What the hell is wrong with people in this sport?  You get to talking about who is gonna win the Olympia and people get downright shitty.  Well, they get shitty on the internet.  I love the internet because I make a living by working on it but with the good comes the bad.  I firmly believe it holds the biggest group of shitheads on the planet.  There is just something about being in front of your keyboard on a quiet night in the middle of nowhere and feeling like you can say whatever the fuck you want to, to anyone you want to, with no consequences.  It is bad enough for “normal” people but then when you add the ego-maniacal, narcissistic and insecure bodybuilder to the mix, boy, the things that will come out of that keyboard …..  Filth I tell ya, absolute filth.

So, I am done doing client work tonight and kind of goofing around on the computer before I go to bed and decided I better check on a couple other sites that I frequent when I have a few minutes and want to argue with a bunch of shitheads or get called names.  Now, there might be a large number of shitheads on the internet but there are even more experts on any given topic and bodybuilding is no exception.  Of course, I do need to point out that I firmly believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion.  It usually is wrong while mine is not but at least I feel it is your right to give your opinion.  I happen to stumble across (ok, ok, I was looking for it) a thread about who will win the Mr Olympia this year.  Considering I just spoke with and saw Phil Heath this past weekend I was curious who was hatin’ on Phil and who wasn’t.  Oh, the haters were in full force.

I am going to preface this next part with this:  I like Phil and I know Phil so I admit that I do want to see him win the Mr Olympia.  I think he is good for the sport and I think that his physique is now where it needs to be (close last year – VERY close) to win this title.  Even though I like him and know him, I don’t feel I am at all bias when I say that I think he is the best bodybuilder and deserves the title.  I call a spade a spade and my clients know this, well.  I won’t tell you that you are going to win when you come off stage and it is clear that you are in fourth place.  I am going to tell you flat out that you are likely going to be fourth.  Your mom won’t like it and your girl will scowl at me and tell you later that I am full of shit and don’t know what I am talking about but I will be honest with you.  I feel that I do the same when it comes to Phil.  However, this year I feel he should win it.

That being said, I mosey into the thread and take a little looksy around  (I am writing this as if I was subtle to the point of possibly whistling at the same time but I think we both know I entered that forum with both hands in my jacket holding two loaded weapons and I was going to pull them out at the first sign of some shit and start breaking some ass – yes, shit seems to find me but that is for another blog)……  The shit that some people will say.  I saw everything from “Phil is a shit talker like all young kids” to a guy posting pics of comparisons between Phil and Kai Green while the guy laughingly points out how “embarrassed” he is for Phil in this particular picture.  Embarrassed for Phil??  What about embarrassed for yourself for laughing at a guy that is among the best in the world??  I mean, what other sport is so duragatory of professional athletes as bodybuilding??  You would never hear of a 15 year old kid saying he could “ball” on Kobe and how Kobe sucks, right?  (”ball” is still cool to say, right???  I don’t want to sound uncool so email me if that was fucked up that I used a word that is 20 years old – thank you).  Yet our sport has fat, dumpy, fucks that sit behind a computer and have the audacity to laugh at someone like Phil.  It just amazes me that this type of shit takes place and yet I shouldn’t be surprised because I have to deal with it on a daily basis.  Hell, there are times that I have to just leave a site and not say anything because it just seems so …. not worth it.

So, I actually was careful with what I said and figured it would look better if I just kept it cool and didn’t play into the fodder.  It is only fun for me to hand people their asses when I have full and complete control over my kingdom and when I am on another site, I don’t have that privilege.  Also, what can happen is that all of the shitheads band together and form a sort of shithead curtain and then it gets really ugly.  Anyway, I posted a few things up and as I always do I noted that it was “just my opinion” but that doesn’t matter much.  People don’t respect opinions on the internet unless they agree with you.

