Arming Himself For The Fray

It was the middle of May, and out-side the Greater Scranton YMCA the air was a brutal combination of humidity, flatulence from the nearby Interstate and, of course, the effluvium of Greater Scranton itself. Inside the Y, though, the atmosphere was more bracing. It smelled of booze and balm, of barrooms and locker rooms—which was as it should have been upon the occasion of the second National American Arm Wrestling Association Championships. If ever a sport developed out of friendly, and not so friendly, barroom tests of strength, it is arm wrestling.

Halfway through this Saturday morning the meet was about to begin and the 156 male and 12 female contestants were warming up, each with his own words, each in his own way. The smaller men paced quickly, applying analgesic balm and chattering words of courage to themselves. The bigger men lounged around, applying analgesic balm and taking little sips of courage from their Thermos jugs. One of them, wearing a turban, was explaining to everyone within earshot that the perfect drink for a long day of arm wrestling was a blend of protein powder, soy flour, wheat germ, orange juice, fresh strawberries, almonds, bananas, raw eggs and beer.

The warming up continued. Spectators began to fill the auditorium, filing past the burly young ticket taker. The scene seemed remarkably decorous, all things considered, when the ticket taker stepped forward and barred the door. "Hold it, Pop," he said to a middle-aged man in horn-rimmed glasses. "It's two bucks to see the show." To which the middle-aged man replied, with a pleasant, though unblinking, smile, "It doesn't cost me a penny to see the show, Sonny. I am the show." And before the ticket taker had a chance to do or say anything for which he would without question have been sorry, someone shouted, "Hey, it's Al! It's the champ! Al Turner's here!" and the middle-aged gent was surrounded and bustled through the door into the auditorium by a group of laughing men, of every age and size, all trying to talk at once.

The subject of their joy and attention, Allen Turner, seems at first glance an unlikely hero for any group of strength athletes. Born on Jan. 20, 1928, his age alone should serve to disqualify him, and he doesn't radiate the kind of heavy-duty power one associates with arm wrestling. It is puzzling—until you notice the hands. Lord have mercy, what a pair of mitts! Great rough-cut mallets, they fan out from his wrists with tendons the size of guywires and display a set of digits that would look more at home on the feet of a Sasquatch.

Throughout the matches that morning and afternoon, those hands fulfilled their promise. Al Turner downed the arms of all comers in the 200-to-220 weight class to win his eighth national title in 11 tries. So easy was it that often he would smile and wink at the audience as his adversary strained. In the finals, after the signal to begin, he held his arm rock steady in the beginning position for perhaps 20 seconds while shouting at his sweating young opponent (a good friend), "C'mon, Randy, pull! Let's have it! Pull! C'mon!" before ending the mismatch with a downward stroke of hand, wrist, arm, shoulder—and a smile.

"Even as a kid I had a good arm," Turner says, gravel-voiced. "The first match I remember was one I had when I was 14, against a friend of my father, a big guy who weighed about 230 to my 135. He and my dad had come in from a drinking bout and were playing across the kitchen table. The guy beat my dad, then laughed and asked me if I'd like to try. So I did, and I dumped him. And then I dumped him again. And from that day on I never lost a match until 1973, when I was beaten in the finals of the nationals by Steve Stanaway."

During the 30 years between 1942 and 1972, when Turner entered his first arm-wrestling tournament, he "pulled arms" thousands of times: against his schoolmates, at first, against his buddies in the Marines, against an even wider variety of contenders once he had left the service and returned home to Brockton, Mass.

Throughout his school days and his three years in the Corps, he had played for the fun and satisfaction of it, but after coming home he had his first money match. "The first time I pulled for money I was 22 years old," he says. "I was working in a foundry, doing heavy work, and one of the guys there, he weighed 260, wanted to see if he could take me. So we bet a buck and he paid me with a silver dollar. My wife still has it."

And as Turner became known for his strength, other matches for money came his way, some of them arranged by his older brother Bob. "We had a heck of a time," Turner recalls, "traveling around, going to the clubs and taverns and playing these guys. I remember once Bob came over to my place after work, all charged up, telling me about this guy he had run into out of town somewhere who kept bending these big railroad spikes and asking him to arm wrestle. Bob told him, 'Look, Buddy, I don't want to play, but I've got a kid brother who can take you.' Bob said the guy just laughed and bent another spike and said, 'Oh, yeah? Maybe your kid brother'd like to go for two hundred bucks.' Well, when we get to this tavern for the match, the first thing the big palooka does is to double up another one of those spikes. 'To warm up,' he tells me. But when we play, I blow him off the table, and as we're leaving Bob pulls a 10 off that big roll of bills and tells the guy, 'Here. Go buy yourself some more spikes.' "

After nine years at the foundry, Turner took a job at a lumberyard in Brockton, where he worked until a few weeks ago when he hired on in another lumberyard in Watertown. He kept looking for money matches wherever he could find them. "During the early years, I'd have two or three a month, sometimes more," he says. "But by the late '60s, word had got around, and I went almost five years without a match." Then, in 1972, things took a decisive turn.