To continue from Part One, my article ended with all the drama leading up to the weigh-ins at the Canadian Nationals. For Part Two, I will introduce a new character to my odyssey - a bodybuilding icon - Lonnie "The Swami" Teper. Yes, Lonnie was the guest MC for the Canadian Nationals that year. Even after many, many, many years; he's still got the same electrifying stage presence.
I am a freak of super size and strength. I wasn't just another kid who lifted weights in his parent's basement. People always ask me when I realized that I was "different". . . and I can narrow it down to one bench press contest at a local gym. It was in that Niagara Falls weight pit that a story was forged that has almost become the stuff of urban legends and folklore.
This story is about me, the Canadian Colossus, and my unbelievable journey to the Night of Champions in New York City. It was 1996; I was still an amateur bodybuilder and had never been to the Big Apple. Naturally, I was very excited to go and check out the show. A friend of mine had an apartment and an extra ticket to the contest and he offered to give me the ticket and to let me stay at his place, so I booked a flight right away. I bet this sounds simple enough, right? Well, the flight was where the real action began.
Since everyone keeps asking me to talk about Nasser El Sonbaty. . .about how we met and became, what I thought at the time, good friends. . . for this week's column, I will tell the full story so you can understand how surprised I was when I read about all the horrific lies he told about my wife and me in his interview on bodybuilding.com. To this day I don't understand why he focused on bashing me for no apparent reason, especially after how hospitable and kind my wife and I were to him when he came to Toronto in the winter of 1995.
Bodybuilding and posing. These 2 words used to be synonymous but over the past several years, as the physiques have evolved, it has changed drastically from the good old days when posing and physically displaying the body as a classical art form with ease and grace was an important and emphasized part of the bodybuilding equation. Now the routines of the top athletes are nothing more than hitting some hard muscle shots and wandering from one side of the stage to the other. There are a few athletes in the current crop that are exceptions to this rule but, as a whole, it seems to be the case.
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