Human Strength

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http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/31/sports...-gold.html  
 
LOCKHART, Tex.— The world's strongest man was in the mood for barbecue, and in central Texas, this means barbecue at Kreuz Market, open since 1900 and completely lacking in gastronomic pretense. Kreuz's offers no sauce, no beans, no potato salad, no plates and no chance to walk away with the steak knives because they are chained to the tables. The lime-green walls are bare, save for the mounted body of an 11 1/2-pound bass and the hide of a 6 1/2-foot rattlesnake. This is a place to eat, not to see and be seen.
Squares of paper come loaded with ropes of link sausage, mounds of prime rib and brisket and thick pork chops stacked like pancakes, all smoked in brick pits fueled by post-oak logs. Tomatoes and avocados are available, but Mark Henry declined. The frivolity of vegetables is not how a man grows to 6 feet 3 inches, 400 pounds by his 23d year.
Tomatoes and avocados do not provide enough octane for the gas tank of an Olympic weight lifter in the superheavyweight class, one who bench-pressed 525 pounds and squatted 937 pounds in high school, who can dead-lift a national-record 850 pounds, who snatches 391 pounds and cleans and jerks another 475. Vegetables did not provide the strength for this five-lift total that no one can match. A meatless diet did not provide Henry's bank-vault physique, did not cantilever his chest to 62 inches, or expand his waist to 48 inches, or hew his 23-inch biceps and calves, his 24-inch neck and 38-inch thighs.
Henry waved off the vegetables, and picked up a pork chop in hands so massive that he cannot find a pair of gloves that will fit them.
"I'm from a family of carnivores," he said.
Where Henry's immense bulk might be intimidating or forbidding, instead it is inviting. He is open, friendly, a man who luxuriates in his formidable heft. He trains in a T-shirt that says "West Virginia gymnastics," although he is the size of five Mary Lou Rettons. He calls Nate (the Kitchen) Newton, the Dallas Cowboys' 325-pound guard, a "little guy." He gives a curdling scream when he enters a locker room at the University of Texas, just to watch the muscle boys scatter. And when he finds another car parked too close to his own, Henry simply nudges it over, as if the offending vehicle were furniture to be rearranged.

He is bringing personality back to a sport tarnished by doping scandals, and eventually, if Henry develops the technique to match his strength in the snatch and in the clean and jerk, he could become the first American superheavyweight to win an Olympic gold medal since Paul Anderson in 1956.
There were six in Henry's party at Kreuz's one day earlier this month, including his mother, Barbara Mass; his aunt, Amy Chaney, and his coach and manager, Terry Todd, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin, where Henry lives and trains. Four pounds of prime rib, three pounds of pork chops and five pounds of link sausage disappeared quickly, but Henry is not a gargantuan eater. Not the way people assume. Some of his weight-lifting friends can go to those all-you-can eat places and devour 70 ounces of steak. Henry said he once ate 50 ounces but had to stop because "my face got tired."
His 25-year-old brother, Patrick, tips the scales at 6-2, 285, and excelled on the defensive line at Texas A&M. The brothers were born in Silsbee, in the piney woods of east Texas, but they were not as imposing as their uncles in a family of enormous strength. Chudd Adams stood 6-5, 420, and DeWitt Adams reached 6-7, though he was a bit on the thin side at 320.
"You should have seen Uncle Chudd," Henry said last March at the Pan American Games in Argentina. "He picked me up when I was a boy, and I cried. He was just so damn big."
The surprising thing about Henry is his agility. He does not have, as his coach said, that "constipated crab" look of bodybuilders who are sometimes so awkwardly bulky that they appear to be rusted and in need of oil. Henry is fluid, graceful. He can explode off his 16 EEE feet, lift his 400-pound bulk to a rim 10 feet above the ground and dunk a basketball.
But there are many questions to be answered before he can be considered a serious medal contender in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. Those around him say Henry must first define his ambitions. Does he want to win a gold medal? Or does he want an acting career? Will he flirt with professional football? Will he gravitate toward strongman exhibitions? He thinks he could draw a crowd by lifting a table laden with 10 or 15 kids, or tossing beer kegs like Frisbees, or lifting cars by the bumper as he once did to his aunt's Pinto, leaving two wheels spinning in the air as she tried to drive home.

At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, where Henry finished 10th, he was the largest weight lifter in Olympic history at 365 pounds. Now he is 35 pounds heavier. The strength is there. Now it's a matter of refining the technique of sliding his body under the bar in the Olympic disciplines. The world records of 451.75 pounds in the snatch and 558.75 in the clean and jerk are about 61 and 84 pounds more than Henry's best efforts. Reply