The point that I was trying to make in those threads, on those sites, was that I see Phil quite a bit at the gym and we talk quite a bit because the time and the day that I usually see him, the gym is dead as hell and he and I are usually the only ones in there.  I was training back this last weekend and he was training chest and as long as I have been in this sport and as much as I have seen, I was floored when I saw him take his shirt off.  Understand that I have seen him during this prep quite a bit and see him pose and such and as impressive as it is, this past weekend was different.  He is so much improved that people are going to be shocked.  His back is not only not a weakness but likely a strength now.  His condition was retarded and he was full as shit – full like each pec was a giant meatloaf or something.  His weight he said was 256.  Now, think about this for a minute:  He turned pro at like 215??  I think last year he weighed in for the O at like 235 0r s0??  Shit, please.  Everyone is talking about Kai and the improvements he has made but if you plan to count out Phil you better think again.  I doubt anyone will stand on that stage anywhere near the improvements that Phil has made this year.

I think what can be so frustrating with the guys in the internet forums saying that Phil isn’t good enough and Kai is a badass, blah, blah, blah isn’t that they have an opinion but that they don’t have an opinion based on anything other than who they like and who they want to see win it.  They haven’t seen any of the competitors to know anything about their condition and yet they will bet you 1000 dollars (some tool tried this, as well – like a bodybuilder has 1000 bucks sitting around, anyway) that their guy will win.  Then someone like myself goes in their and gives a first hand opinion and gets all but laughed at (ok, I don’t get laughed at but you get my point).

Will Phil win the O this year?  I don’t know.  Do I want him to and do I think he deserves it based on how he looks?  Yes.  However, I won’t be making excuses for him if he doesn’t win.  I don’t bitch about politics and I don’t bitch about judging.  If he doesn’t win then whomever beats him is straight up one badass sumbitch.

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What is your definition of hardcore?

Webster defines hardcore as: unswervingly committed; uncompromising; dedicated. I am dedicated. I am just not unswervingly committed and uncompromising. I used to be but I am not any more.  This weekend I am reminded once again of my not being as hardcore as I once was.

As most of you know, I have four children.  My youngest will be starting school on Monday and even after doing this three other times over the last twelve years it isn’t any easier, I don’t think.  My oldest is seventeen so if you take five years away from that (starting school at five years old), you get twelve years.  Where am I going with this?  In usual Skip fashion you will make the connection shortly.  I first have to ramble on and give you details that are likely insignificant but, hey, I have never once said I was good at this writing thing.  In fact, I was accused not too long ago on facebook of butchering sentences; writing in fragmented sentences; using quotations incorrectly and being unable to articulate my thoughts well.  My response to him was only two words and, quite frankly, I articulated my thoughts well with only those two words but …. as usual I am going to use more than two words and as usual  …. I digress …….

For myself, I was born into this sport with what I considered at the time was absolute hardcoredum or hardcorination or hardcore-ism-ation-ly-duration or … whatever other Shawn Wayon’s-ism I can come up with.  You get my point, though, I think.  I was fourteen and wanted to be the most hardcore guy (kid) in the gym.  From the time I was about fourteen and through high school I would trade off other sports that I was very good at because they would impact my training intensity in the gym – or my ability to remain “hardcore” in the gym – whichever you prefer.  I passed on baseball which was my ticket if any sport was going to be a ticket for me.  I passed on football but I passed on that primarily because I was a pussy.  That’s right, I said it.  That shit fucking hurt.  I didn’t want to get hit in the gut with a helmet over and over (first sign that I might not be as hardcore as I thought).  I passed on basketball and for all of you turds that are laughing right now at the thought of me playing basketball, I was good.  I was not a starter, usually, but I was consistently the 6th man.  Yes, I hated being the 6th man and thought I should have started and traded that in, as well.  I traded a senior trip to the Bahamas and the one that I want to slam my dick in a door to this day about was when I passed on playing baseball in Japan in my junior year of high school.  My dumbass actually thought it was cool that the papers noted that I was not going to make the trip due to trading in the sport of baseball for bodybuilding.  It wasn’t bad enough that I didn’t see how fucking stupid I was but it had to go into the paper for the entire town to read how fucking stupid I was.  All the while I am reading and thinking “that’s right, everyone in town knows I am a bodybuilder now”.  The point of this ramble session  is that I traded not only sports but many other things away during my school days because they might have conflicted with what I thought was my reputation as a bodybuilder and my ridiculous goals of someday winning the Olympia.   I say ridiculous because I had no chance of ever turning pro or even coming close to an Olympia stage but unfortunately for me I had no one to stand up and tell me.  Would I have listened?  Probably not but someone should have said it because there were many people that knew it and yet stood by as I spit away opportunity after opportunity thinking it would just get in the way of my hardcore existance as a bodybuilder.

