Much to the chagrin of the natty “genetic limits” crowd, in the 1940s and 50s there existed a crew of gigantic pro wrestlers who dwarfed just about everyone in modern pro wrestling, dudes so huge they pretty much defy description and all of whom stand as a stark reminder of the fact that genetics play a laughably small role in one’s muscular potential. These men, all of whom were born in the economically tumultuous first third of the 20th century, didn’t just smash all of the idiotic “genetic limits” you’ll see repeated online as gospel- they destroyed every preconception everyone on the plane had about how big people could move, how muscular a person could get, what the “place” of black people in Southern society was, and any idea you might have that your improper sports supplementation might be the problem with your in-gym progress.
Meet the dudes who did the most with the least, in a time when everyone told these men that everything they would ever try would end in failure. These were men who defied the odds and everyone’s expectations as they paved the way for Rocky Johnson and Tony Atlas: Bobo Brazil (1924-1998), Sailor Art Thomas (1924-2003), and Luthor Lindsay (1924-1972), all of whom were Negro Heavyweight World Champions in wrestling because racism and white fragility prevented white people from allowing them to win the regular belts.
For those of you who have read my new book, Plague of Strength’s Bite-Size History Vol. 1, you’ll be familiar with the House of David baseball team, but for those who haven’t yet purchased it, here’s a primer before you go drop $10 on the greatest history book you’ll ever read- the House of David was an evangelical Christian cult that started a couple of badass baseball teams that were co-ed, multi-racial, and practically unstoppable on the field. They helped desegregate the South by forcing Southerners to allow the Negro League All-Star team with whom they traveled in a kind of Globetrotters-style arrangement to stay in the same hotels and eat in the same restaurants as the HOD team, and it was here that we begin the story for Bobo Brazil. The wrestling champ was at that time was a baseball player named Houston Harris born in the to-this-day-racist-af Little Rock, Arkansas, who was trying to break into professional sports while working at a steel mill.
After a few matches, the gigantic baseball player was introduced to famed wrestling promoter Joe Savoldi, who gave Houston the name BooBoo Brazil and a gimmick with a sequined cape. The first flyer advertising Brazil misspelled his name, and the name Bobo stuck with him for the rest of his career (something that happened a lot with fighters in that day). Very quickly, Bobo became a huge draw all over the country due to his massive size, his incredible strength, and his incredibly soft-spoken manner. Where the black fighter to win boxing’s heavyweight championship created controversy wherever he went and flaunted his victories and sexual conquests with white women, Bobo Brazil would make impassioned pleas to his fans to come out and support him, because he could not win without their help.
Wrestling events in the South at this time had segregated seating (whites sat in floor seats while blacks were confined to the balcony) and they treated black fans like shit, but black wrestlers and one white wrestling heel named Sputnik Monroe (a wrestler I profiled in BSH) marketed to them. While Brazil played the genuine nice guy everyman, Monroe played the ultimate heel in the mind-meltingly racist Memphis market- he stole fashion cues from the exact people that terrify fat old white men who drink mint juleps and got his drip up with a purple gown and a diamond-tipped walking cane. Because he really was about that life though, Monroe started drinking in traditionally black bars, and openly hung out with black patrons while handing out tickets to shows. That, of course, aroused the ire of racist cops, who arrested him for a variety of archaic and asinine charges, which he would then hire a black attorney to resolve. This meant that he became the largest draw in his territory, and it forced them to change their seating policy because Monroe’s shows would be half empty in the floor seats, but the balcony would be over capacity and sold out.
At the same time, Brazil quickly began drawing so many fans at Southern matches that event promoters were forced to abandon their segregated seating system altogether to accommodate the massive number of fans of all colors. It was a perfect storm of desegregation forced on the unwilling and unwitting Southerners by the House of David baseball team (which created the gimmick that the Harlem Globetrotters would later use in basketball, although the House of David was actually nearly unbeatable instead of simply so for the sake of performance) combined with the racism of NFL fans and the opportunity it created for Brazil that Bobo Brazil is known as the “Jackie Robinson of wrestling”- like Jackie Robinson he was not the first to do it, but he was the spark that lit the fire of desegregation in that sport.
