The Explorer Who Became a Judge: On The Life Of Charles Gaines

It happened at Caesars Palace in December 1983. Fifteen women competed in a bodybuilding contest that did not really exist. It was conjured up for a film crew, mixed professionals with amateurs in flat contravention of the sport’s own rules, and sitting on the judging panel, scoring them, was one of the men who wrote the film.

Charles Gaines was that man. Go to the end credits and he is listed there as an IFBB judge, which is an odd credential for a novelist to be holding. Depending on which account you believe, he had either never watched a women’s bodybuilding contest in his life or he had seen enough of them to be handed a scorecard at a world championship. He also appears in the finished cut, interviewed about what he makes of it all, in the register of a man who has wandered in off the street and is being asked for his first impressions. The film contains both of these facts and never once puts them beside each other.

Gaines died on 21 July at his home in Nova Scotia, aged 84. His daughter Greta announced it and told everyone to catch that fish and kiss those lips while you can, which is a better sentence than any I’m about to write, and I found out about it from a friend, over email, and was truthfully a bit shocked at how unbothered everyone seemed. Everyone, including Arnold Schwarzenegger on many…. many occassions, talks about Arnold’s importance in making bodybuilding mainstream. It was Charles Gaines who helped give the ‘Austrian Oak’ the support and popularity he needed through his books, and later his co-produced documentary on bodybuilding, Pumping Iron.

Every obituary this fortnight has run the Arnold and Gaines story. Fair enough, it’s a good story. But the Caesars judging panel is the one that will not leave me alone, because it shows you what happens to a man once the thing he described starts listening to him.

How Charles Gaines Saved Bodybuilding

Quickly, the bit you probably know, especially if you read this Substack regularly.

Sports Illustrated sent Gaines to cover a Mr East Coast bodybuilding contest in 1972. He was a novelist then, part of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had already publsihed one book. He brought a photographer, George Butler with him. The two immediately became intrigued about a physique sport that, for many, was seen as suspicious (at best, people often thought bodybuilders were vain idiots. At worst, it was coded as homosexual, which, for 1970s America, brought its own bigotry).

Two years later the two of them produced a book, Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding, with Ed Corney on the cover, because in 1974 nobody was sure Schwarzenegger was the draw. Later printings gave the cover to Tom Platz. Later ones still arrived at the image we all now carry round in our heads, so you can more or less watch celebrity culture assemble itself across three dust jackets, which is the kind of thing I find much more exciting than I should. And yes, I own several editions.

To everyone’s amazement, the book sold. It became a New York Times bestseller, to the surprise of everyone including its authors. Gaines and Butler knew they could go even further and began setting in motion a documentary on bodybuilding. For this, Gaines and Butler spent years pitching several thousand people for money, most of whom said no even after watching test footage of Arnold posing at an amusement park in Massachusetts. About four hundred thousand dollars eventually came together and the film went out in January 1977. Gaines co wrote and narrated. It was Pumping Iron and it helped propel Arnold, and bodybuilding to the masses. It is, without a doubt, the single most important fitness movie bar none.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I actually think the man did, and it isn’t reach.

If you wanted to write about a muscular body in English before 1974, you had two voices available. One was the trade voice from fitness moguls, like Joe Weider and Bob Hoffman and the rest. It was advertising wearing a byline, and in which your inadequacy was the product and the cure was on page forty. The other was the respectable voice, which handled the muscular man as a case. Vain, arrested, compensating, faintly ridiculous, and very often coded as sexually suspect in ways nobody quite said out loud.

Gaines made a third one. He did it by the almost stupidly simple method of describing what was in front of him with the attention a literary novelist gives a failing marriage. He called the book a report from an interesting, colorful and heretofore ignored region of American life. He said he and Butler had felt like nineteenth-century explorers, since the place was as primeval and unmapped as parts of Labrador.

Which is nonsense, obviously, and noticing that nonsense is roughly what I love doing. Bodybuilding was not unmapped, it had eighty years of its own magazines, contests, and its own aesthetic quarrels conducted at enormous length by men who took them extremely seriously. What Gaines meant was that nobody with cultural standing had bothered coming to look, which is a different claim and a true one, and which is also the claim every explorer in history has made about somewhere already full of people.

As any Irish person will tell you, maps are not neutral. Whoever draws one decides what’s a feature and what’s empty ground which brings us to nine years after Pumping Iron when Gaines was scoring a women’s bodybuilding contest.

