Gun shop: N.R.A. stands for no rest allowed, as a quintet of bodybuilders arm-wrestle barbells and dumbbells after the Night of Champions

Muscle & Fitness, Sept, 2004 by Jeff O'Conncll

Speaking of diaper dandies, stage right, is the aforementioned Brit, 29-year-old Lee. Fresh off his second pro show in the States, he picks up the barbell now with his guns. After unloading a clip, he thunks the bar down and flexes before the mirror, his brow oozing sweat.

Since Lee lives near Dorian Yates' legendary Temple Gym, I ask him about it--only to hear the shocking rumor that it might be closing. "It's far too hardcore for most people," says Lee. "You go down a big flight of steps, and it's like a dungeon-really, really dark and cold, with stuff growing off the walls."

"So if you're a housewife looking to do cardio, you're SOL, huh?"

"There are only like two exercise bikes in there," he says, laughing. "But it's a good gym for the hardcore."

No one is more bent out of shape about the show than George, who follows Lee with a set of bench dips-normally a great alternative when you don't have the strength to do full bodyweight dips, only George does his with four 45-pound plates stacked on top of his thighs. The Lebanese diamond and gold wholesaler transplanted to upstate New York is ballistic over slipping to sixth place at the night show, after having been called out at the prejudging in sequences that might have suggested a top-five finish. Making matters worse, fourth was given to a personal rival, Ahmad Haidar, also from Lebanon. And talk about buzzard's luck: George tied with Pavol Jablonicky for fifth, only to have a computer tiebreaker slot him sixth, the highest ranking that doesn't qualify one for the Mr. Olympia.

George has earned the right to bitch about anything he wants, though. When the photographer jokingly compares his own weight, 155, to that of his subjects, George, standing there at 213, notes that he was 129 in 1997--after awakening from the coma into which he had slipped after having three hollow-point bullets rip through his midsection during a jewelry heist, and then watching sections of his stomach and bowels flow onto the asphalt in a river of Pepsi and blood. When he came to in a hospital a month and half later, he was half the size he had been and stitched up like a baseball. "Man, looking at myself in the mirror, I remember all those scars, the colostomy bag, and I was just like, Awww," he says. "I looked in the mirror and just cried, you know? I couldn't believe this was me."

Left with little but a cool nickname, "Bulletproof," George trained his way out of the abyss. "I went to the gym every day, starting a couple of weeks after I got out of the hospital," he says. "I could barely walk, but I started riding the bike nice and slow, and lifting 5-pound dumbbells. Eventually they removed my colostomy, and six months after that I won the New York State Bodybuilding Championships."

CHARLES IN CHARGE

I ask George whose arms he envies in the sport. The first name out of his mouth is Ronnie Coleman; the second is Darrem Charles, who's curling 40-pounders nearby. His back stays ramrod-straight, but the shapes under the skin of his arms shift like a cyborg.