Similarly, Bobo Brazil’s gigantic tag team partner Art Thomas never held the strap, as his skin color prevented it (and his horrific gimmick probably should have if that hadn’t). His atrocious gimmick, which was just dressing as a sailor, was pulled from Thomas’s stint in the Merchant Marine, which he entered to escape the hell of being black in a US orphanage in the 1930s. After the Merchant Marine, he began bodybuilding and was quickly picked up by a touring strongman show. In 1943 a promoter plucked him out of that and dropped him into the wrestling world, where it is thought he was the first bodybuilder-wrestler of the sort which Tony Atlas and the Ultimate Warrior would later exemplify.
Like the Warrior decades later. Al Thomas man couldn’t wrestle for shit, but he was immensely strong and very difficult to hurt. As a result, he was able to easily manhandle the racists who would get into the ring and try to mete out some “Southern justice.” Due to his general lack of technical knowledge, Sailor Art Thomas most commonly used the move with which George Hackenschmidt and the other strongman-wrestlers of the early 20th century broke thousands of opponents’ ribs over the years- the bear hug. Instead of learning a variety of ways to hurt people, Sailor Art Thomas chose the time-honed method of the strongman and simply became a human Juicemaster- if he wasn’t looking for a submission by bearhug or fatality by internal organs perforated by multiple splintered ribs, Thomas used his massive strength for basic throws.
Though his wrestling style matched that of the Warrior, his demeanor was quite the opposite- Art Thomas was too nice for his own good and often taken advantage of as a result, but beloved for his physique and work ethic and respected because he was a serious badass when he finally realized he had been wronged. Despite the endless efforts by dickheads to defraud him, Thomas didn’t live angry and die young- Thomas’s career lasted from the 40s to the 80s, and his life expectancy at age 10 was only 45 years but he lived to 79.
In a somewhat tragic counterpoint to Thomas’s longevity is the short life span of the third giant of the era, Luther Lindsay (1924-1972). Lindsay’s insanely thick-legged career was cut short in the ring when he suffered a fatal heart attack while pinning his opponent in a match. Perhaps it was his height and weight that did him is, because in spite of his tree-trunk legs, Lindsay was a mere 6’4″ 235lbs. Also unlike his occasional tag-team partners and travelling companions, Lindsay was a highly skilled submission fighter who was one of the only people to beat professional wrestling legend Stu Hart in the Hart’s Dungeon. He impressed men like Lou Thesz and Stu Hart so much that Hart actually carried a photo of Lindsay in his wallet until his death, and it was his insane wrestling skills that enabled Lindsay to be the first black man ever to challenge for the world heavyweight title.
Despite the fact that the owners of the LA Colosseum forced the LA Rams to hire a black player in 1946 or face eviction, black football players who entered the league in the late 1940s and early 1950s often left as quickly as they came due to the incessant racial abuse that was hurled at them by crowds of dickheads. It was in fact so bad that the second black player to enter the NFL, Woody Strode said that if he had to integrate heaven, he wouldn’t go.
Strode was a mixed race (Black, Creek, and Cherokee) American multi-sport superstar who was also a standout decathlete who married a Hawaiian princess before becoming an actor. Because Strode was considered one of the best-built human beings on the planet in the 1930s, he was immortalized with a portrait designed but not displayed at the 1938 Olympics due to the fact he was black. The painter of Strider’s portrait was fellow actor, dancer, athlete, and artist Hubert Stowitz, whose apparent love of POCs and First People in particular made him persona non grata at Hitler’s 1938 games (and would get his art banned in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Idaho if those illiterates knew it existed).
The workout that built his ripped 6’3″ 205 pound physique was simple, very reminiscent of the Great Gama’s training routine, and likely the one that inspired Herschell Walker’s workout- 1000 pushups, 1000 free squats, and 1000 situps every day. This wasn’t a man blessed with every convenience (including protein RTDs and a modern freeway system that allowed him to freely travel to the best gyms on the planet… and he wouldn’t have been allowed to train in most of them even if he did, because he was black).
