Taking A Punch
Strength Training with Mitch Myers
One day, Coach Myers came into the locker room to find me alone, in the dark, mostly naked, sweating, and suffering.
In 1980, Mitch Myers was a year and a half younger than my nephew Campbell is now. What wears so young, fresh, and agile on Campbell was sage, ancient, and wise on Mitch. Perspective is everything.
By this point in the game, nothing much shocked Mitch. He’d spent a year trying to flush out the culture of drug use in the St. Andrews High School sports program. I’ll go to my grave defending the position that St. Andrews had no more of a problem with recreational drugs than any other school in Mississippi, but except for the Golf Team, every sports team on our roster had a couple of players taking black pill stimulants. The golf team had a reputation for coke, but it had nothing to do with performance.
Strength-enhancing drugs had not yet taken hold in Mississippi High School sports. By the time I was thirty, people were calling it an epidemic. I worked out with a boy named KT. He went to public school. If I say which, it would identify him. KT had little time for the private schools, which he called the “White schools,” but we got along because we had similar goals outside the classroom. We were both experimenting with Dynabol, an anabolic steroid. We weren’t the only people taking steroids in Mississippi, but in 1980, there weren’t many others.
Sitting in the dark after a hard workout while my body returned to a normal temperature and my energy level returned to something I could work with was pretty common. I was almost forty by the time I admitted to Doug Draper, my psychologist, that for about thirty minutes after a really good workout, I felt suicidal, usually inducing tears. If I couldn’t find a quiet, dark place to wait for this to pass, I would do it in my car with the air conditioner on.
Doug had been experimenting with serotonin inhibitors on me. He’d been treating me for chronic depression since I was thirteen. His theory was that my body had trouble metabolizing serotonin, and sometimes physical exercise made it spike. I made sure that he understood that feeling suicidal and being suicidal were very different things. I’ve never been suicidal or even close, but feeling suicidal is something that happens, and you learn to ride it out.
“What’d you do?” Mitch said, pointing to the masses of black and purple on my stomach.
“KT and I have been screwing around with a medicine ball,” I answered.
A medicine ball is one of the oldest pieces of strength training equipment. Possibly even older than dumbells. While there are several exercises you can do with it, the original purpose was to throw it as hard as you can into each other’s abdomen. The idea is that the more you take a punch, the more you can take a punch, and the process makes you stronger.
My body’s core was never very attractive, but neither was my face. I could and did make it strong as hell, though. Your core is the seat of your strength. Without it, you got nothing. It doesn’t matter what it looks like.
At a time in my life when instability seemed to seep out of the walls, Coach Myers was my rock. He never flinched, no matter how many times Mike Shepherd called him “hebe.” I don’t think any of us actually understood what it meant or took the time to consider it.
One day, I offhandedly said, “Hey, hebe,” and he laughed. “That’s so offensive.” He said through his laughter. The spectacle of a Mississippi boy not knowing what antisemitism is must have seemed bizarre to him. It hadn’t been that long since some men who looked and sounded like me blew up Beth Israel because they thought the Rabbi took the wrong side of the integration issue.
Running a thousand reasons why I fucked up through my head, I blurted out, “I’m so sorry.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Coach Myers said, “Just don’t use that word in New York.”
That’s a key part of the story. A New York Jew with good grades, Mitch couldn’t get into the medical school he wanted, so he took a job at this little Episcopal High School in Jackson, Mississippi, hoping for a second chance. In Jackson, Mitch found love in another teacher and found his way into Medical School. His brief layover teaching at St. Andrews was the key to his life’s desire.
I wouldn’t say he was a natural athlete, but Mitch was a very good athlete. He knew more about strength sports than any coach I had ever met until I met Gordon Weir. Coach Myers was brutal and honest about drugs and sports. He laid out the advantages and the risks. He also made his opinion that over-privileged white kids, bound for college, should not risk their health or their lives for sports. He insisted that we be honest with ourselves about ever being anything other than “pretty good” at any sport.
I was pretty honest with him about my own drug use. He was absolutely against it but admitted stimulants were much more dangerous. In 1980, there wasn’t that much information out there about the long-term effects of steroids. That was one of his main objections.
Mitch was pretty honest about some of his exploits in life and sports. He once told me how he and his buddies set aside one or two Saturdays a month to do a thousand or two thousand crunches.
KT and I split our workouts between the Downtown YMCA, JOGO’s Gym near Five Points, and the Police Academy. We never worked out at St. Andrews.
St. Andrews had a Universal Circuit Training machine that nobody maintained and a squat rack Terry Clark built out of two-by-fours and painted blue and white. The first time I met Arnold Schwarzenegger, he represented Universal Exercise Equipment at the National School Supply and Equipment Association convention in Chicago.
We sold Universal Machines. We probably sold the one in use at St. Andrews. They’re absolute crap. Their only benefit is you can line boys in a ring around it and rotate positions until they’ve all had a stab at “lifting weights.” When the future Governor said he used Universal Machines to “Pump Me Up.” He was lying. I’m pretty familiar with every workout routine he ever used, and none of them involved a Universal Machine. God knows how much money we made selling them, though. Him too.
I never would have tried it if Mitch Myers had not put the number “one thousand” in my head, but once he did, I had to. In sets of fifty, a thousand Roman Chair crunches aren’t so bad for the first five hundred. Then reality starts to set in.
KT and I sometimes did stupid things, like putting on gloves and punching each other in the gut at the top of a movement on a Roman Chair. The more you take a punch, the more you can take a punch. The process makes you stronger.
I still hear from KT sometimes. His career in law enforcement ended when he developed drug problems and was caught doing some stuff he shouldn’t have done. He works in private security now, which pays the bills. KT is on a list for a possible liver transplant. Dynabol and a lifetime of whiskey aren’t a great combination. KT’s story has always been a little more intense version than my own. Last I heard, Coach Myers retired from his career as one of Jackson’s Top Pain Doctors.
No matter how I feel, I try to write more than one thousand five hundred words a day. That implies many things, among them that I will produce more words that are crap than I will words worth preserving. Creativity is like a muscle. You have to use it, or you won’t have it to use. One of the biggest fears in creative endeavors is the fear of pulling the trigger. As long as your creation is hypothetical, it’s potentially brilliant, but once you pull the trigger and start putting it down on paper, it might be crap.
There’s no way around it, though. The only way you can make yourself better able to take a punch is by taking more punches. Eventually, your own mortal weakness doesn’t bother you so much anymore.
One of the things I like to do with my writing is to locate and identify the blocks at the bottom of the pyramid and tell their tale. I only knew Mitch Myers on a daily basis for two years. In that time, I’m sure I was a right pain in the ass. He never let on, though. He never taught me anything about chemistry, but he taught me a lot about Boyd.
