Strength Competitions
IRA BERKOW
The New York Times
Published: October 17, 2006
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Phil Pfister, who owns a Ford Crown Victoria, is an unusual kind of motorist. Not only can he drive the car, he can lift it, too.
“One day we were driving with another couple and we got a flat tire,” recalled Pfister’s wife, Michelle. “Somehow, the jack didn’t work. So Phil picked up the rear of the car and the other guy changed the tire. Phil was the jack. Other drivers on the road passed by and they couldn’t believe their eyes.”
That’s hardly the half of it. Pfister has hefted, flipped, hoisted, curled, pulled or carried a 300-pound log, a 350-pound beer keg, a 420-pound boulder, eight women on a platform, a 1,500-pound tire, and, while harnessed up, two 18-wheel tractor trailers, a fire truck, and the 300-ton Riverboat Cajun Queen in New Orleans among sundry items.
“When we needed a new couch — one of those big, three-seater couches — Phil hoisted it up and carried it into the house,” Michelle said. “Friends are always calling and asking, ‘Would Phil come over and move our piano?’ Things like that. And he will. He’s a good guy.”
Not only is Pfister “a good guy,” he is also the world’s strongest man. He made it official last month, when he won the World’s Strongest Man competition, becoming the first winner from the United States since 1982.
Pfister, at 6 feet 6 inches and 345 pounds with only 5 percent body fat, wears a size 56 jacket. He has forearms that would make Olive Oyl swoon, and hands and fingers so big and thick that friends describe them as two bunches of bananas hanging from his wrists.
The World’s Strongest Man contest was a 10-day event in Sanya, China, in which boulders, pipes and cement blocks were hauled and buses were pulled — though, to be sure, not without a certain amount of grunting, wheezing, puffing, throbbing veins and popping eyes.
“There was a lot of drama,” Pfister said last week. “I was behind going into the final day, into the final event, in fact. And then. ...”
Pfister, 35, a blue-eyed blond with a gentle demeanor that belies his prodigious strength, has been competitive in previous World’s Strongest Man contests: He placed fourth in the 1998 and 2001, fifth in 2000 and didn’t make the finals in 2003.
At the competition last month, he was neck-and-neck — 20-inch necks, as it were — with Mariusz Pudzianowski of Poland, the defending champion and a three-time winner.
“The finals are held over three days and include seven events,” Pfister said. “Mariusz won the first two. But I won the third, and I knew he was getting nervous. I had beaten him earlier in the year in a Strongest Man contest in Columbus, Ohio, and I saw the worried look on his face, and he was pacing. We were way ahead of the other contestants, and you get 10 points for winning, and 9 points for second, and so on down the line.”
It came down to the final event, the Atlas stones, on the third day, Sept. 23. Competitors carry five Atlas stones, which start at 220 pounds and increase in weight to 352 pounds, and place them on platforms while being timed. Pfister was in second place, trailing by half a point.
“On the last stone, I carried it to the pedestal and placed it on the platform,” he said. “Then Mariusz tried to place his stone on the pedestal, but missed, the stone rolling off and falling to the ground.”
That made Pfister the champ, winning the coveted title and $40,000; strongmen don’t earn anywhere near what, say, a Yankees infielder does.
Pfister’s rise to this station was an unlikely one, although he has always been rather large for his age, at any age. His parents are physicians; his father, Alfred Pfister, is an internist in town, and his mother, Lois Knapp, is a retired pediatrician. In high school, Pfister wasn’t interested in sports, other than skateboarding or riding a Jet Ski, because he thought practicing three hours a day with the school football or basketball team was not fun. He went to West Virginia State College, at first majoring in pre-med, but he said he “didn’t have the motivation or dedication to make my way through organic chemistry and physics.” He finally graduated with a general-courses Board of Regents degree.
What he wanted to do was become a firefighter, a career, he said, “that gives a guy a lot of flexibility beyond a life of work.” And seven years ago, he did. He is in station No. 4, which has a gym in the basement that includes bricks and stones and huge pipes, perfect for his workouts.
“The bed’s a little small up in the second floor,” he said, “and I have to kind of curl up, but it’s O.K. And I don’t slide down the pole when there’s a call. At 345 pounds, if I land wrong, I could hurt something. I take the stairs; I’m pretty quick about it.”
Pfister, who says he has matured in his approach to sports since his high school days, now actually enjoys the training. Besides the firehouse, he also works out at a fenced-in outdoor area nearby, where he may wrap his arms around 300-pound boulders and transport them the way someone else might carry a bag of groceries.
A casual observer might ask two questions: What possesses him to do this lifting, and doesn’t he risk, well, a hernia?
“I like competing, I like doing things most people can’t do, and there is a certain amount of recognition that is satisfying as long as you win,” he said.
He said he had never been seriously injured. “You develop an intelligence on how to lift, or carry, using all your muscles, especially your legs and butt,” he said.
But there is a problem with sitting in some chairs, particularly lawn chairs. “They have a tendency to crumble, so I stack a few together before sitting down,” he said.
Pfister took some time to regain his strength after the grueling events in China, then appeared on “Late Show With David Letterman” on Oct. 5. For the national television audience, he went about doing what has made him legendary— flipping a car. This time it was a Pontiac Sunfire, on West 53rd Street in Manhattan.
At home here, he said, people he has never met stop him and congratulate him. At a stoplight, the man in the car in front of him sticks his arm out the window and makes a muscle, another form of congratulations. Pfister taps the horn on his Ford Excursion to thank him. (His wife usually drives the Crown Victoria, which he hardly fits into.)
He has cut down on his portions at meals. “I realized I didn’t need all that food,” he said. But in a restaurant, he will still knock off a platter of seafood for an appetizer, a T-bone steak the size of the plate, a heap of mashed potatoes, and large crepes for dessert. (He often eats the dessert first. “It’s the best part of the meal, why wait for last?” he said.) He doesn’t drink alcohol.
He is also proud, he said, that he has always been drug-free and has succeeded in a sport where “the vast majority,” use performance-enhancing drugs. He speaks often to school, church and civic groups about achieving goals, and about staying clean and healthy. “I feel everyone should make a contribution,” he said, “and that’s my way.”
He and Michelle, who is studying to be a registered nurse, have been married for seven years. At first, she said, she wondered about all this lifting business of Phil’s, but when he carried her across the threshold on their wedding night, she began to have second thoughts. In fact, Michelle, at 5-7 and 145 pounds, became so involved in it that she once competed in a Strongest Woman contest. “I came in fifth out of five,” she said. “And I decided that I was going to take up yoga.”
Their 5-year-old son, Wyatt, also takes pleasure in a lot of this. “After dinner, Phil will say, let’s go out and pull a truck,” Michelle said. “It’s practice for Phil. We harness him up and he pulls our pickup. Wyatt sits in the front seat, loving every minute of it. It’s better than sitting home watching television. Sometimes he’ll ask, ‘Can Daddy lift that building?’ ”
At the firehouse, Capt. Rob Kinser spoke about Pfister in glowing terms. “He’s a gentle giant, a top Grade A individual,” Kinser said. “Like, we had a brush fire a while back and we were having a devil of a time getting the hose up the cliff — 250 feet of hose. When you have those big hoses filled with water, they’re tremendously heavy, five-, six-hundred pounds.
“But then Phil came over and started pulling the hose. I was at the nozzle, and he was pulling me up the cliff with the hose! Oh, he’s a big asset. A very big asset.”
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