I’d actually started the article way back when I was writing about Steve Michalik and Pete Grymkowski, because Grymko loved him and Michalik was unsurprisingly a total piece of shit when discussing him. The idea of a dude who smoked weed preworkout, was a bodyguard for Twiggy, and bounced the most insane go-go club in hyperviolent, Death Wish-era New York City, and smashed racial barriers in bodybuilding seemed like a rad concept (it is) but I shelved the article as I moved onto a bunch of other partially completed articles and books.

The deeper I looked, the more interesting this story got, because Harold Poole seems to have fallen into obscurity because of a combination of bad luck, bad decisions, an unwillingness to accept the fact that a natty mass monster is just a big dude standing in a lineup of other big dudes at an untested contest, having a shady line of work, and racism. As the last two have no bearing on modern bodybuilding competitions, I looked to see what role they played in Harold’s situation, and it was not inconsiderable, though placing all of the blame at the feet of racism seems stupid given the fact that his fellow natty bro Chuck Sipes suffered an almost identical fate.

That said, I still thought it might be a good idea to point out that while shit is pretty good for most people at this point, life for a black person in the US in the 1960s was a hell of a lot different than it is now, and life before Monsanto killed all of the fucking bugs and before the advent of air conditioning was basically hell on Earth for everyone, but even moreso for American blacks than anyone else in the US or Canada. Shit is getting better, but if you don’t understand and acknowledge how shitty it was, there is always the danger of backsliding into unpleasantness. With that, learn about this bad motherfucker, Harold Poole.

I’m a bad motherfucker, not a fucking role model.
Fuck church, hit a bong, then go smash a fucking bottle.
Yeah, got a few sluts to help me roll a few blunts
And they never question me ’cause they know I hate cunts.

I’m about that life

Bodybuilding has always had two faces- the public, squeaky-clean “Golden Boy” image embodied by guys like Lee Haney, Arnold, Dave Draper, and Larry Scott, and then it’s had its hard-partying bad boy side that ranges from halfwitted, drug addled murderers Craig Titus and Kelly Ryan to cave-dwelling maniac Benny Podda, and every manner of lunatic in between. Since the beginning it’s been the latter group who captures our imagination, but it’s the goody-two shoes athletes who get all of the accolades and press. Thus, massive Kai Greene is relegated to “Tier 2” bodybuilders in a lot of people’s minds because he’s not yet worn the crown due to his unwillingness to play ball with the Weiders and his documented willingness to fuck citrus fruit, a situation that would be considered borderline insane if not for the fact that it’s the way it’s always been. Tragically, however, it has, and bodybuilding judges’ transparent efforts to keep the “un-American” out of the spotlight has only contributed to the degradation of the public opinion of a sport that is already considered to be a drug-soaked, homoerotic freak show by humanity at large.

Like any other stupid barrier to competition, the unwritten racial rules that dominated bodybuilding early on stand as a reminder of how shitty humanity has been even in the recent past, and a reminder to be less of a piece of shit in your everyday life (though if you’re active on social media, that ship has fucking sailed and you might as swell just eat a fucking gun)That said, we need to realize that the guys who were bucking the racism trend were fucking brave, and they had a seriously thick skin the likes of which few of us could even conceive (I highly doubt Poole would have called wearing a mask to reduce disease transmission to be “oppression.” So when you’re remembering Sergio Oliva, remember he wasn’t just battling bodybuilders onstage- that man was battling half a fucking nation to become the dominant bodybuilder in the US, and Harold Poole was exactly the same, if harder fucked by life.

Born on Christmas day of the year Japanese surrendered to the Allies (that would be 1943, for the history-challenged among you), Harold Poole sprang into a world completely unprepared for a gargantuan, stuttering, pot-smoking, mixed-race (German/First Peoples/black) teenager with a quick fists and an unreal physique to take the bodybuilding world by storm. With enough size and ethnic diversity in his genetic background to qualify as an honorary member of the Samoan family that includes the Rock and Roman Reigns, Poole became dominant in sports from an early age. As a tween in Indianapolis, Poole began competing in football, wrestling, boxing, and track, and in the five years between eighth grade and graduation, Harold Poole began packing on the mass after one of his coaches very uncommonly recommended Poole start lifting weights.

“Four months later, I zeroed in on the Mr. NY State contest, which was being run by Tommy Minichiello and in tandem with his famous Mid City Gym in NYC. Well, of course, I was outside with Harold Poole smoking a joint. Harold was into the Cheetah Club and some other kind of shady stuff, but it was ok.”