Woody Strode did way more than most people could dream of with so much less at his disposal than you have that it boggles the mind any of you call yourselves hard gainers. This man was one of the first two black dudes to play on the CFL, in the 1st group of black players allowed into the NFL, and one of the first black actors to play commanding, arresting, non-subservient roles in film. While being the most jacked man in America he broke down more walls for his peers than Juggernaut has in all of his comic appearances. (Photo by Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images)
Due to that unstoppable wave of tiny-dick energy coming out of NFL fans and players, men like Luther Lindsay (1924-1972), who in any other era would have one of the nastiest linebackers the NFL would have ever seen, went into professional wrestling instead of the NFL. It wasn’t just the NFl that missed out on his skils though- had mixed-martial arts existed when Luther was alive, he’d probably be remembered as one of the best fighters in history, because Luther wasn’t just modern-pro-wrestler-huge- he was so skilled at submission fighting that is he lived in this era no one would have ever heard of Brock Lesnar, except as a reminder not to fuck with Luther Lindsay. In fact he was so strong and so good at submission fighting that he is purportedly the only person who ever “stretched” Stu Hart, a bro so legendary at submission fighting that he might as well be Paul Bunyan, because Stu Hart impressed the shit out of God-tier fighter Gene LeBell (read why that matters HERE).
If you’ve seen the noughties-era film Ready to Rumble, Stu Hart was the basis for the trainer in that film- he was Judo Gene Lebell-level badass (Lebell said Stu Hart was possibly the toughest man he knew), and Lindsay tapped him often enough that Stu Hart carried a pic of Lindsay in his wallet until his death.
If you’re keeping score, this is a NCAA Division II wrestling champ and All-American nose tackle who went into pro wrestling after hating the Canadian Football League and looking for a new gig. In doing so he became arguably the baddest fighter on the planet in the 1950s, snagged the Negro HW Champion title in 1953, was the first black man to challenge for a title, and his success allowed for other black wrestlers like his eventual tag-team partner Bearcat Wright to enter pro wrestling and win the title. And he was as wildly glorious in death as he was in life, dying in the ring of a heart attack after coming off the top rope for a pin, just like in the movie The Wrestler. Oh, and he was one of the first professional wrestlers to openly promote heavy weightlifting- like all of Stu Hart’s guys, Luther loved the bench press and reportedly benched over 450lbs in his prime.
Unfortunately for Lindsay, it was Bobo Brazil’s other tag team partner, Bearcat Wright (1932-1982), who would win the first heavyweight title in wrestling as a black man, though most wrestling historians dismiss his championship due to regional factionalism in wrestling promotions and a variety of other dumb bullshit (they erroneously claim Ron Simmons was the first champ, though he was born seven years before Bearcat Wright beat Killer Kowalski for the title). A case could also be made that Brazil won a title in 1961 just before Bearcat Wright beat Kowalski, but because Brazil defeated Nature Boy Buddy Rogers when he was injured, Brazil refused to accept he title. Regardless, these three men were an absolutely unstoppable force for multiple decades, they shattered the preconceived notions and misapprehensions of racist wrestling fans about the abilities of black people, and dismantled the race barrier that had kept black men out of championship contention in wrestling. In the history of badasses who never quit fighting, these men sit squarely in the VIP section.
Though Bearcat Wright wasn’t as ripped as the other guys, he was neither small nor a pussy. Wright stood 6’6″ 275lbs and would rip phone books in half during his promos. Beyond that, he was 8-0 as a professional boxer- he sidelined in that sport because his father was a boxer by the same name who defeated Max Baer and fought George Godfrey for the Negro Heavyweight Title. Wright didn’t just bring crushing grip strength to the ring, either- the man swam through controversy like fish swim through water and went even harder at the idea that “no press is bad press” than Elon Musk- he was suspended by the Indiana Athletic Commission for refusing to compete until wrestling was desegregated (a move that ultimately helped desegregate boxing) and refused to drop the strap (relinquish his title) to multiple high-profile white wrestlers (Killer Kowalski and Classy Freddy Blassy). Because he was such a massive draw, wrestling promotions forgave the big man over and over and continued to book him for main events until his untimely death at 50 from sickle cell anemia. Before his death, however, he wrestled all over the world, demonstrating his massive strength and sick vertical leap from Memphis to Melbourne and everywhere in between.
Lest you think he was the first black world wrestling champion, however, think again- that distinction sees to be held by Frank Crozier (1882-sometime after 1937), who won the coveted Lord Lonsdale belt in catch wrestling, which was the 19th century precursor to modern submission fighting that allowed small joint manipulation and strangulation, both of which are barred from competition today. Lancashire wrestling matches, also known as catch wrestling, catch-as-catch-can or gouging (as it was called in the United States, where an eye gouge equalled a boxing KO) were nasty- when fighting Lancashire wrestlers you knew they were going to just hurt you in weird ways, digging their fingers into sensitive areas and trying to damage nerve ganglions when they weren’t digging their chin into your eyeball, snapping your fingers, or striking in the same way you see open-hand fighting in Japanese promotions like Shooto.
