by Glenn Stout
“She’d come home every night at the start of the school year crying and upset,” says her mom, Liz Johnson. “That permanent smile she had, that gleam in her eye, that was all gone.”
Her mom says she tried to talk to teachers and administrators and got nowhere. So she tried a whole new path—the starting quarterback of the undefeated football team. After all, senior Carson Jones had once escorted Chy to the Special Olympics.
“Just keep your ear to the ground,” Liz wrote to Carson on his Facebook page. “Maybe get me some names?”
But Carson Jones did something better than that. Instead of ratting other kids out, he decided to take one in—Chy.
He started asking her to eat at the cool kids’ lunch table with him and his teammates. “I just thought that if they saw her with us every day, maybe they’d start treating her better,” Carson says. “Telling on kids would’ve just caused more problems.”
It got better. Starting running back Tucker Workman made sure somebody was walking between classes with Chy. In classes, cornerback Colton Moore made sure she sat in the row right behind the team.
Just step back a second. In some schools, it’s the football players doing the bullying. At Queen Creek, they’re stopping it. And not with fists—with straight-up love for a kid most teenage football players wouldn’t even notice, much less hang out with.
“I think about how sweet these boys are to her,” says volleyball player Shelly Larson, “and I want to cry. I can’t even talk about it.”
It’s working.
“I was parking my car yesterday, and I saw a couple of the guys talking to her and being nice,” says offensive lineman Bryce Oakes. “I think it’s making a difference around here.”
And the best thing is? The football players didn’t tell anybody.
“I didn’t know about any of this until three weeks ago,” says Carson’s mom, Rondalee, who’s raising four boys and a daughter by herself. “He finally showed me an article they wrote here locally. I said, ‘Are you kidding me? Why didn’t you tell me this?’”
All of a sudden, Chy started coming home as her bubbly self again. When her mom asked why she was so happy, she said, “I’m eating lunch with my boys!”
The boys take care of Chy, and she takes care of the boys. Carson, carrying a GPA of 4.4, got in a car accident last week; since then, Chy is always trying to carry his backpack. “I know his neck hurts,” she says.
I get emailed stories like this a lot, but most of the time they don’t pan out. They turn out to be half true, or true for the first week but not the second. But when I walked into the Queen Creek High School cafeteria Tuesday, unannounced, there was four-foot-high Chy with 11 senior football players, eating her lunch around the most packed lunch table you’ve ever seen, grinning like it was Christmas morning. It was Carson’s birthday, and she’d made him a four-page card. On one page she wrote, in big crayon letters, “LUCKY GIRL.”
I asked Chy to show me where she used to eat lunch. She pointed to a room in the back, away from the rest of the kids, the special-ed lunchroom. Much more fun out here, she said.
“I thank Carson every chance I see him,” says Chy’s mom. “He’s an amazing young man. He’s going to go far in life.”
Nobody knows how far Chy Johnson will go in life. The life expectancy of those afflicted with her disease, microcephaly, is only 25–30 years. But her sophomore year, so far, has been unforgettable.
She’ll be in the first row Friday night, cheering 10-0 QC as it plays its first playoff game, against Agua Fria. Some people think it will be QC’s sixth shutout of the season. Sometime during the game, Carson probably will ask Chy to do their huddle-up “Bulldogs on 3” cheer, with everybody’s helmet up in the air. You won’t be able to see Chy, but she’ll be in there.
“Why do I do these interviews?” Chy asked her mom the other night.
“Because you’re so dang cute,” her mom answered.
I’ve seen this before with athletes. Josh Hamilton used to look out every day for a Down’s syndrome classmate at his Raleigh, North Carolina, high school. Joe Mauer ate lunch every day with a special-needs kid at his St. Paul, Minnesota, high school. In a great society, our most gifted take care of our least.
But what about next year, when Carson probably will be on his Mormon mission and all of Chy’s boys will have graduated?
Not to worry. Carson has a little brother on the team, Curtis, who’s in Chy’s class.
“Mom,” he announced at the dinner table the other night, “I got this.”
Lucky girl.
BURKHARD BILGER
The Strongest Man in the World
FROM THE NEW YORKER
THE GIANT OF FORT LUPTON was born, like a cowbird’s chick, to parents of ordinary size. His father, Jay Shaw, a lineman for a local power company, was six feet tall; his mother, Bonnie, was an inch or so shorter. At the age of three months, Brian weighed 17 pounds. At two years, he could grab his Sit ’n Spin and toss it nearly across the room. In photographs of his grade-school classes, he always looked out of place, his grinning, elephant-eared face floating like a parade balloon above the other kids in line. They used to pile on his back during recess, his mother told me—not because they didn’t like him but because they wanted to see how many of them he could carry. “I just think Brian has been blessed,” she said. “He has been blessed with size.”