– bonafide Uzi-wielding, 10 grams-of-gear-a-day psychopath, Mr. America and the man who made Gold’s Gym great (before a major corporation fucked it all up) Pete Grymkowski

Though his skin color might have indicated to his fellow students that Poole was definitively not among the “it” crowd (Indianapolis’ schools wouldn’t be desegregated until the fucking 1980s, and this was the late 50s), his performance on the field and mat proved otherwise. After a year of training, the kid that had to be bused to a special, shitty school for kids who had the misfortune to have a few drops of African ancestry still stuttered, but he now ran a 54 second 400y dash. Three years later, track coach Roy Aberson’s lifting routine had paid off dividends, and Poole was a 5’10” 175lb specimen, and by his senior year he was a 200 pound heavyweight who took second (or fourth, depending on the source) in the state championships in wrestling while wrestling for the team that won their sole state title in thirty years just two years prior, and threw the shot 55′, which was only 10% off from the throws by America’s elite shot putters at the time (Parry O’Brien from the OG Westside crew was throwing a 62′).

And before you start thinking that overcoming a bit of blackness and a stutter on the way to becoming the youngest person to ever compete in a Mr. Olympia isn’t much of a big deal, it’s because you’re looking at it with modern eyes. Modern Indianapolis is pretty rad- I’ve been there a few times over the last 20 years and always found it to be clean, bright, and full of rad ethnic food. The Indianapolis of the 1960s was a pile of shit if you were black, however- the insanely popular jazz fad that made Duke Ellington a hyper-famous citizen of black Indianapolis had been pointedly killed, and the area formerly known as the Avenue and Black Wall Street was forcibly turned into a massive slum, which was then used as justification for racism in spite of the fact that it was forced on the black citizens of Indianapolis against their will. Oh, and then they ran a highway through the area and forcibly relocated the black inhabitants of the area elsewhere.

The Era in Which Harold Poole Grew Up Sucked as a Whole, But American Blacks Had It So Horrendous It’s a Miracle they Survived at All

I placed this heading here just in case the historical background behind the environment in which Harold Poole competed isn’t something you care to read about- it’s mainly curated excerpts from an article about the Indianapolis in which Harold Poole was raised- one in which an enterprising black community had created a really vibrant economic and cultural center in Indianapolis, which was then systematically destroyed by a lot of shitty people. Frankly, with that as history’s most recent lesson, it is a fucking wonder Harold Poole isn’t in the Killer Workouts series rather than Baddest Motherfuckers.

“The Rise of Indiana Avenue was as much a “Black Wall Street’ as it was an ‘Indianapolis Harlem.’ It was both an internationally known center of Black music during the Jazz Age and a regional center of Black commerce and entrepreneurship. Technically, Indiana Avenue is just one of four diagonal streets radiating from the center of town. But it was way more than just an Avenue; symbolically and culturally, it was an organism.    

“It was also the site of one of the first Federal housing projects in America–Lockefield Gardens–which boasted indoor plumbing for all 748 units, shops, a school and plenty of wide open green spaces for residents. When it opened in 1938 even white families wanted to move there.”

“The Avenue was a mile of businesses that catered to Black residents. Black-owned business, churches, bars, night clubs, theaters, and homes. Indiana Avenue itself was surrounded by some 400–500 acres of Black neighborhoods. By the early 1900s, some of these neighborhoods went as far south as Washington Street and a far north as 16th Street. “Indiana Avenue” was more than a single neighborhood: it was the spine of a whole collection of Black neighborhoods, with a few pockets of immigrant enclaves in the mix. Each neighborhood had its own homes, shops, churches and infrastructure. While, yes, White European immigrants also settled amidst Black residents, the city was merely a few decades old before Black leadership stepped up to develop a largely undeveloped area. In basic terms, The Avenue and many surrounding Black neighborhoods weren’t the product of a previous generation of European settlement left after a white flight. It was intentionally built by and for the Black community.”

“In 1910, the Avenue’s most famous resident arrived. That year Madam C. J. Walker relocated her business to the Avenue and utilized local talent in labor and leadership to quickly build a worldwide business empire. At the time of her death in 1919 she was considered the wealthiest self-made woman of any race [Jamie’s note: and the first female self-made millionaire] in America, with a manufacturing operation that lasted 70 years. Walker raised funds to build Black branch of the YMCA on Senate Avenue and began development of the Walker Building. Sometimes called the Walker Theatre, it is a four-story multi-use building that housed the world headquarters of Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, a beauty school and salon, a ballroom, an auditorium/movie theater, a drugstore, a coffee shop, and professional offices. The theater, still standing today, incorporated African, Egyptian and Moorish Designs and is one of the few remaining African-Art Deco buildings in the U.S.”