Crozier, a Jamaican who emigrated to Scotland and began lifting and wrestling there, won the title on his first try, besting legendary the legendary Wigan and Lancashire wrestlers who would found Billy Robinson’s Snake Pit, which was one of the earliest modern-ish mma gyms and a factory for insanely hardcore light-and middleweight fighters.
The heavyweight winner that year was the Swiss Hercules Johann Lemm, which made this tournament a sort of bodybuilding exhibition as well, as Lemm was just as jacked at 5’8″ 216lbs (given Crozier only weighed 154lbs, he must’ve been short af). It is also very interesting to note that the promoter for Lemm and the circus tournament was the Scottish Apollo William Bankier, a 5’6″ 175lb early practitioner of jujitsu as well as a badass bodybuilder-strongman with 15.75″ cold-measured arms (which would be over 17″ with a pump).
Crozier traveled all over Europe wrestling and occasionally boxing, getting knocked the fuck out by former world champion Jack Johnson so quickly that Johnson had to do an exhibition against a family member afterward to calm the crowd. He didn’t officially retire until his 40s, at which point he’d been a massage therapist for years. It was for that reason he volunteered to work in a hospital during the Spanish Civil War rather than simply flexing his UK passport and leaving. At some point in Spain’s tumultuous 1930s, the world lost track of this badass and his date of death is unknown.
And Crozier himself followed in the steps of the man who was perhaps the United States’ first black wrestling champion, Viro Small aka Black Sam (1854-??). Standing 5’9″ and 184lbs, Small would have been big for a well-fed white person of the era rather than a free black man living in poverty and under horrific oppression. Small put his brawn to excellent use as both a boxer and a wrestler (though the distinction at that time was fairly hard to make from a 20th century perspective) and became a collar-and-elbow (what would become collegiate style) champion of the United States before going around the country dominating all comers in catch wrestling. Not to disparage your favorite fighter, but not even Wanderlei “The Axe Murderer” Silva beat anyone so badly they later came back with a gun, but Viro Small did just that.
Not that it mattered to Small, because the Tiny Dick Energy fired out of that gun and into Small’s neck barely even slowed him down- his craven, gun-toting opponent went to prison and a year later Small was back battering the fuck out people in boxing, wrestling, and in bars, as he was the number-one bouncer in the most violent neighborhood in the United States at that time. Known as the Bowery and made famous in the film Gangs of New York, that area was known for producing insanely badass pro fighters like Bill “The Butcher” Poole and John Morrissey and the most violent gang members this side of MS-13. He was so beloved that just over 100 years after he was born, boxing historian Morrow Wilson wrote in his book Magnificent Scufflers that
“Viro was the right man of any hour. He was warm natured, courteous, and sympathetic toward the live and let live customers, yet he was also strong of body and will power. Though Viro stalwartly declined to get rough with any customer with minor transgressions such as running out of money, any patron who was disposed to start fights or bully or use objectionable language was as good as in the gutter the moment he opened up. Viro was also a man of extremely rapid motions and almost uncanny talents for removing pistols or knives and replacing drawn weapons with fractured arms or wrists or tranquilizing uppercuts, but always, of course, in a courteous manner.”
If you take nothing else away from this article, realize that you’re focused on all the wrong things. None of these guys were obsessing over minute details like their macro-and micronutrients, badgering people online about the best program, or program construction, or ANYTHING TO DO WITH PROGRAMS OR DIET. When in doubt, they trained harder and ate more meat. Then they repeated that system over and over until success emerged. Success is within your grasp, because it’s not like you have anything remotely resembling the challenges that these guys faced and overcame with a smile and flexed biceps.
Man as much as I like the IG posts, it’s the long form stuff where you really shine.
Thanks bro! I love doing the long form stuff, but I’m still trying to figure out how to make any goddamned money at this and the numbers of people who read are steadily declining, especially among younger people, so I have been trying to expand my reach. I’ll make sure to do more long form stuff so I make everyone happy going forward!
