Pearl Is A Rare Old Gem

Smudge pots glow on the valley floor down below, giving off heat to save the pear buds. To call this morning would be premature. It is frosty nighttime in Talent, Oregon. Up on the hill a barn light goes on. A man walks to a scale, weighs himself and records the weight on a nearby chart. Two hundred and thirty-four pounds.

This is no common barn; it's chockful not of hay and Holsteins but of barbells and exercise machines. The man moves from the scale to the radio, turns it on to a country music station, adjusts the volume and then sits on an exercise bicycle. His breathing gradually quickens, coming in steaming puffs in the unheated building as he drives the pedals down. It isn't quite 4 a.m. This is no ordinary man, but for him it's an ordinary morning.

His name is Bill Pearl, and he's the Sam Snead, Bill Tilden, George Blanda, Gordie Howe of bodybuilding. He has what they all had, what few athletes ever have—an ability to perform at the highest levels of a sport at an age when most—if not all—of their original rivals are long retired. Pearl was only 22 years old in 1953, the year he won both the AAU Mr. America and the National Amateur Bodybuilding Association Mr. Universe titles, which were then the premier events in amateur bodybuilding, and he was 47 when he gave a historic exhibition in Indianapolis at the 1978 Mr. America contest on the 25th anniversary of his earlier win.

Normally, when a revered old star is to present such an exhibition, his appearance is saved for last on the program, but in 1978 it was decided to feature Pearl first. Roger Schwab, writing in Iron Man, reported: "There would be no dramatic anticipation. When the curtain opened at the start of the show, there was Bill Pearl on the dais, looking finer than he did 25 years ago. Let me reflect for a moment back to the spring of 1964 in Philadelphia at Town Hall. Bill posed before a full house that night of enthusiasts who realized they were seeing perhaps the best in the world. In an unforgettable display, laced with the glare of flashbulbs exploding nonstop, Pearl presented all he had to offer before a standing audience, wildly applauding. This night the scene was identical. Pearl was magnificent. He displayed great roundness and mass of muscle and beautiful skin tone.... Pearl was the class of the physiques appearing this evening and would have won this event...if circumstances had allowed. (There are no repeat winners in AAU Mr. America competition.)"

Pearl has appeared three times since that night in Indianapolis—at the Mr. Olympia event later in 1978, in Munich in 1980 and in Australia in 1981, when he was 51 years old. And even now, as he approaches 53, with his roseate skin he looks to be 30 and altogether capable of competing with men young enough to be his grandsons. Leaving aside for a moment the critical matter of will, how is such a thing possible? How can a 52-year-old, no matter how dedicated, retain for so long the appearance of young manhood? Is he some sort of physical anomaly or is he a window through which we may see the future?

Anyone who has spent much time in what is sometimes called the Iron Game has, of course, seen weight trainers over 40 whose physiques were, if not up to Pearl's standard, surprisingly youthful. Apparently there is something about the act of regularly stressing the body with heavy exercise that gives it the wherewithal to resist the visual manifestations of advancing age, which such sports as distance running, cycling or swimming, whose cardiovascular benefits are unquestioned, clearly do not. Consider the way aging ironfolk look, compared to, say, middle-aged runners, who sometimes appear to be older than their years. What else could account for the proud sweep of a veteran lifter's haunch—the first part of the body to slacken—compared to the dwindling thews of most men beyond 40, or even 30?

The limited research in this area suggests that men and women of middle age will respond to systematic progressive resistance with weights by becoming more powerful and more flexible, with more endurance and less fat. The reasons why this is true are rather complicated, having to do with the body's biochemical goings-on following stressful exercise of this sort. Some of the studies indicate that one of the reasons workouts with weights cause middle-aged men to gain more power and muscular shape than workouts on the jogging track or handball court may be that the stress of progressive resistance weight training causes the body to produce more than the normal amount of the male hormone, testosterone, whereas the stress of the other exercises doesn't.

Even so, bodybuilding, with a few notable exceptions, has been since the beginning a young man's game. The Greeks, in their fascination with the ideal male body, always linked physical perfection with youth, and until the 1970s people in the modern world of weightlifting automatically expected the best men to be in their 20s.

Pearl dealt this thinking a killing blow even before his 1978 exhibition. In 1971, at the age of 40, he entered the professional division of the London-based NABBA's Mr. Universe competition. He'd won the event first in 1961 and again in 1967, but it was his appearance in '71 that symbolized his and, by extension, everyone's, ability to hold back the hands of the clock.

The occasion was especially significant in that it was intended to be a showdown of the superstars of the sport: Pearl, Sergio Oliva, Frank Zane, Reg Park and Arnold Schwarzenegger—Schwarzenegger had won the event the three previous years. "I was training as hard as ever," Pearl says now, "but I really didn't figure on competing again until I began to read the challenges being issued by some of the other top men. They were claiming—or others were claiming for them in the muscle magazines—that I was too old. Anyway, they gave me a lot of heat about it, and I guess it bothered me a little, because I decided to give it a shot." It should be explained that in those days, as in these, the world of bodybuilding was riven by factions, and bringing all the best men together in one competition, which rarely happens, was bound to stir up the faithful.