“The Black community contributed mightily to the economy of Indianapolis even if they weren’t all wealthy enough to leave behind a building as their legacy. There were many white-owned manufacturing enterprises in and around the Indiana Avenue neighborhoods that made use of cheap Black labor. Acme-Evans’ nine-story state-of-the-art mill (the largest in Indiana at the time) had a 90% Black workforce, including my great-grandfather Porteus Boyd who worked there for 39 years. Acme-Evans workforce was 90% Black. Then there was Kingan and Company, one of the largest meat packing companies in the world, with an industrial complex straddling the White River that employed 500 Black workers by 1945. According to the 1940 census, my great-grandfather made the modern equivalent of less than $15,000 a year with a family to support, which appears to be the norm at the time. But all of that was about to go to shit.” 

Though the Black Wall Street in Indianapolis was a beacon of hope to the African-Americans of the area, it was basically a Bat-Signal for hate where the whites in Indiana were concerned.  Indiana is rural as shit for the most part, and rural Americans even to this fucking day overwhelmingly blame the evil “gubmint” and the minorities for their various and sundry failings, which are too numerous to list in this article.    As such, the fine people of Indianapolis would hold one of the last public lynchings, attended heavily by women and children in a mob that numbered up to 15,000, after racists in the crowd falsely accused three black teenagers of raping a white woman and shooting her boyfriend (they’d indedd robbed the dude, but the woman testified repeatedly she’d never claimed to have been raped), and the Indiana Ku Klux Klan had a roster of over 250,000 members with micropenises and arm measurements under 14″ in the 1920s.

And because they were clearly all about being upstanding, good, “god-fearing” people that they endlessly alleged themselves to be,

“That 1920s membership role included the Governor, Mayor of Indianapolis, over half the elected member of the Indiana General Assembly and many other high-ranking local and state officials. So it should be no surprise that, in Indiana Avenue’s earliest days, Blacks and immigrants were largely left alone on the Avenue because the Central Canal bisecting the area was known to carry malaria.

While the collection of Indiana Avenue neighborhoods thrived in its own way, the area would never generate as much tax revenue or look as shiny and new as white communities. Discriminatory practices and “redlining” were common, meant that denying Blacks access to loans and other financial services was held up–even endorsed–by regulations and laws. The Fair Housing Act wouldn’t be signed until 1968 and, even then, had uneven impact. And so, even its heyday, the Avenue had a well-worn look since home- and business-owners didn’t have easy access to capital for improvements or expansion.

Eventually, the Indianapolis Police Department began to raid establishments that attracted too many whites on the Avenue. The Chief of Police even publicly stated in 1939 that it was his intention to enforce segregation on the Avenue. The crackdown stemmed the flow of visitor dollars, meaning that money grew tighter for even the most successful Avenue owners. It was during this era of enforced segregation that the Avenue’s jazz scene began to slow down a bit. Many clubs closed. Many illegal gambling spots did not. In the absence of official financial access, the role was often fulfilled by bootleggers, drug dealers, bookies, boosters/fencing operations, and pimps. This did wonders for the status of “criminals,” elevating their profiles as bankers and philanthropists in the black community” (Paschall). 

They ended up finally killing off the community entirely with “slum clearance” movements to evict people living in derelict public housing that had been utterly abandoned by the city, stamping out any of the proto-Harlem vibe Indianapolis had in the Roaring 20’s and replacing it with the creeping dread that no matter how valiantly they strove for the stars, the black inhabitants of Indianapolis looked like they would forever be battered back down.

So, it was that sort of an environment in which Harold Poole, who although by all accounts was exceedingly well-spoken and remarkably light-skinned, Harold’s ties to “criminal enterprises” like titty bars and weed (all of which likely reflected the state of Indianapolis more than Poole’s seedy mindset) combined with his coffee ice cream complexion meant that he was still considered “black enough” by both society and bodybuilders… and that benefited him about as much as you’d expect when he couldn’t sit and eat with the competitors he faced onstage after the contest was over. To make matters worse, history had already proven to Harold Poole that whatever ground black people could make up was going to be ripped away from them anyway by a bunch of jealous, chubby illiterates armed with bibles and micropenises.

