Arnie was just an average boy
Date: 15-08-2003
Posted by: Anabolic Info TeamIndia |
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Arnold Schwarzenegger's boyhood pals in Austria remember an easygoing kid from a humble home who played medieval knights with his friends but was kept under the strict control of his policeman father.
By all accounts he was an average child, until he discovered the little-known sport of bodybuilding at the age of about 13.
"Someone came up to me and said there were two boys who wanted to meet me and get an autograph," said bodybuilder Kurt Marnul.
Marnul, who at 74 still has a weightlifter's build and works out three hours a day, was the reigning Mr. Austria at the time and a pioneer of the then-obscure sport.
"Arnold said he really wanted to look like me. He asked me where he could train and what he should do and I told him. That's how it started," Marnul told Reuters.
Schwarzenegger transformed himself, focusing entirely on building the body that would win him multiple Mr. Universe titles and seven Mr. Olympia competitions, make him a multimillion-dollar action hero, and now, give him a shot at being governor of California, the most populous US state and the world's fifth largest economy.
The action hero's campaign includes calls for improving education but he was not a stellar pupil, according to friends in the small town of Thal near Graz, the capital of Styria province in southern Austria.
"You couldn't say he was one of the best (pupils). He was more average, he wasn't very different from anybody else," said Josef Heinzl, like Schwarzenegger aged 56, who grew up with Arnold.
"But when he started weight training, he became much more ambitious. He had a staying power that is not easy to maintain at that age," Heinzl told Reuters.
Heinzl lived near the Schwarzenegger family house in what is today a pretty and well-maintained village but in the austere post-war years was a drab rural outpost with few comforts.
"There was no refrigerator, no flushing toilet, no doctor -- only a radio," Schwarzenegger wrote in a passage quoted in the biography "True Myths - The Life and Times of Arnold Schwarzenegger" by Nigel Andrews.
Schwarzenegger's father Gustav was a policeman, described as a strict disciplinarian who made Arnold and his older brother Meinhard keep their shoes polished and write essays after family outings. Meinhard died in a car accident in 1971.
"We were fun-loving boys, all the kids (in the village) were lively. But his father was the police post commander, so he had to behave," said Franz Hoermann, another friend and also 56.
Gustav was also a former Nazi Party member, who joined shortly after Hitler's Germany annexed Austria in 1938, a fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger has never tried to keep secret.
As in many families across Austria and Germany after the Second War World, the Nazi past was not a topic for discussion around the table or among the children.
"It was not a topic for us. We didn't talk about it," said Karl Kling, who owns the Restaurant Thalersee on the local lake and also grew up in the same group.
What the boys did do was play medieval knights in ruins near Schwarzenegger's house, attend school in a two-room schoolhouse in the village and play in the Thal lake.
"The lake was our main hobby, swimming and rowing boats," Hoermann said.
It was also at the lakeside that Schwarzenegger, who had just discovered weightlifting, met the man who would be his first trainer, the head of a newly founded weightlifting club in the provincial capital Graz who came to the lake to swim.
Arnold joined Marnul's club in Graz, a two-hour march over a mountain when he missed the last bus home at night. His father, himself an athlete but who frowned on bodybuilding as an unpopular new sport, at first limited him to three visits a week so Schwarzenegger set up a training room for himself at home.
Friends say he was dogged about his new sport. "Once he started training he had very little time. He didn't think of much of anything except his muscles," Heinzl said.
Schwarzenegger went AWOL at one point during his compulsory military service to compete in Germany and win the 1965 junior Mr. Europe, and next year turned down a secure Graz city job offer arranged by friends to instead move to Germany and work in a Munich weightlifting studio.
From there he moved to the United States in 1968 to start training at Gold's Gym in Venice Beach, California. He won his first Mr. Universe Title in 1969 and in the 1970s leveraged his status as a bodybuilding icon to start a film career. In 1986, he married Maria Shriver and became part of one of America's most powerful political families, the Kennedys.
"More than anything else he has stamina, huge stamina. A little setback will not stop him from doing something," Heinzl said.
