Continuing a winning tradition: Arkansas mason takes top prize in the SPEC MIX Bricklayer 500 Competition

Masonry Construction, June, 2003

What's it like to be a world champion bricklayer?

"The problem is that my boss expects me to do the same thing every day now," quipped Wayne Phipps, who won the SPEC MIX Bricklayer 500 contest at the World of Concrete/ World of Masonry in Las Vegas by placing 539 brick in one hour (see article on page 24). A second-generation mason who started laying brick at age 15, Phipps led the Mourer Masonry Inc. team in the first event of MASONRY CONSTRUCTION magazine's masons' challenge competition. Joining him on the winning team were tenders Mark Baker and Rafael Vega, also of the Batesville, Ark.-based masonry contractor.

As he was building his 26-foot-long, double-wythe competition wall, Phipps was not even sure whether he would reach the minimum of 500 brick required in the contest. "At one point I asked one of the brick tenders how I was doing and he said it was not looking too good," he said. "I was not counting, but I had an idea how high I had to go to qualify. Towards the end of the one-hour event I felt that I was getting there and sped up. After finding out I won, I screamed and shouted." He received a Polaris vehicle, $2000 cash, $1000 Cabela's girl certificate, first-place trophy, first-place engraved Crick level, and a Bricklayer 500 champion jacket for his efforts.

Aside from drawing on his 20 years as a mason and working "just a little bit harder" in the days before the competition, Phipps said he didn't do anything specific to train for the event. Now that the excitement is behind him, it's back to the daily routine. But for Phipps, that doesn't mean monotony.

"You learn something new every day in this trade," he said. "We're doing a job right now that has a lot of firsts for me, like working with different types of stone."

Phipps is following in the tradition set by Jerry Mourer, president of Mourer Masonry, who won a similar bricklaying contest two consecutive years in the late 1950s. Mourer founded the company in 1970 and one of his first employees was Phipps' father. "Wayne's father worked on the wall beside my dad and was an excellent bricklayer," remembered Kurt Mourer, vice president and Jerry's son. Another son, Lee, also is a vice president in the family business.

But the Mourers' masonry roots go much farther back that the 1950s. The family name Mourer is a variation of maurer, which is the German word for bricklayer. "All of our ancestors were bricklayers," stated Kurt Mourer.

Phipps and his Bricklayer 500 team certainly did justice to the Mourer name, and the president said he would like to see the champ return to World of Concrete/World of Masonry in Orlando next February to defend his title.