Yo- If that last sentence doesn’t drive home how myopic we’ve all been about how astonishingly fucking horrible being black in America was prior to the 1980s, nothing will. I’m not saying everything is as it should be at the moment, but I’d never really stopped to think that neither Harold Poole nor Sergio Oliva could even eat pizza with their fellow competitors in a lot of the US at the start of their careers. This isn’t about social justice anything- I’d never realized how goddamned unpleasant that must have been, being despised by half of your competition for the color of your skin and then barred from even hanging out with the ones who weren’t shits after the competition was over (and the trophy was likely handed to the wrong fucking guy). I personally don’t do much socializing at competitions because I fucking despise them- I’m just there to perform and leave, and I generally expect to be disliked. Even so, being treated like Oliva and Poole were, knowing that they were in every way their competitions’ superior, would have given me a fucking stroke- that neither of those dudes caught any bodies in their pursuit of breaking the race barrier is a fucking miracle.

Harold Poole Essential Facts

• Born: December 25, 1943
• Died: August 7, 2014 (pancreatitis)
• Height: 6′
• Weight: 240ish
• Occupation: Professional bodybuilder, professional wrestler, personal trainer, martial arts instructor, celebrity bodyguard
• Competitive Career: 1960-1982
• Titles Won: 1961 AAU Jr Mr. America, 1962 AAU Mr. America Most Muscular, 1962 AAU Mr. America (Runner-up),  1963 AAU Mr. America Most Muscular, 1962 AAU Mr. America (Runner-up), 1964 IFBB Mr. America, 1965 IFBB Mr. Olympia (Runner-up to Larry Scott), 1966 IFBB Mr. Olympia (Runner-up to Larry Scott again), 1967 WBBG Pro Mr. Olympia (in which legendary bodybuilding paratrooper badass and bench beast Chuck Sipes took third), 1968 WBBG Pro Mr. Olympia (beating his training partner, the original “Giant Killer” Freddy Ortiz), 1971 IFBB Mr. USA
• Legend Status Shit: Youngest man to ever step onstage at the Olympia.

By the time Harold Poole was beginning to be old enough to compete in bodybuilding, the only black men in America who’d tried to win at bodybuilding had failed to do so in spite of insane physiques for their day. Whether due to politics, racism, or the pageant setup of the AAU Mr. America, even the best black strength athletes in America couldn’t snag America’s top physique crown.

Here’s a short list of some of the men who gave it hell before Harold Poole hit the scene:

• featherweight Olympic weightlifter John Terry (1908-1970), who pulled 600 at an odd lifts meet at 132 pounds in 1939 (Fair). Terry was the first black person to represent America in any sport in the Olympics.

• 5’8″ 225 pound Olympic weightlifting gold medalist John Davis (1921-1984, who said a decade after his second attempt to win the Mr. America that he would “never [again] enter the A.A.U. Mr. America contest because I believe a negro cannot win” (Fair). Davis also held the unofficial world record in the deadlift for a while, with a 705 pull at 193 in 1942 and repped 400+ with no spotter on the bench, so had he been born twenty years later, it’s likely Davis would have been remembered for his supertotal and his bodybuilding career rather than having been just one member of the US Olympic weightlifting Dream Team. Had he had the benefit of a couple of extra decades, the baddest lifter of the 30s and 40s would have given Larry Pacifico (click here for Pacifico’s training if you’re a Patron [it’s a Patreon-only article]) and Vince Anello problems both on the platform and in the post-meet posedown.

• bodybuilder Melvin Wells, who was considered to be the best built man not named John Grimek to ever have lived in his heyday (but was heavily criticized for his lack of lower body development). Wells is considered as having one of the best sets of arms and shoulders of the presteroid era, but his lack of overall development killed his chances of being Mr. America, especially given his skin condition.
  • “Mel’s entire arm program consisted only of 3 sets of ten in the strict curl and the press! Yet when I say STRICT, Wells took this to a whole ‘nuther level- our USAWA rules tell us for curling to put a sheet of paper behind our head & butt, backed up to a wall, then curl(without paper slipping) ; for training, Wells didn’t use the paper thing, but very reliable witnesses observed him ALWAYS performing very SLOW, picture perfect barbell curls ,full range, with 150 pounds for his 3 sets of 10 (one writer counted him doing 12 perfect reps with 145 in front of a large crowd at the famous York picnic!). His presses were perhaps even more noteworthy – 3 sets of 10 ,super strict with 120 pounds ! Oh, wait, I forgot to mention, these were one arm presses!! Absolutely no side leaning or back bend either. Hmm, this guy coulda done some major damage to the USAWA record book for curling & pressing” (McKean).

