directions by holding them stationary with iron chains. Some have lifted chairs (with pretty women sitting down on them) clean off the floor with their teeth.
John’s nail-bending nail-bender was a homage to two legends of the golden age of vaudeville and circus strongmen, Joseph Greenstein, otherwise known as the “Mighty Atom”, and his disciple, a rock-breaker from the stone quarries of Pennsylvania, Slim, “The Hammerman” Furman.
Joe, or Joseph’s, real name was Yosselle Greenstein, and his story can stand as representative for strongmen as a clan. Yosselle was born prematurely in a Polish town close to the German border 1893. He was sickly and no-one expected him to live.
As a boy he was befriended by a circus strongman, one Champion Volanko, who visited town with the Issakov Brothers’ touring circus. The strongman taught Yosselle how to breathe properly and strengthen his muscles, which weren’t very big.
Greenstein travelled with Volanko’s circus to Kharkov in the Ukraine. From there they rolled to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Eventually the circus ended up in the Indian city of Poona. Greenstein’s eyes had never opened so wide. He wrestled the locals; he tried out yoga, he ate healthy, mainly vegetarian food. His tuberculosis disappeared, although he remained short – no more than five foot, four inches tall.
Having taught him all he knew, Volanko was soon on his way with the circus but, now, filled with wanderlust, Greenstein decided to immigrate to America. It was 1911 and he bordered a ship in Bremen, Germany, with a one-way ticket to Galveston, Texas.
Life in Texas wasn’t easy. At first he helped a pedlar of dry goods to load and unload his heavy wagon. He had a spell as a tinsmith. And a stevedore – a dockworker – although he was last to be given work because at first he wasn’t unionised.
For a spell he became a cowboy. He broke scrap metal and washed bottles for the Samson Junk Company. On weekends, sometimes he wrestled against the country boys and farm hands in the Texas back country. All the while Yosselle sent money back home to Leah, his sweetheart in Poland, and dreamed of having enough to bring her to America.
Greenstein opened a garage, or what in America is called a gas station. By now Leah had left Poland and joined Joseph in Texas. The two were married. The Greensteins were merry with children.
But they still struggled financially, both working long hours. Finally, their luck turned. News of Joseph’s wrestling and occasional strongman stunts in Texas found their way to a promoter.
While Joseph perfected his routines of bending, pulling, ripping and biting in half, Louis Nussbaum, the promoter, sent money to Texas from New York. “Get here as soon as possible,” his telegram to Greenstein said.
The Golden Age of vaudeville strongmen was between roughly 1890 and the Great Depression in 1929. It was a time of rapidly growing urban populations in the cities of North America, Britain and Europe, with people in those cities eager for cheap, accessible entertainment.
Eugen Sandow, of German and Russian descent, showed his “perfect body” to spellbound audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. His message of self-improvement was well-received by everyday folk, kings and businessmen.
Sandow has been called the “Father of Modern Bodybuilding” but his biggest muscle was his quick commercial mind. He was a fine self-publicist. He produced books and pamphlets. He pioneered the invention of body-building equipment and toured the world.
Self-improvement invariably involved change. Sometimes this change was self-change, so Sandow changed his name. And while not expressly following Sandow’s example, Joe Greenstein sounded a little too much like the name of the neighbourhood schmuck, so, once in New York, he changed his name too.
Yosselle, who had become Joseph, had now become the “Mighty Atom” or the “Great Atom”. Standing five-feet four inches tall, and weighing only 145 pounds, on promotional posters in New York the Mighty Atom was dubbed “The strongest small man in the universe”.
While each vaudeville performer was part of the same broad category, each was different. They had different acts, different spiels. The Atom liked to twist coils of rolled steel into shapes. One of his acts was to lie down on a bed of nails and have assistants place weights on his chest.
He also bent pennies and broke chains wrapped around his chest. He pulled stationary trucks with his hair. One of his signature events – perfected on Coney Island – was to bend steel nails. In choosing to bend steel nails himself, McGrath was inserting himself into the great tradition of old-time vaudevillian strongmen.
The “Mighty Atom” hit the vaudeville tradition as it was ceasing to be a tradition and becoming something else – history. In the late 1920s the entertainment world was changing. Silent movies were supplanted by the talkies. Radios became cheap and freely available.
