Dedicated grapplers feel the pull of competitive arm-wrestling

STAFF PHOTO SAMANTHA BAKER w @NWASAMANTHA
David Finkbeiner, center, positions Scott Fleming, left, of Oak Grove, Mo. and Bruce Jones of Beebe for competition Saturday, Feb. 8, 2014, at Inferno Fitness & Mixed Martial Arts in Springdale during the Border Wars Challenge Winter Throwdown arm wrestling tournament. The competition was double-elimination for each of the four men's weight divisions and open women's divisions.
STAFF PHOTO SAMANTHA BAKER w @NWASAMANTHA David Finkbeiner, center, positions Scott Fleming, left, of Oak Grove, Mo. and Bruce Jones of Beebe for competition Saturday, Feb. 8, 2014, at Inferno Fitness & Mixed Martial Arts in Springdale during the Border Wars Challenge Winter Throwdown arm wrestling tournament. The competition was double-elimination for each of the four men's weight divisions and open women's divisions.

“The Japanese are among the happiest nations on earth …,” the magazine The Cosmopolitan confidently reported in an 1889 piece called “The Japanese at Play” - and why? Because they regularly grappled or watched grappling. And among the many kinds of grappling was wrist wrestling, or what modern Arkansans call arm-wrestling.

So often proposed as a party game - “I’d like to see Wayne arm-wrestle Richard!” - or enjoined to enervate a hyper child, arm-wrestling is really a capital mano-a-mano contest. At its barest and most spontaneous, it requires nothing more than two opposing hands and a flat base for elbows.

It tasks your strength and musters all your energy and focus, and yet it isn’t a test of strength the way moving a heavy object is.

It may involve some pageantry and intimidation - OK, likely does - but neither can compensate for a smaller hand, weaker wrist or torpid arm.

Size is a factor, but not as much as one might expect - competition “pullers” are not as stratified as in wrestling or boxing. In the 1980s and ’90s, Yukon Jack tournaments spread from California across the nation, with right hand-only, double-elimination matches in three men’s divisions: lightweight (up to 160 pounds), middleweight (161 to 190 pounds) and heavyweight (191 plus), along with a single division for women.

It is, in the strictest sense, hand-to-hand combat, but with less threat of death.

Finally, it’s one of the few contests that can be called “intimate” - you are, after all, not simply facing your opponent over the space of a few inches, but holding hands.

At 9 p.m. Tuesday, AMC premieres a new “reality” show called Game of Arms. It will follow men from five arm-wrestling clubs (in Erie, Pa.; Kansas City, Kan.; Baton Rouge; Sacramento, Calif.; and New York) and, naturally, appears to include as much stock reality show schlock as true-to-life training and competition.

“I turned down the show. I’m the super heavyweight champion of the Ultimate Armwrestling League, and we have a lot in the works with different networks - we’re doing our own thing,” says Michael “Monster Mike” Todd of Cabot.

It’s true. The league’s website lists Todd as the super heavyweight champion (236 pounds or heavier). He’s holding one of those back-brace-size championship belts at his waist. Also, Todd is the super heavyweight champion for right- and left-handed pullers.

The 40-year-old thinks Game of Arms is going to be a success, or at least, that’s his public pronouncement, but he also says the show will lie.

One, he’s an arm-wrestling fundamentalist.

He believes he’s a professional athlete and that to compete at his level, one must live like a pro, with the attendant diet strictures and unerring workout regimen. Meanwhile the show will dip well into highwaymen-and-honky-tonks mythology, what he and girlfriend Rebecca Sample, one of the league’s few female contenders, call “dumb redneck” tropes.

Here’s another thing: “The video of Travis Bagent that’s used for the commercial - now, it’s awesome; it’s great training footage,” Todd says. “He’s flipping a tire, jogging in the snow in West Virginia, he’s doing a CrossFit rower. But he’s also telling people he’s the greatest arm-wrestler in the world and that’s not true.

“I am. I really am.” EVERYBODY DOES IT

If there is indeed a connection between grappling and happiness, here’s another felicitous fact of the phenomenon: Many, many amateurs come to it late in their sporting life. That is, after high school and college.

Josh Woodhouse of Fayetteville is 31 and attempting to build a regional circuit of regular tournaments called Mid-South Armwrestling. His first official tournament, the Border Wars Challenge Winter Throwdown, took place Feb. 8 in Springdale.

“I’ve only been arm-wrestling three years,” he says. “My confidence is through the roof. When you start seeing your strength, and you’re winning, you start building confidence.”

And many serious competitors can remain formidable well into middle age.

One of the Border Wars’ competitors was “Big” Mike Cagle of White Hall. He’s 58 and says he’s a two-time world champion and six-time state champion (these claims are harder to demonstrate than, say, being an Olympic medalist), and “I’m just now actually making a comeback.

