Downing soldiers on

Flex, August, 2003 by Jim Schmaltz

GARRETT DOWNING's been through worse. He's trudged through hell and absorbed the shock and horror of it all. No, he hasn't been to CELINE DION's Las Vegas show. The IFBB pro is a Gulf War vet, and he says that his Marine Corps training helped prepare him for surgical slice and dice travails to repair a tendon in his left leg, which he tore in September, and subsequent painfully complicated rehab. "It was ripped off the bone," Downing casually remarks of his biceps femoris, as if describing a busted radiator on his car. "Unfortunately, I won't be cleared to compete until early in 2004."

Downing, who roamed battlefields of the dead in southern Iraq, expressed his amusement at reactions to a comment in FLEX when he referred to PRESIDENT BUSH as "overrated." "Some people took offense at that on the Internet," says Downing, who served four years in the Corps. "It's funny, because my wife, ANNAMARIE, considers me kind of a conservative. She calls me J.C. WATTS." Watts is a black former Republican congressman from Oklahoma.

Speaking of the battle weary, Downing says he was in the same platoon as writer and former Marine sniper ANTHONY SWOFFORD, whose memoir Jarhead about the first Gulf War became a national bestseller earlier this year. "I haven't read it yet," Downing says. "I could only take so much of the television coverage of the recent war. After a while, I had to turn it off."

It could have been worse, Garrett. It could have been Celine Dion's Vegas show.