The Unprecedented Woman

Gaines and Butler went back to the bodybuilding in the early eighties, this time for the women. The book was Pumping Iron II: The Unprecedented Woman. Much like the original male series, a film came out after the book, this time in 1985. It followed a handful of competitors toward the World Cup, mainly Rachel McLish, who was the sport’s established and very saleable champion, and Bev Francis, an Australian world record powerlifter who turned up with a body that the sport, and the documentary, deemed as ‘too muscular’ for women’s bodybuilding.

I show parts of the film to students most years because of how outlandish it is in parts. Bodybuilding is, to my mind, defined by three things, muscularity, symmetry and leanness. Now people will quibble about ‘aesthetics’ and how subjective the sport is but, to my mind, the idea that an athlete can be ‘too muscular’ is hogwash, especially if they’re lean. In one scene, Francis steps off the posing platform and immediately jokes about whether or not she looked ‘too manly’ on stage because of her muscularity. The scene serves as a good way of showing how women’s strength, and muscularity, is often policed by our ideas of how a woman ‘should look’.

The film asks, out loud and on camera, how muscular a woman can become before she no longer counts as a woman. That is what makes the footage so useful. Usually this judgement happens quietly, somewhere between a judge looking at a body and writing down a score. Here the men have to explain themselves. They cannot quite do it but they keep coming back to ‘femininity’ as though saying the word settles the matter. Which reminds me of the Irish exam I failed at school. I had an essay on dúchas learned off by heart, so I wrote out what I knew and ended every paragraph with “and this is an example of dúchas.” I had assumed that naming a thing was the same as explaining it. The examiner disagreed and failed me, correctly. That is exactly what is happening in the judges’ room at Caesars, except nobody in there is failing them.

Anyway, Francis came eighth of fifteen which was a travesty as she was the lean and incredibly muscular. She said later she should have been first or last, which I think is the smartest thing anyone involved said about the whole business, because a scoring system asked to measure two things that contradict each other will always produce mush in the middle. Carla Dunlap, who was incredible in her own right, won.

And Gaines was on the panel. The man whose entire claim was that this world deserved describing from the inside, on its own terms, without a sneer, sat down at a contest invented for his own camera and handed out numbers. Whether he was qualified to be there is the bit I cannot settle, and I have stopped trying. The credits say IFBB judge. The footage says bystander. Both of those are in the same film, cut by the same people, and I suspect nobody involved thought the two were in tension, which is itself the most interesting thing about the whole enterprise.

I don’t think that’s a scandal. Whatever the panel did that night is small beer next to what the federations were doing to women’s categories across the same decade. And, more importantly, Gaines was an absolute champion in pioneering these women in the first place. I think it’s more useful than a scandal. It shows you what success does to documentary attention. Describe a subculture well enough and you stop being a visitor and start being one of the forces acting on it. Gaines didn’t sell out but he could no longer stand where he’d claimed to be standing in 1974, once the dispatches had gone and changed the place they were sent from.

Few people working on physical culture now sit outside that problem. It is really hard to be a historian or sociologist of fitness because at some point, you need to rely on the people you are studying for access and opportunity. My next book is on women’s Olympic weightlifting and I was blessed to interview 30 plus athletes and officials. Some of them had read my previous work and that was enough to get me access. Gaines wasn’t ‘doing something wrong’, far from it. He was an example of how the fitness industry tends to operate on a trust system.

One Strange but Amazing Interlude

Gaines also invented paintball, which is a sentence you only get to write about a particular kind of American. I know that’s not relevant but come on, how could I not include it?

It started as an argument with a stockbroker over whether city instinct or country experience wins out in the woods, and got settled in June 1981 outside Henniker, New Hampshire, with twelve men, a hundred acres and a set of pistols designed for marking trees. A forester named Ritchie White won it by gathering every flag he needed and never firing a shot, thereby proving the countryman’s case by refusing to play the game the city men thought they were in.

I absolutely love that. The sources can’t agree whether it was the seventh or the twenty seventh of the month and the men involved were still contradicting each other about the original duel decades later, so the founding myth is about as sound as any founding myth, which is to say not very.

Now, what’s worth taking?

Gaines produced twenty five books or so between novels, fly fishing collections, a life of Charles Atlas, and a highly readable memoir. Sixty three years married to Patricia and he was inducted into both the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame, then the Paintball Hall of Fame, a double I’d guess nobody else holds.

Arnold said he was interested in everything. That’s the inheritance, I think, rather than the bestseller or the film. A man walked into a room full of enormous people in Venice at a moment when every respectable literary institution in America was telling him it wasn’t worth the trip, and decided it was a place, and that somebody should go and describe it properly. He was out fishing not long before the end at the age of eighty-four.

I’m off to squat, badly, and to sit with the fact that most of what I know about muscle came to me through a man who was improvising the whole time and was at least honest enough to let the camera catch him at it.