“This is my first year in comeback, and I’ve really gotten in shape, and I really do believe, the Lord willing, that I’ll lick this Border War.”

He did not place.

Cagle also says he was at the filming of the most famous arm-wrestling spectacle of this age, more famous exponentially than any ABC Wide World of Sports tournament - Sylvester Stallone’s Over the Top in 1987. “I was sitting right beside Sylvester Stallone when he was getting rubbed down [in the movie] by the chiropractor girl. I was sitting right by him, and you can see my tattoo -‘Carol.’”

Here’s another curiosity about this truly international but mostly unheralded spectacle - most people have done it.

“Everybody has arm-wrestled at least once,” Dave Patton, a longtime lightweight champ, told Tom Junod in a June 14, 1993, Sports Illustrated story “Arms and the Man.”

In Eastern Europe it’s a prize sport and an elective course in some high schools and colleges even though it has never been (and many say never will be)an Olympic event.

“I mean, there’s no one I know personally who’s done any synchronized swimming.”

THROWBACK TRAINING

The first thing you learn from schoolyard arm-wrestling is that the one who can roll the other guy’s hand backward is most likely to win the pull. (The second thing you learn is to get a head start on that before the word “Go!”)

For serious practitioners, there are myriad styles and stratagems, but most come down to three basic techniques:

Top roll: From a neutral grip, turn your thumb away from your strong shoulder and throw straight down, pinning the knuckles.

Hook: From a neutral grip, roll your pinkie in toward your nose and pull, pinning the wrist.

Shoulder press: Lean your strong shoulder over the table and behind your grip and press your opponent’s hand to the table, pinning the hand.

“At my level, we all know the same techniques,” Todd says. “We have to have the strength to execute those techniques.”

To that end (and because Todd is a one-time personal trainer who markets Vitalis supplements), he has built a 2,000-square-foot gym onto the side of his house. In it he has benches and cross cable machines, but he also has plenty of unusual pieces of equipment that are largely arm-wrestling-specific and all primitive.

One is an angled leverage bar fitted with 15 pounds of weight plates. Palm up and elbow tucked, he holds the grip end and turns his hand over. It is, he promises, “the heaviest 15 pounds you’ll ever handle.”

Another bit of equipment is a “wrist roll,” a short horizontal bar with softballs capping either end and a strap tied to the middle from which dangles a stack of plates weighing about 50 pounds: The strain is to wind the strap onto the bar by turning the softballs over and over in your hands.

Another fixture in his gym is two close-set, vertical, 2-inch-thick tow ropes, which he climbs.

So-called “thick-grip” bars and handles are favorites of arm-wrestlers, who know that the wider the hand is opened the less strength can be focused there. They want to maximize what they have.

To that end, Todd also has a 200-pound steel ball - a perfectly round and smooth solid steel sphere the size of a classroom globe. He believes it was forged to crush rock in some capacity. Lifting 200 pounds does not the strongman make, but doing so with your fingers splayed and compressing a slippery smooth ball isn’t possible for a man of average strength and size.

Todd and his cousin Josh Wood routinely “shoulder” it (set it on their shoulder, the way a pirate might a parrot).

And every day Todd spends 10 minutes on his Marpo Kinetic Vector rope-pulling machine with a 100-pound resistance threshold.

Imagine sitting behind the gear box of a stationary bicycle fitted with a simple loop of thick rope. Todd grips the rope with one hand at a time,a foot or more from his chest, and pulls it into his chest, contracting his wrist flexors in the same motion. One hand over the other. It is, of everything he does, the closest approximation to a pull.

BROKEN BONES

Thanks to all this training, “I can take anyone’s hand in the sport,” Todd says. “Before our bout is over, I’m going to fold your wrist.”

Breaking it? Nah, not the wrist, but there is something called the “arm-break position.”

There are several gruesome examples on YouTube. In Strong Arm Tactics, written by competitive arm-wrestler James Retarides, it’s “when you turn your competing shoulder past the alignment of your hand and wrist.

“Most refs will warn you in this position; they will tell you to ‘face your arm,’ but to be safe you should turn your noncompeting shoulder toward your hand and wrist.”

In fact, in most arm-wrestling organizations and tournaments, refs will call fouls if a competitor won’t heed that warning.

Still, “I see people who, if they do not know what they’re doing, have had arm breaks, and pretty severe arm breaks,” says Sample, a former labor and delivery charge nurse at Baptist Health Medical Center. “So I think if someone has an aspiration to arm wrestle, that they get with someone who knows how to train, learn it that way, and then of course, it’s some way for all of us to compete.”

ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 02/24/2014

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