Fast forward to about twenty years old:  Yup, I’m pretty hardcore at this point.  I was a BIG fish in a small pond and as long as I stayed in my little town I was known as Mr Muscle Guy.  I trained my ass off, I ate a can of tuna once or twice a day – STRAIGHT FROM THE CAN because God dammit, I was a badass.  I would go to Christmas dinner at my grandmother’s house in my rolled up jeans and boat-neck cut Gold’s Gym sweatshirt (also cut off at the forearm and waist – but not too short at the waist – still just long enough to hit the belt line) and have my “hardcore” food in a bag after arguing with my mother until the point that she would just simply give up.  I couldn’t eat “normal” food for even the biggest holiday of the year.  No, I had to prove to everyone that I was different.  I was hardcore and everyone around me was just a bunch of pussies that  didn’t understand me.

I should also mention that I had no real job and was struggling to go to college because, well, it just didn’t seem to fit with going to the beach, training, etc..  Of course, in hindsight, it didn’t seem to fit all too well that I drove a beat up chevette and had no money to do much of anything so dates were not something I tended to go on a lot.  I wasn’t without a girlfriend but I was that broke-ass boyfriend that only wanted to sit at your house and rent movies because I had no money to take you anywhere.  As long as I had a great chest workout that day or squatted for the meanest pump I could get, I was on top of the world.

Fast forward about a year and a half:

I am working a bouncing job at the hottest bar in the area (I think we can all say we pretty much saw this one coming, yes?).  So, I am now training at the baddest-assed gym (insert the word hardcore for badass at any point in this story) in the area, I now have money to put gas in my chevette and go out on some dates if I want to (though protein powders are expensive and …. an absolute necessity) and I bump into this hot little bitch at the bar.  I throw a few Andrew Dice Clay lines at her and she is sold.  Okay, I might come back and edit that part  because my wife sometimes reads my blogs.  I don’t think she reads them for entertainment purposes as much as to see if I am lying when I talk about her so ….. ok, the Andrew Dice Clay lines didn’t happen but I did lean into her the night I met her acting like I was going to kiss her but walked away.  You know, the old “Top Gun” scene in the elevator.  Yeah, it was cool twenty years ago but if my oldest daughter reads this she will be laughing her ass off at how cheesy her dad was.  Say what you want but she bought it – HOOK, LINE AND SINKER and if she says otherwise, she is lying.  Good LAWD…… if I don’t stop going off on these tangents I am not going to finish the story …..

Are you still with me?  I will be tying this in very soon so bare with me …

I met my wife and shortly after we find out that we are having a beautiful baby girl.  Well, it didn’t go that well at first.  I mean, you gotta know that Mr Hardcore was struggling with the prospect of having to train and keep up with my bodybuilding lifestyle and keep training for the Olympia while only having placed seventh in his first show and … let’s just say it was a local show and I was in the lightweight class.  Not exactly remnants of a pro in the making.  Add to that the fact that while I was pursuing this bodybuilding dream of mine, I had not finished school and had no real job to speak of.  So, I struggled with what the hell was going to happen.  Ever hear the country song by Kenny Chesney called “There Goes My Life”??  Yup, I swear to this day it was written for me about my oldest daughter.  In fact, if you wanted to just skip my entire blog you could just go listen to that song and you would get it.  But …. you can’t because you have read this far and stopping now just wouldn’t make sense.  I did my last show as a full-blown, hardcore badass in the Spring of 1992.  I was a middleweight (barely) and it was my first class win ever.  I had arrived (in my mind) and proved my hardcore status just in time to trade it all in on being a father.

