The Birth of a True Legend

The Birth of a True Legend

By Joseph R. Blahnik (extensively edited by Frederick J. Blahnik)

 

“I have yet to be bored by someone paying me a compliment.”

 

—Otto Van Isch

 

Many, many years ago–during a different time and a different era–a youthful modern-day Paul Bunyan emerged from the rural backwoods of southeastern Minnesota and set the arm-wrestling world ablaze.  He came out of nowhere like a theretofore undiscovered comet, burned brilliantly for but a fleeting handful of years, and then faded away nearly as quickly while the decade of the 1960s slid silently past its halfway point.  Here is his self-told story, and this is how the whole legend and hyperbole surrounding the apocryphal Joe Blahnik first began:

 

Age has really taken a gargantuan toll on my strength and endurance as I’ve grown older, but just the other day I caught myself thinking back to the days when my mythical strength was actually something to boast about.  I wasn’t very old–still a boy actually–when Dad summoned me out of the house one day to assist him on repairing an unremembered piece of farm machinery.  I lumbered outside to see exactly what the Old Man wanted.

Specifically, he asked me to tighten the burr on a fairly large bolt.  Simple enough, you might say.

Yet even at a tender age, I obviously was not cognizant of my preternatural God-given power.  I tightened the burr……and tightened it some more…….and then tightened it a little bit more…….and finally gave it one last firm twist just for good measure…..

Oh, oh…….SHIIIIIIIT, Joe Blahnik, you heavily-muscled young bruiser, you……..you shouldn’t have doooooone that……..!!!

I apparently gave the burr one half-turn more than was necessary–and the overmatched bolt wound up snapping into two forlorn pieces.  Dad wasn’t very happy with my unintended show of strength that day and muttered disgustedly under his breath, “Boy, you just don’t know your own ineffable strength!!”

Okay, let’s flip the calendar forward a few years now……. 

During my teen-aged years we Blahnik children had our normal daily chores to do on our home farm, but in addition to those I was constantly in demand by our neighbors back by our Austin, Minnesota spread.  Over the summer months, helping a neighbor bale hay or straw was virtually a daily ritual.

One year I was called upon to assist a can milk hauler too; the poor schlump had somehow been injured and could no longer lift the one hundred pound milk cans that were the stock of his trade, so you can imagine the dire dilemma he faced.

Here’s how the logistics of the system worked in those days:  At each farm on our designated route, the cans that were completely full of milk had to be carried to the waiting truck from wherever the farmer cooled his primary source of revenue.  A surprising number of farmers back then cooled their milk in an icy-cold spring that bubbled out of the ground; those springs were invariably located at ground level, hence at the base of a hill.

After much practice and daily conditioning, I got to the point where I could routinely carry a one-hundred-pound can of milk in each hand……up a sometimes steep embankment…….and then swing each can with a single arm about three feet up into the air and into the bed of our waiting milk truck.

WOWSIE WOOZIE!!!!!!!!  

Looking back now, even I am amazed at that Samsonesque feat of raw strength!

Another year a guy who operated a portable feed mill near our farm had been injured on the job, so he asked me to ride along with him on his route.  My essential assignment with that job was to shovel corn into the grinding mill as expeditiously as possible, and you better believe that’s just what I did:  I’ve seen shit slide out of cholera sufferers slower than the ridiculously absurd rate at which I shoveled that fuckin’ corn!  Then there were the frequent telephone calls by neighbors requesting help to clean accumulated manure out of barn pens.  I well remember that sheep manure was probably packed the hardest of any livestock excrement and unfalteringly presented a formidable challenge to remove.

I further recollect a neighbor hiring me to throw dirt out of a basement one time.  Why throw dirt? you are probably rightfully asking at this juncture.

Well, the floor of this guy’s basement was originally just plain soil and it was thus obviously unfinished, but the resourceful man was first going to lower that “floor” down some distance as a prelude to pouring cement over it in order to create a nice, finished room with a higher ceiling.  I recall the fellow was utterly astounded at the fact I quite effortlessly threw soil out the open window with a massive scoop shovel that was typically used only for handling grain, rather than the much smaller, wimpier garden spade he was using.

In the back of my mind, I was scornfully thinking I should throw a dress on the effeminate impostor and go buy him a nice dainty purse and a glitzy pair of earrings to better suit his (lack of) masculinity!!

My Blahnik family moved to our new Spring Valley farm in the fall of 1962, when I was twenty years old and in my absolute physical prime.  By that time..…by that time you might say my cartoonishly muscled arms were in such sensational shape they probably should have been registered as lethal weapons down at the sheriff’s office in our county seat of Preston.  I have no doubt I could have wrestled a giant grizzly bear he-devil to a stalemate and thrown fifty-pound barbell plates around like they were plastic Frisbees. 

I didn’t just look like Adonis, Reader; I WAS Adonis reincarnated in flesh and blood!!!  Then again, the real Adonis might have been just a tad punier and less defined than Yours Truly and probably would have gotten down on his hands and knees to beg me for seduction techniques.

Glen VanGrevenhof and Jim Teske–new untamed friends I had made from the vicinity we moved to north of Spring Valley–and I made our rounds to the local “watering holes” quite often back then.  After we got a few drinks under our belts–Which never took very long, by the way….think five to ten minutes!–Glen would start getting loud and obnoxious and begin voicing his opinion about how strong I was, and he incessantly boasted how there was no one in that night’s establishment who could whip me in arm-wrestling.

In some of the more redneck saloons and dancehalls we regularly frequented, that challenge was tantamount to waving a bright red flag in front of an enraged Brahma bull’s nose.  Believe me, Glen’s boisterous bragging brought on some monumental arm-wrestling challenges for Yours Truly over the years!!!

