People often ask how my involvement in the fitness and bodybuilding industry started since it’s pretty obvious from looking at me that I don’t live the lifestyle myself.
My first exposure to anything related was seeing the magazines on the newsstands and the first one I recall was Muscle & Fitness at a Kroger in West Lafayette, IN which had Boyer Coe on the cover. Since I’ve always liked super heroes this was the first time I saw actual humans who looked superhuman and was intrigued. I kind of forgot about things for a while and then in the 80s saw Women’s Physique World magazine which showcased female bodybuilders which I had never seen before. Throughout the 80s I followed the sport as I liked the look of the women, and in high school and college continued being a fan of womens sports. I tried to write a piece about steroids at Auburn University when I was writing for The Auburn Plainsman in the early 1990s but couldn’t get too many people to talk about it and that was the start of my journalistic career in the sport.
In college I attended my first contest and had friends involved in the sport. Supporting them, meeting the athletes and other fans was fun and since many of us were all over the place we often shared thoughts and ideas over online services like Prodigy at that time. As the internet evolved, I used to cruise the newsgroups since at that time the web sucked and only seemed to have research papers on it.
As the web evolved, I continued to post contest reports and photos online, and eventually had opportunities to create a site to host the archives. Since then, my personal web page was migrated and evolved into it’s current manifestation of ‘genex magazine’ which is run by James Cook of FTV. I’ve also done numerous freelance work for Ironman, MuscleMag International, Oxygen and various other publications.
