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Bulked-up 'Brothers' thin on factsDate: 01.12.2006
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team Japan
Skipping breakfast is a bad idea, but on days when it can't be helped you can always pick up a shiny foil pouch of Weider In nutrient jelly at a railway station kiosk and slurp the contents from its plastic nozzle before your train arrives.
The space-age foodstuff is sold at groceries and health clubs, too, with the latter venues also likely to carry Weider energy bars, Weider protein powder and Weider magazines such as Muscle and Fitness.
But what's in all that stuff? And who is this Weider guy anyway? The interesting but frustrating book Brothers of Iron provides no answer to the first question, but a partial answer to the second one.
The man behind the brand is Joe Weider, a Norse-god-like drawing of whom appears as a logo on some of the products. Born in Montreal in 1920 or '22 (he's not sure) as the son of penniless Jewish immigrants, young Joe promised his father he would one day make the Weider name famous. With the help of his brother Ben, the book's subtitle tells us, Joe "created the fitness movement and built a business empire."
That's a grand claim, but the wide availability of Weider products in Japan backs up the "business empire" part. The "fitness movement" boast should be even more impressive. Brothers of Iron shows the Weiders made major contributions to this movement--Joe wrote a prescient 1950 manifesto predicting that the ills of industrialized living would require it--but the book fails to prove they "created" it.
Joe is the dominant character in this story. Eight of the book's 12 chapters are told from his point of view, with four from Ben. A lifelong bodybuilding afficionado, Joe founded Your Physique magazine at his mother's dining room table in 1940, later hiring Ben as an assistant. In 1946, they organized Mr. Montreal, their first bodybuilding contest.
Here the villain of the story makes his entrance. In those days, bodybuilding (judged by appearance) was a minor offshoot of weightlifting (judged by numbers). The North American governing body for both sports was controlled by Bob Hoffman, a rival magazine publisher based in the United States.
Having led the Weiders to believe he would sanction Mr. Montreal, Hoffman pulled the plug at literally the last minute--creating a dramatic scene. Joe and Ben founded the International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB) on the spot, and report that Hoffman did everything he could to ruin them from that day on. Both Weiders repeatedly accuse Hoffman of underhandedness, but their bete noir is now deceased, and we don't get his side of the story.
Elsewhere, the Weiders are gentlemanly--or at least discreet--when it comes to their former enemies. Joe describes his first marriage as an utter disaster and recounts underlings embezzling him blind, but the names of his ex-wife and his ex-employees are tactfully omitted. (His current wife, since 1961, is glowingly described.)
In 1968, Joe took an Austrian weightlifter named Arnold Schwarzenegger under his wing, viewing him as a surrogate son. They had a falling-out in the 1980s when a Hollywood-ized Arnold spurned Joe, but have since made up to the extent that the now California governor wrote a foreword to this book.
A straightforward account of such eventful lives would make excellent reading, but the brothers muddy the waters with needless bombast and glaring omissions. Ben's chapters are mainly an account of his successful, decadeslong struggle to win provisional Olympic recognition for bodybuilding, giving the reader the impression the sport has such recognition now. But in a one-sentence afterthought, he says Olympic recognition "was allowed to automatically lapse, due to technicalities."
Joe says he loves to taste-test Weider products and personally designs labels for them, but he never does get around to discussing any of the ingredients.
Worst of all, in this 300-plus page book on bodybuilding, steroids are casually discussed on a mere seven pages near the end.
Not every good biography needs to be a tell-all. But this one falls short of being a tell-enough. |
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