• Cuban-born George Paine, who was 5’9″ and 210 pounds of sculpted mass that just couldn’t defeat the likes of Reg Park at the end of his career due to Park’s extra 25 pounds and inch of arm girth, and couldn’t defeat no-names like 1954 Mr. America Dick Dubois (though he did come in third to badass pothead and super-shredder Zabo Koszewski) due to what most perceived as an obvious racial barrier in the 50s. Like Harold Poole would later be, George Paine represented an old school mass monster decided opposed to steroids and embittered that their use meant their mass was no longer uncommon in the 1960s. Frankly, I understand their reasoning, but as with anything, their refusal to adapt to a new norm meant they were basically forgotten by history.

Part of the problem at this point was that there weren’t a lot of bodybuilding contests to enter when these guys were competing. Not only did men like Harold Poole and George Paine fuck themselves in regards to keeping up with the Joneses on steroids at the time in which these guys competed. In the US, it was almost as if the AAU was the only game in town, and they regularly did stupid shit like sanction John Terpak for even attending professional bodybuilding competitions, in spite of the fact he didn’t compete.To give you an idea of how the bodybuilding world looked at the time, the sort-of Super Bowl of bodybuilding was generally considered to be the NABBA Mr. Universe, which Arnold won in Pumping Iron prior to winning the IFBB Olympia. The IFBB was only a few years old at the time and really had no international cache yet, so the pinnacle of bodybuilding was the NABBA Mr. Universe and everything else was underneath that.

Highest International Title in 1960: NABBA Mr. Universe (began in 1948 as an outgrowth of Bernarr McFadden’s original American bodybuilding competition in 1903.

Secondary International Titles (waaaaay in second): IFBB Mr. World, Mr. Universe, and Mr. Olympia, which were set up like the Holy Trinity as three co-equals, in spite of the fact that two of the three are never discussed any longer and almost totally unknown (again, not unlike the Holy Trinity).

Highest National-Level Competitions: AAU Mr. America and the NABBA Mr. Britain were basically on par with one another, though the Mr. America contest had no international arm and Mr. Britain was a qualifier for the NABBA Mr. Universe

Up next, I’ll cover Harold Poole’s rather tragic competitive career, his short-lived wrestling career, and whatever else happens to sneak its way in there. I’ve also got a non-lifting BME in the works for Madam CJ Walker, because that broad was way too cool to go unremembered. The point of this series isn’t social justice anything, but if you feel like you’ve got your back up about anything in this article, I highly encourage you to take it up with me personally any time you’d like- my patience with the unlettered and obese, gun-wielding limp-dicks of America who are terrified of small fabric masks and black people alike is at an all-time low.

JUMP TO PART 2

If you want to contribute to my attempts to forcibly educate humanity, feel free. I appreciate the help, no matter how little. This shit’s been free for over ten years and will continue to be free, because fuck this industry and just about every fucking “strength coach” in it- and they’re nothing more than personal trainers if they’re not coaching actual athletes (powerlifting is not a fucking sport, and the participants are not defined as athletes for having done so. It is a fucking strength exhibition), by the way, so don’t get it fucking twisted. If you can help me help you, rad. If not, just do me a favor and stop putting money in the pockets of people who don’t fucking deserve it- whatever failed phys ed teacher you’ve paid to help you is almost certainly unqualified to do so, and is based on what I’ve seen on social media, they’re almost definitely a shitty person to boot.

Sources:

Dusa, Michael.  Conversation # 35-Pete Grymkowski, Mr. World and Gold’s Gym Genius, with an assist by Roger Callard, Mr. America.  Reprinted from original.  Hardcore-Underground.  30 Jul 2016.  Web.  22 Apr 2019.  https://hardcore-underground.com/showthread.php/1239-Insane-Steroid-Interview-With-Old-School-Bodybuilder-Pete-Grymkowski

Fair, John.  Mr. America: idealism or racism: color consciousness and the AAU Mr. America contest, 1939-1982.  Iron Game History.  Jun/Jul 2003, 8(1):9-30.

Fair, John D. Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

McKean, John.  Strict!  USAWA.  16 Jan 2015.  Web.  29 Jul 2020.  http://usawa.com/tag/melvin-wells/

Paschall, Wildstyle.  Indiana Avenue: The Ethnic Cleansing of Black Indianapolis.  New America.  4 Feb 2020.  Web.  28 Jul 2020.  https://www.newamerica.org/indianapolis/blog/indiana-avenue-ethnic-cleansing-black-indianapolis/

Roach, Randy. Muscle, Smoke, and Mirrors, Vol. I. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2008.

Roach, Randy. Muscle, Smoke, and Mirrors, Vol. II. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2011.

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