Fast forward to this weekend – right now – as I sit here and type this and if you have read this far you are too kind for sticking it out:

Since that day that I was forced to trade in my hardcore status I have come to see so many things so much more clearer.  Yes, I am sure that maturity, wisdom and knowledge would have helped but I really haven’t come to have much of any of those.    Seriously, what I have found is that as time passed I realized I was still going to train and hopefully compete down the road at some point and I did.  Of course, I always had my kids in tow and they would go to the daycare while I trained and I could only train at gyms with good daycare.  In the middle of a leg workout when I was rattling plates and thinking I was the baddest-assed guy in there, I would be humbled by the voice over the loud speaker calling:  “Skip, you are needed in the daycare” and I would have to stop what I was doing, go change a shitty diaper and smile and laugh with one of my four kids for a couple minutes before going back to the squat rack to pretend I was the baddest-assed guy in there …. yet again.  The irony of my story is that as the years went by and I got less and less “hardcore”, I advanced and got better at the sport that I was so obsessed with so many years ago.  I used that hardcore facade to kind of pretend that I was going to be somebody in this sport one day and yet I achieved nothing until I put it all into perspective.  Did I win or even threaten to win the Olympia??  I think we all know the answer to that.

The reason this hits me this weekend is because my youngest child goes off to kindergarten on Monday.  It has been almost seventeen years since that last show that I thought I had to trade it all in and yet all I had to really do was get things into perspective and simply grow up.  I train hard these days.  When I go into the gym I give it all I have and when I walk out I am satisfied that I couldn’t have trained any harder.  I push it sometimes to the point that I wonder if I really should be training as hard as I do at almost forty years old.  I don’t like guys that talk on their cell phones in the gym and I don’t like the guy that does curls in the squat rack.  I push the envelope sometimes when it comes to getting ready for a show, too.  In the end, though, I don’t consider myself hardcore because I am not willing to, by definition, “commit unswervingly” or “uncompromisingly”.  I compromise all the time and I “swerve” all the time.  I have little choice with having a business that takes up so much of my time and spending time with my wife and my four kids.  So, at least by Webster’s definition I am going to have to start calling myself something else because hardcore just doesn’t work anymore.  I think I will trade in the word hardcore for “passionate”.  Yeah, it has a nice ring to it …..

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I have worked with Curtis 2 times previously and aside from his outing where he dropped to the ligheavyweight class to get his pro card, he was in his best condition while working with me. Tonight Curtis hit the stage for his 3rd pro show and by all accounts I am getting feedback that this is his best condition as a pro, thus far. We got together only about 6 days ago so there is plenty we can improve upon but his condition at the Europa Pro Show tonight shows clearly that if this is what we can do in only a week, we have a bright future ahead of us. I look forward to working with Curtis in the future. He is a great guy and has tremendous potential that I feel is yet untapped. He and I are on the same page in that we both believe in keeping it simple in regards to contest prep and that is going to be the difference in his condition in the future. Keep an eye on this guy and it appears he will likely crack the top 5 at what is being called the year’s best 202 line up of the year.