Entertainment became infinitely reproducible from a studio in Los Angeles. It didn’t matter what he could lift or bend or break, the little guy with crazy hair in the mock leopard skin singlet wasn’t quite as exciting as he used to be.
After a couple of years playing to packed houses across New York, the bottom fell out of the vaudeville market. Almost as quickly as his stage shows had started, they stopped. The promoters skedaddled with their sweet talk and their cash. The punters wouldn’t part with even a dime. How was the Atom to put food on the table for his growing family?
Out of work like so many other unfortunates during the Depression, the Atom found himself performing eleven times a day at Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus on New York’s Forty-Second Street. He later became a pitchman, selling a variety of products, sometimes his own – like soap and potions.
While selling, he extolled the virtues of clean-living. Clean-living involved clean thinking and clean eating, with fruit, roughage and vegetables, regular fasting and only small amounts of red meat. You needed, said the Atom earnestly, to drink your water.
During his sales patter from street-corners or little stages, Joe would casually bend a bar of steel or twist a penny. The punters admired the “Mighty Atom”. He was a quirky little guy, just like themselves. If he could do things to get out of the gutter, they could do things to get out of the gutter too.
One day the Atom bought himself a truck. It was the perfect wheeze. He could transport himself, his soaps, his potions and his patter to all the fairs of Pennsylvania. He could sell; he could preach the virtues of clean living. He could perform. He could do all three at once.
By moving around in his truck for at least some of the year, he found himself earning a decent living. He attracted acolytes intrigued by his secrets. One of them was the so-called “Hammerman” Slim Furman, who introduced himself in a novel way – by berating the Atom from the back of an auditorium in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania in 1955.
Joe Greenstein even had a book written about him, by an author who had made his money creating the Kung Fu television series of the 1970s. The author’s name? Ed Spielman. The name of his book? “The Mighty Atom – the life and times of Joseph L. Greenstein.”
McGrath read Spielman’s book. He read it again. It became a bible, he carried it everywhere. A bullied child himself, he identified strongly with Joe’s hardscrabble Polish past.
John’s duties when growing up extended beyond collecting water on the edge of O’Brien’s bog. It was his responsibility to get rid of dead foxes his father had trapped in the fields. One day he found a live fox that hadn’t been throttled.
Careful to avoid being bitten, John loosened the snare and freed the fox. The act made a big impression on him. Suddenly the idea of eating meat became unattractive. Having seen so much everyday drunkenness in the towns in which he grew up, he also became teetotal.
Spielman’s book about the “Mighty Atom” brought many of the disparate strands in John’s life together. If a tubercular from a Polish border town could overcome his size, his background, his health and his religion, so could he.
There are many beginnings, many middles and many ends. They happen in their own order and in their own time. But this was undoubtedly an end. It was an end because it brought to a satisfactory conclusion so much that McGrath had been searching for. And it signalled a beginning because it confirmed that by being a vaudeville strongman, he was on the right track.
In preparing for his record-breaking nail-bending feat on the stage of the Marriott Hotel in Newark, McGrath had a big scare. He damaged his back in training in December 2016 and spent Christmas in bed, so incapacitated that reaching for the TV remote was an ordeal.
Slowly his strength returned; he increased his training regime, eating healthily and fasting regularly, as his hero, ‘The Mighty Atom’ had done. A couple of months before Newark, he received an invitation from the event organisers. The nail-bending record was on. It was time to go.
I remember sitting in a hotel room with him on the morning of the attempt, watching as he and his buddy, another strongman, Chris Ryder from Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, carefully wrapped nails in blue canvass cladding. The reason for so doing? So John didn’t damage his hands too badly in the superhuman effort of trying to bend so many nails so quickly.
That afternoon, before peers, ‘Iron Tamers’ like David Whitley (who smashes coconuts with his bare fists) and Eric Moss, McGrath took nails wrapped at the ends in canvas cladding and bent seven of them. The record was initially rejected on a technicality but ratified within a week. In the subterranean world of bending steel, McGrath had become a world champion.
Some of us prefer the hammer, some the nail. For my part, I know a good story when I see one. John’s is a good story, as is the story of the old-time – I’m leaving out the final “e” – vaudeville strongmen. It’s not a big story, to be sure. I’m not even sure that it’s that important – as far as sporting stories go. But it is interesting. And curious. And because of those who took to muscling their way into the footnotes of history, it is rather touching, in a tender and all-too-human and shake-your-head kind of way.