And one issue I have with the long form stuff is that I am incredibly easily distracted, so I have over a million words in draft article, haha. And because my writing follows whatever my current interest are, I rarely go back to see what drafts I’ve abandoned. That might be something worth doing, though, frankly.
Typo line 2 “there existed a was a crew”. OK Jamie, taking a shit on racism is always a good idea in my book. Maybe there are a few exceptions but I think from what I can see your post cnfirms the idea that you can be big and natural, but not big, shredded and natural. I suppose then it comes down to what does shredded mean. I don’t care, I have no real interest in looking freaky , starving and dehydrating and posing and all that stuff. To me it comes down to numbers, what I can do. These days I am more into kbell stuff than anything else, and there is tons of progress to be had whilst natty. Keep em coming.
Good looking out on that typo.
Nah, that’s definitely the wrong takeaway- Art Thomas was lean as shit. Those guys weren’t lean because they travelled constantly and ate whatever they could. And the black guys had seriously limited options. Beyond that, they had no conception of diet in the way we do- that was just getting started on the West Coast and really didn’t become a thing until the 90s. If you look at the guys prior to that it was basically just starvation and a ton of cardio to get lean. The 80s guys made that most apparent because they would just take handfuls of dbol and speed and would eat like 800 calories of horsemeat. There were tons of natty guys were were big and lean back in the day, and there were even dudes like Gustav Fritensky who looked like a modern-day bodybuilder in the early 20th century. If anything, this post is evidence that you can be big and reasonably lean on a diet so bad that it would make a Redditor pass out from reading it- remember, these guys couldn’t eat at Rands Round-Up and other smorgasbords where the lifters of that era made all of their gains. They were eating in back alleys, behind gas stations, or in bars that served “colored people”. Your Russians prove the same thing in many regards, as the serfs were arguably as badly treated as black slaves in the US.
Off topic- had Lincoln survived Reconstruction, you likely wouldn’t be hard selling anyone on the merits of the left and this entire site would likely look considerably different. At the very least I never would have been so stupid to call myself a libertarian while espousing syndicalism in an idiotic effort to make myself look like a non-socialist and thus a “real man”. By the same token, your hard sales pitch actually made it harder for me to make that realization than easier. As it stands however, I feel very fucking ridiculous- that was some truly idiotic philosophical gymnastics I was doing simply to announce to the world that I am obsessively dedicated to giving the world more than I take, a fact that is plainly obvious to anyone who knows me and thus entirely pointless.
Agree with Alex
Bet! I’ll make it a point to get more long-form stuff out!
Why’ve you got a constant hardon over black people? Is it some kind of fetish thing for you, i can’t understand why so many of your posts lately are so “ooh ooh, black people are the best thing ever!!” Are you being bullied by one, do you need help? You seem to be turning into a wigger, this must be down to some kind of peer pressure from black people where you work (i’m guessing there’s loads). Stand up for yourself dude, it really is ok to be white if you weren’t aware ffs….
Lullzzz. Bro, where have I said that black people are the best thing ever? Has it not occurred to you that I go out of my way to find overlooked strength athletes of the past? I’ve published like 3 million words, and none of them were lauding people of whom you’ve heard, and if it was, it was doing so in a way you hadn’t realized. When I realized that I’d only written about white dudes who like 10 years, I realized that was because all of the books I had grown up reading were filled with nothing but white guys, and there were tons of non-white lifters with rad stories that had never been told.
And since you’re feeling all racially superior, lets examine who between us is Hitler’s wet dream. That would be me- blond, blue eyed, hypermuscular, god-tier strength, demonstrably superior intellect, and an encyclopedic knowledge of all things. Although I don’t fit the Prussian exual fetish ideal of a 6′ blonde, you probably don’t recognize the fact that the Germans’ height requirements came from the sexual fetishes of the Kaisers anyway, so we can discard that as non-essential.
From that position of definitive “racial superiority”, I can state with the utmost authority that your racism only illuminates your various failings, and I’m unlikely to be the only one chuckling over the fact you’ve chosen this way to announce your girl/guy/partner left you for someone non-white. Maybe you should go masturbate to jacked white dudes elsewhere, in an environment where your myriad personal failings won’t be on constant display.
