The Camaraderie Years

I was sitting in Joe Weider’s plush Woodland Hills office when, out of the blue, he asked, “What do you think makes a true professional?” Before i could respond, he began:

- Chris Lund

“A true professional always improves or gets better, and that’s what i want you to do. Arnold always did, and that’s why he became the greatest bodybuilder in the entire world, and, another thing,” he continued passionately, “camaraderie. find me all the bodybuilding camaraderie you can. Arnold regularly trained with Franco Columbu, frank Zane, Dave Draper, Ed Corney, and Ken Waller. He did something that no one ever did before. He introduced camaraderie to bodybuilding, and i want your pictures to capture this just like Artie Zeller used to do!”

Afterwards, my mind was a whirlpool of ideas, with camaraderie number one on the list. So, the next day, i headed straight for Gold’s Gym in Venice. As i looked around the huge rooms packed with every piece of training equipment you could imagine, i started thinking seriously about what Joe had said the day before. While i couldn’t actually see Arnold, and his merry men doing heavy squats, preacher curls, and Arnold dumbbell presses, etc, (Arnold had retired by then) there was, believe me, still plenty of action taking place inside the walls of the Mecca. in fact, back in the early 1980’s a brand new era of camaraderie was happening right before my very own eyes, and this new ‘Golden era’ of bodybuilding would last for more than a decade.

Tom Platz, who had come so close to winning the 1981 IFBB Mr. Olympia, in Columbus, Ohio, formed a huge part of this new era, and he was renowned for training his upper body at World Gym, situated about a mile away from Gold’s. After his workout he would drive down to Gold’s to train his legs, and, needless to say, squats were always Tom’s number one exercise. He would do set after set, even up to 50 reps with 600 lbs, until he actually collapsed on the floor.