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Ya know? I don’t seem to be making many friends lately. Scratch that. What I should say is that I am not KEEPING many friends lately. I seem to “make” them just fine but apparently keeping them is the part that I need to work on. Yeah, boy, I am suuuure losing sleep tonight. lol
I have been part of the online bodybuilding community since about 1998 and I have been involved in bodybuilding for 26 years – about 20 of those competing. I have never once wavered in who I am and I have not ever misrepresented myself. Who you see is who you get and that goes for in person or online. My online persona is pretty much the same as you get when you talk to me in person. It has always been like that and it always will be like that. I have met so many people in person that I have known online that there are a ton of people that will gladly vouch for me on this. Here are some points you can expect from me both online and in person:

*If you are respectful to me I will return that respect. I don’t much care how you treat other people as long as you treat me with respect.

*I will gladly tell you EXACTLY what I think but rarely give my opinion on something unless you specifically ask me for it. Why? Because I feel strongly that there are too many people that give their opinions without being asked and I don’t want to be one of those types of people. The obvious exception is online on my site or in this blog. People come to both sites for MY OPINIONS so I would be remiss to not give my opinions. Where 5 people might not like my opinion on something, 100 people love it.

*I do not ever and will not ever say something to intentionally hurt someone’s feelings. I am not a cold and insensitive person but if you ask my opinion, be prepared if it might not be the ego-stroking answer you were looking for. If you ask an opinion and then the response “hurts your feelings”, don’t blame me for being insensitive – blame me for being HONEST.

*If you disrespect me or try to take something from me that I have worked hard for, I will not let it go until I am damned good and ready to let it go. It might be immature and it might be unprofessional but …. just don’t try to screw me over or disrespect me and it won’t be an issue. Some people let things slide and others stand on principle. I am the latter and I don’t give two shits if it makes me friends or loses them. If you don’t understand me well enough to know that I have character, you can’t call yourself a friend of mine, anyway.

*I can quickly be diffused with a very simple yet sincere “I am sorry” or “ok, I fucked up”. My wife of 16 years will tell you that the fastest way for her to get me off her ass isn’t to explain it away but to just say “I’m sorry”. It stops me dead in my tracks EVERY SINGLE TIME. She will also tell you that I am someone that has no problem owning my mistakes and I have no problem saying that I am sorry, as well, when it is called for. There is nothing worse to me than a lack of accountability. If you do something, own it. I do a lot of shit that a lot of people don’t always like but I own it. I don’t explain it away, I don’t hide from it and I don’t make excuses for it.

*If you decide that you don’t like me, stick with it and damned sure don’t patronize me. I don’t have time for your fake-ass bullshit and you likely have better things to do than to pretend you like me. Really, my skin is thicker than that. I will be ok if you don’t like me.

*If you do decide you don’t like me, at least be fair and make sure that the reasons you don’t like me are your own reasons and not just because of something someone has told you. That would just be weak and pathetic and …. kinda high school, I guess. I don’t do high school, anymore, as I am almost 40. Plus, do you trust that person so much with who your friends are? lol Be careful, not so fast.

*I am comfortable in my skin. I will sleep well tonight and I don’t say or do many things in my life that I regret. I am careful to weigh out my actions and words beforehand and this is why I am comfortable in my own skin. I am not perfect, however, and I have never claimed to be. I make mistakes and I use poor judgement sometimes but when I do I own it. It doesn’t happen often because I am careful with my words and my actions but I am human so it does happen.

The above points are to highlight some of the things you can expect from me for those that don’t know me. I only post these points because after losing a handful of “friends” lately (I use the term loosely), there seems to be so much confusion as to the type of person I am. I just wanted to be fair for those that are either on the fence or might soon be wanting to “defriend” me. I have said in a past blog that we all can’t get along and I am fine with that. I am not one of those people that pretends that we are all friends and should see each others strengths and weaknesses, blah, blah, blah. If you don’t like me, don’t like me. We don’t need to hash it out, have a conference or “session” to figure out how we can move through it, etc.. Just be fair and not like me for a good reason. I will do the same by being friends with people that I trust to respect me and not try to screw me over or take advantage of me.
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