Racially superior? Me?! Erm, if you haven’t got it from my name, let me enlighten you – i’m not white. Neither am i black. I’m mixed race (father black, mother white). Anyhow, my point really was that by constantly bringing attention to someones race or color, what you do is perpetuate its relavence. And when you do that, poor old ‘coons’ like myself get bad blood from white people – and i can’t blame them. People (unfortunately, usually white liberal people) should follow Morgan Freeman’s advice when he was asked “what can we do about racism” – his answer, “it’s easy – stop going on about it!!”
Looking small …The ancient Greeks famously fetishized the male body in sculptures that represent powerful, illustrious men as hulking figures with taut, rippling muscles. Sometimes these figures appear partially clothed in drapery or cloth; often, they are stark naked.
To the contemporary eye, their bodies are ideal—except for one, ahem, seminal detail. “They have small to very small penises, compared to the average of humanity,” art historian Andrew Lear, a specialist in ancient Greek art and sexuality, says. “And they’re usually flaccid.”
Countless contemporary art lovers and historians have been struck by the modest nature of the phalluses that feature in classical sculptures of gods, emperors, and other elite men—from Zeus to celebrated athletes. The small members seem at odds with the massive bodies and mythically large personalities they accompany. But the ancient Greeks had their reasons for this aesthetic choice.
Rewind to the ancient Greek world of around 400 BC, and you’ll find that large, erect penises were not considered desirable, nor were they a sign of power or strength. In his play The Clouds (c. 419–423 BC), ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes summed up the ideal traits of his male peers as “a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick.”
Historian Paul Chrystal has also conducted research into this ancient ideal. “The small penis was consonant with Greek ideals of male beauty,” he writes in his book In Bed with the Ancient Greeks (2016). “It was a badge of the highest culture and a paragon of civilization.”
In ancient Greek art, most of a great man’s features were represented as ample, firm, and shiny—so why weren’t these same aesthetic principles applied to the penis? As Lear and other historians suggest, part of the answer lies in how the phalluses of less admirable men were portrayed.
Lustful, depraved satyrs, in particular, were rendered with very large, erect genitals, sometimes almost as tall as their torsos. According to mythology, these creatures were part-man, part-animal, and totally lacked restraint—a quality reviled by Greek high society. “Big penises were vulgar and outside the cultural norm, something sported by the barbarians of the world,” writes Chrystal. Indeed, across many an amphora pot and frieze, well-endowed satyrs can be seen drinking and pleasuring themselves with abandon.
In Greek comedy, fools also routinely sported large genitals—“the sign of stupidity, more of a beast than a man,” according to Chrystal. So, too, did artistic representations of the Egyptians, says Lear, who were long-time enemies of the Greeks.
In this way, satyrs, fools, and foes served as foils to male gods and heroes, who were honored for their self-control and intelligence (along with other qualities requiring restraint, like loyalty and prudence). If large phalluses represented gluttonous appetites, then “the conclusion can be drawn that the small, flaccid penis represented self-control,” explains Lear.
While today, being well-endowed is often equated with power and even sound leadership, “the penis was never a badge or virility or manliness in ancient Greece as it was in other cultures,” Chrystal writes. “Potency came from the intellect needed to power man’s responsibility to father children, prolong the family line and the oikos [the family unit or household], and sustain the polis [the city-state].”
There is no doubt that across ancient Greek art, the representation of the phallus—and its varying size—was symbolic. As Lear suggests, this might hint at why artists of the age depicted male nudes so often, even when a character or narrative might not require it. “They used the penis as an index of character,” explains Lear. “It said something.”
Back then, it indicated whether or not a man was upstanding. But while the cultural symbolism of the penis has since shifted, some things haven’t changed. Then, as now, the male sex was seen to be the distillation of a man’s ability to dominate.
Weirdly, they were all into feet, and that was reflected in their statues and the fact that they oiled their toes as specifically and deliberately as their genitals, lol
Nice to see you back
I never went anywhere, lol- I’ve just been posting short stuff on Instagram. Being just one guy, there is a physical limit to how much I can write, haha.
Believing pro wrestler size stats is a new low as a historian
Did you miss the part where they competed in multiple sports? How the fuck haven’t you followed Rant’s lead yet? How is it possible your reading comprehension hasn’t ever improved over these many years? One would think even barnacles learn.
I’ll be honest I only really skimmed a lot of it