#112
You have to be ready to die. That’s the crux of it. Genetics, training, they matter—but if you’re not more willing to die than the other dude, if he’s any good he’ll throw you in a hook and make you risk an armbreak to pull through him.
That was my approach, anyway. How I won my first Nats. I was never the strongest at a comp, or the best or most technical, but I was the guy who sized you up—your levers, body language—and made you hurt until you either quit or gave me everything I wanted when you tried to slip.
Some people thought my tendons were just good. That when my elbow was way back behind my shoulder there was some iron there holding off the spiral fracture. Or if you forced my wrist way down, like a failed low-hand sorta position, there was something about my ulna that made it immune to the searing shooting pains everyone else gets being bent that way.
Not really. Probably my tendons were better than average, but I went home in more agony than anyone—got sent home from how many work sites cause I couldn’t lift a hammer. Broke my arm lots. What they say about it healing back stronger, it isn’t true, not always. Most people don’t feel their humerus flex like a suspension bridge when they open a fridge. I do.
I sometimes wonder that if I’d been stronger or stuck to a training plan for once, could I have gone pro. Been up there with the Devons and Johns and Ermes of the world.. sit around 240 in the off and come down to 225 for a title. Maybe. It’s nice to tell myself, think nostalgically on as though it really happened.
But in life you can never change just one thing. It’s all mixed up. If I’d been stronger, maybe I don’t train so hard ‘cause I can’t get my self-destructive fix anymore from local table time. I hear it’s like ninety percent gym work for the top guys. That’s not me. Or maybe if you fix my head so I train more consistently, I also lose that fire that makes me me and lets me kill myself on the table when it’s needed. I’d be just like any other guy. Who can say.
I spread it around, at least. Made a point of rotating between all the trainings in my state, sometimes a three, four hour drive just to do it. I figure it’s poor etiquette to show up once a month and hurt other guys—’cause they get hurt too, we all do, but especially if you pull with me—hurt them so bad that they don’t fully recover till I show up again at the start of next month. If I’m gonna fuck your elbow up for four weeks then you should get at least twelve before you pull me again, is the way I see it.
That’s the culture, though. It’s something chicks don’t get, most of them, why there aren’t many women in the sport. We tell girls about it and the first thing they ask is Don’t you break your arm? and—okay, for me the answer’s yes, but not for most guys because there are safe ways to pull, so their answer is No, you keep your elbow inside your shoulder line to reduce the risk of a spiral fracture, but there is a lot of tendon pain. They ask why we do it if there’s so much pain and we say Because it’s fun. And that’s kind of it. But not really.
Truth is that I’m just an extreme case of the mentality that all guys who armwrestle have. It’s a bit of the cutter mentality—we hurt ourselves to feel alive. And it’s a bit of the big mountain climber mentality, those guys who climb Everest just because it’s there. But those are activities you do yourself, mostly, and armwrestling takes two.
So then you think about combat examples. Why do guys join the military, why do they do UFC. And those are close as well. But there are too many other things going on. Dudes join the army thinking about serving their country and seeing other countries and getting abs. For fighting sports there’s money. Ring girls. Perks.
Armwrestling really doesn’t have that stuff. How many people watch East vs West each year? A thousand? Less? And those events are like twenty top guys getting paid like $10k tops two or three times a year. If you’ve always wanted to see Turkey, or Georgia, okay then AW’s your thing. Some YouTubers do alright. But there’s nowhere to go in the sport, not materially, accessibly… not even enough to hang a rags to riches dream on. You either like pulling or you don’t. It’s not something you can explain to people.
The closest I think anyone has ever come to it was this Slovak named Alojz. As in carbon alloys. I remember cause that's how he corrected me on saying it. I was fairly new at the time, two or three years in the sport and he was this big guy with catcher mitts I couldn’t do anything against.
I’m pulling him and doing my usual thing where I’m just throwing myself into pain. Surging a flop wrist press over and over, king’s moving under the table with my arm locked out full—ugliest battles you’ve seen. And each time Alojz is catching me and letting me work because that’s what the stronger guy does.
At some point, there’s this pause between our rounds. Not a chatty one, Alojz quiet while he figures something out. Then he sets up for this posting toproll that’s the most hookable thing in the world. I mean, his elbow’s planted down so hard on the pad that there’s zero chance he’s blocking a quick surge forward around his wrist. It’s golden. A clear gimme, even despite our gap in strength.
But the thing is that hooking a posting toproller doesn’t hurt. It’s just the mechanics of it. They’re not gonna slip out of your hand so there’s no chance of a wrist getting spun out, and all the force you’re applying on each other is just trying to open up the others’ bicep—no lateral elbow involvement, no pressure on your frame. It’s just muscle on muscle, the hooker oughtta win with all the leverage they get, and everyone’s perfectly safe.
So pain hungry me doesn’t take the hook. I go in for a low-hand toproll instead, exactly what you shouldn’t do, and consciously I’m thinking something stupid like wanting to test if I can overcome the hard counter regardless, but in retrospect really I was hoping he’d cup my hand painfully down and back—it’s easy to do when you’re given the height like this—in another ugly match.
Alojz doesn’t cup. He doesn’t even drag back. There's no need to, not when I’ve given him everything already, everything he tried to give to me. We just stay there, locked in that starting position, I’m struggling to force the pull somewhere bad and he’s gently rehabilitating it, a dad playing with his son, figuring me out all the while, and eventually he says in his thick Slovak timbre: Getting hurt won’t make you a man, Mitch. It just makes you hurt.
Maybe I remember it funny. Time does that to memories, makes movies of them. But the way I remember it is that we both let up some, so I look at him, wondering, and he nods the slightest nod I’ve ever seen and finally I give him what he wants and hook him down gently to the pad. Then he claps the back of my hand with his free left and walks off while I’m standing there with painfree elbows and wondering the fuck just happened.
I never saw Alojz again. But I think often ‘bout what he said. That yeah, somewhere in me, there’s this assumption that I can hurt my way to manhood. That we can—armwrestlers, I mean. That for all the tradie jobs and sheds between us and good stable blonde wives that we banter about in the straps, something never clicked that said You’re a man now forever. There’s no more to be done. Good job.
Instead we live with this perpetual coming-into manhood. Always reaching for it, but with all the normal societal rituals associated with manhood long-ago complete we’ve got to invent our own, and for some fucked up reason we think—or we’ve been taught—that pain is a prerequisite for this to work. Or at least a reliable pathway to it. That being a man is about always going through shit and that implies the shit’s existence, so if you already largely solved the shit life gives you you’d better make some more.
So we keep coming back. We’re all the same, doesn’t matter the town I’m in. Every practice a mess of boys, in garages or in parks, clustered round rickety homemade tables blessedly free from the OHS shit we deal with all day—tables that creak and twist during the match and threaten to run off completely so another guy will put his foot on the base to hold it down for us—and between pulls all of us hold our arms in the air and rub our tricep tendon as much to feel the pain as to relieve it, someone will pass around a massage gun if you're lucky, and at 8 we all leave men. Referees giving funeral rites.. gawking passersby witness to our lives.
It’s good.
It sounds like Fight Club tryhard shit too, I know. Maybe it is. But we’re not schizophrenics, misogynists.. not cultists out to burn the system.. don’t mix us up with that. It’s just there’s lots of reasons guys like that movie and one of them is that it gets at this getting hurt thing that lives in some of us and if you have it, you have it, and if you don’t, you don’t.
It’s not something you can explain to people. Mostly we’ll never say it, even among ourselves. We’re not a bunch known for being good with words.
But if you want to pull, I’ll be there. And if you hurt me, I’ll be back.