I remember one time in particular when the three of us buddies were partying at the Pla-Mor Ballroom on the east side of Rochester one Friday night.  Sure enough, my trusty “trainer” and handler Glen VanGrevenhof once again had me matched up against some super strong guy for an arm-wrestling bout.  I am naturally left-handed for eating, writing, and throwing, but shoveling or any physical labor of that sort I instinctively do right-handed for whatever reason, and therefore my right arm is actually the stronger of the two.  There are far more natural right-handers than left-handers strutting around the bars, taverns, and debauched shitholes of southeastern Minnesota, thus it usually didn’t present much of a problem when I would offer my right arm as the preferred weapon with which to wage battle against those presumptuous, delusional assholes.

Anyway, I beat that aforementioned behemoth challenger at the Pla-Mor Ballroom quite easily right-handed, but then the persistent son-of-a-bitch wanted to see how tough I was left-handed.  That bout turned out to be a hard-fought, long-lasting test, but I’ll be damned if the muscular bastard didn’t flat-out beat me fair-and-square!!!

And to make matters infinitely worse and to rub my nose ignominiously in the dirt, the conceited jerk thereupon made no effort to disguise his extreme pleasure with regard to his conquest over the mythical and previously undefeated Joe Blahnik either.

Of course, this extraordinarily rare outcome didn’t set very well with my plumped-up psyche, so I almost immediately started preparing for a rematch with the insufferable braggart.  Accordingly, each and every night just before crawling into bed I would sit on the floor of my bedroom and arm-wrestle the leg of my bed with my left arm–straining just as hard as I could for as long as I could……

Yes…….every single fuckin’ night I would do this, Reader, as though someone had me by the crotch and was squeezin’ down on my crown jewels harder than a starving dog on a prized milkbone!!!

And then the next time Glen, Jim, and I were at the Pla-Mor Ballroom, it didn’t take us very long to hunt down that cocky buttfucker and for me to loudly challenge him to a rematch that the whole establishment could hear.

I’m sure—unless your IQ for whatever reason can be measured on the Richter Scale—you have already guessed the correct outcome to this story:  On the second occasion, I took full advantage of the new opportunity presented to me and whipped the smart aleck guy’s ass soundly–with BOTH of my prodigiously muscled arms, I might add!!

Another instance which really stands out in my memory was the night the three of us good compadres headed into the notoriously rough Grand Meadow Liquor Store.  We never even had time to venture away from the bar before Glen vociferously queried the bartender on duty regarding who was the best arm-wrestler present that night; he wanted to match their undisputed champion against me.  Red Hathaway was the bartender on duty that evening, and he indicated that either he or Reggie Benson was the toughest their joint could offer up.

And since Red was serving a regular shift as bartender and was therefore unavailable…..that left me pitted against the illustrious Reggie Benson for Highway 16 bragging rights!

A little background info is probably in order at this point, I think:

The Benson family was a great big tribe from rural Grand Meadow and its members were all extremely large individuals.  In fact, Duane Benson–Reggie’s brother–went on to become a stalwart football player who competed professionally in the National Football League, including in one of the earlier Super Bowls as a member of the Oakland Raiders when they were matched up against a Green Bay Packers juggernaut coached by the legendary Vince Lombardi–and Duane performed at the highest level of his profession for many years before finally calling it quits.

Reggie Benson was tall in stature too, but actually slimmer in physique than most of his hulking, lumbering brothers and sisters.

In any event, the two of us modern-day gladiators managed to find an empty booth in the crowded saloon and the much-anticipated arm-wrestling match commenced.  I struggled incredibly hard for fifteen or twenty minutes trying to secure any sort of an advantage over my grimacing adversary, but by that time my vast experience told me I was never going to be able to slam the determined guy’s arm down.

After coming to this sobering realization, I thereupon refocused my attention and concentrated solely on “locking up” my right arm.  I figured if I couldn’t actually beat my opponent, I wanted to make damned sure of the fact it’d be impossible for him to experience the immense satisfaction of defeating me!!

I think that classic, unprecedented arm-wrestling match dragged on for close to forty five minutes before Reggie and I both realized neither of us was willing to accept defeat.  Hence, we grudgingly traded nods of mutual admiration and called the contest a draw.

But when I subsequently stood up in the booth to go fetch a much-needed drink from the bar (I was way behind my friends by this point!), my right arm just dangled limply from its shoulder joint analogous to a wet dishrag.  In fact, it took quite some time before I was able to recover even a soupcon of feeling in that grossly traumatized extremity!!

 

As the years slipped by and the Sixties started to wane, so too did my brief but sensational arm-wrestling career.  I found myself challenging obvious pretenders less and less often as I discovered alternate, more refined ways to impress and ultimately seduce the opposite sex—Let’s be honest here:  Isn’t that every red-blooded male’s chief, unending goal?!–and I was thus perfectly content to sit back and let younger bucks vie for the esteemed title of “Top Dog in the Tavern” on most nights and pursuantly wake up the next morning—their upper bodies sore and mysteriously aching–with their right arms feeling like overboiled strands of Capellini pasta.

And today?

Well, Reader, today I am still the owner of enormous upper arms–twenty two-inch “guns” easily–but the herculean muscle mass of years past has been insidiously replaced with an entirely different substance.  I won’t divulge just what that other substance is, other than to say the word starts with an “F”, contains three letters, and rhymes with cat…….

 

 

“Sometimes we deny being worthy of praise, hoping to generate an argument we would be pleased to lose.”

 

—Cullen Hightower