Lightning strikes twice

Flex, June, 2005 by Greg Merritt

* Troy Alves and Michael Jai White first met in grade school in Connecticut, and they have remained close friends for some 30 years. "He's my oldest friend in the world," White says of Alves. "Troy and I started martial arts together when we were seven. I stuck with it, and he went with baseball and then later, he got into bodybuilding. Troy didn't get into lifting weights until high school, but he was always a freak with veins on the outside of his muscles. He was always really ripped, and his body took to weight training immediately."

Meanwhile, White, 37, went on to earn seven black belts, win numerous karate titles and bring his fighting skills to the big screen. Now a veteran and versatile actor, he is best known for his starring role as a conflicted superhero in Spawn (1997). Throughout the years, he hit the weights as hard as the heavy bag.

"Mike Katz had a World Gym in Connecticut, and he first taught me how to train when I was 17," White recalls. "I was never tempted to go into competitive bodybuilding, but there were bodybuilders I looked up to. My man was Serge Nubret. I just liked his shape. I had a picture of Nubret on my wall, and I visualized myself looking similar to him."

Recently, White trained under Charles Glass at Gold's Gym Venice to prepare for his starring role as boxer George "Iceman" Chambers in next year's film Undisputed 2. Even with White currently living in Southern California and Alves in Arizona, they remain close friends.

"I went to Troy's first bodybuilding show," White remembers, "and I followed all his shows in Arizona. I try to get to every one I can. I think he's great for bodybuilding. He's got such a cool attitude, and he's such a well-rounded person. He's amazingly unaffected by the whole glamour of the thing." They both are. Maybe that's what happens when one friend grows up to play a comic-book superhero and the other grows up to look like one.

HULK TALK

* On which episode of The Incredible Hulk did Lou Ferrigno speak? The answer is "King of the Beach" (February 6, 1981), in which Ferrigno played dual roles--his usual part as a mute green giant and a guest-star stint as hearing-impaired competitive bodybuilder Carl Molino. Ken Waller, 1975 Mr. Universe, played one of Molino's physique competitors.

THE GAMES PEOPLE WATCH

* One lazy Sunday afternoon while surfing channels, I got hooked on the National Scrabble Championships. It wasn't on a public access channel, the Game Show Network or even Nickelodeon. It aired on the self-professed "leader in sports": ESPN (not ESPN2). Scrabble joins a slate of "basement games" on the network, including poker, billiards and table tennis. What, no Monopoly or Candyland?

Two days later, ESPN ran a dog show. The National Spelling Bee is an annual tradition. The point isn't that such events make for bad TV. High-stakes poker is enthralling, but I stayed with the Scrabblers. The point is this: the network that regularly televises the top canines doesn't televise the top bodybuilders, and no other network is doing any better.

It wasn't always like this. In the eighties, ESPN regularly--if not promptly--scheduled the top NPC amateur and IFBB professional contests, often during prime-time slots. Fox Sports Net picked up the ball in recent years, but then dropped it. The Olympia and the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic are on pay-per-view, but other pro shows never make it to living rooms. It has something to do with the fact that nearly anyone can play poker or Ping-Pong or teach a dog to sit, but competitive bodybuilding remains an alien world to the general public. An ESPN spokesperson said they simply don't get much demand for bodybuilding, but it remains under consideration. As bodybuilding fans, you need to continually let the networks know what you'd like to see. Meanwhile, the word "bodybuilding" has a letter value of 22 points in Scrabble. Maybe it'll show up on TV yet.

SHE WEARS SHORT SHORTS

* To develop fantastic legs fine enough to wear history's most famous short shorts, Jessica Simpson could have talked to Branch Warren. Instead, with the help of a live-in trainer, Simpson worked out six days per week to muscle up before taking on the role of Daisy Duke in the film The Dukes of Hazzard (due August 5, 2005). Simpson beat out Britney Spears and Mandy Moore to play the redneck originator of the eponymous shorts.

RANDOM ACTS OF MUSCLE IN CELEBRITYLAND BY GREG MERRITT