Fort Lupton is a city of 8,000 on the dry plains north of Denver. In a bigger place, Shaw might have been corralled into peewee football at eight or nine, and found his way among other oversized boys. But the local teams were lousy and, aside from a few Punt, Pass & Kick contests—which he won with discouraging ease—Shaw stuck to basketball. By seventh grade, he was six feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds. When he went in for a dunk on his hoop at home, he snapped off the pole, leaving a jagged stump in the driveway. By his late teens, his bulk had become a menace. One player knocked himself out running into Shaw’s chest; another met with his elbow coming down with a rebound, and was carried off with a broken nose and shattered facial bones. “It was bad,” Shaw told me. “One guy, we dove for a ball together, and I literally broke his back. It wasn’t that I was a dirty player. I wasn’t even trying to do it hard.”
Like other very large men, Shaw has a surprisingly sweet nature. His voice is higher and smaller than you’d expect, and he tends to inflect it with question marks. His face has the bulbous charm of a potato carving. “He’s almost overly friendly,” Terry Todd, a former champion weight lifter and an instructor at the University of Texas, told me. “It’s like he thinks that if he’s not you’ll be frightened of him and run away.” At six feet eight and 430 pounds, Shaw has such a massive build that most men don’t bother trying to measure up. His torso is three feet wide at the shoulders; his biceps are nearly two feet around. His neck is thicker than other men’s thighs. “I know I’m big,” he told me. “I’ve been big my whole life. I’ve never had to prove how tough I am.”
In the summer of 2005, when Shaw was 23, he went to Las Vegas for a strength-and-conditioning convention. He was feeling a little adrift. He had a degree in wellness management from Black Hills State University, in South Dakota, and was due to start a master’s program at Arizona State that fall. But after moving to Tempe, a few weeks earlier, and working out with the football team, he was beginning to have second thoughts. “This was a big Division I, Pac-10 school, but I was a little surprised, to be honest,” he told me. “I was so much stronger than all of them.” One day at the convention, Shaw came upon a booth run by Sorinex, a company that has designed weight-lifting systems for the Denver Broncos and other football programs. The founder, Richard Sorin, liked to collect equipment used by old-time strongmen and had set out a few items for passersby to try. There were some kettle bells lying around, like cannonballs with handles attached, and a clumsy-looking thing called a Thomas Inch dumbbell.
Inch was an early-20th-century British strongman famous for his grip. His dumbbell, made
of cast iron, weighed 172 pounds and had a handle as thick as a tin can, difficult to grasp. In his stage shows, Inch would offer a prize of more than $20,000 in today’s currency to anyone who could lift the dumbbell off the floor with one hand. For more than 50 years, no one but Inch managed it, and only a few dozen have done so in the half century since. “A thousand people will try to lift it in a weekend, and a thousand won’t lift it,” Sorin told me. “A lot of strong people have left with their tails between their legs.” It came as something of a shock, therefore, to see Shaw reach over and pick up the dumbbell as if it were a paperweight. “He was just standing there with a blank look on his face,” Sorin said. “It was, like, What’s so very hard about this?”
When Shaw set down the dumbbell and walked away, Sorin ran over to find him in the crowd. “His eyes were huge,” Shaw recalls. “He said, ‘Can you do that again?’ And I said, ‘Of course I can.’ So he took a picture and sent it to me afterward.” Sorin went on to tell Shaw about the modern strongman circuit—an extreme sport, based on the kinds of feats performed by men like Inch, which had a growing following worldwide. “He said that my kind of strength was unbelievable. It was a one in a million. If I didn’t do something with my abilities, I was stupid. That was pretty cool.”
Three months later, Shaw won his first strongman event. Within a year, he had turned pro. He has since deadlifted more than a thousand pounds and pressed a nearly quarter-ton log above his head. He has harnessed himself to fire engines, Mack trucks, and a Lockheed C-130 transport plane and dragged them hundreds of yards. In 2011, he became the only man ever to win the sport’s two premier competitions in the same year. He has become, by some measures, the strongest man in history.
Shaw does his training in a storage facility in the town of Frederick, about 15 minutes from his hometown. His gym is behind the last garage door to the right, in a row of nearly identical bays. He leaves it open most of the year, framing a view of the snowcapped Front Range, to the west. Inside, the equipment has the same cartoonish scale as his body. One corner is given over to a set of giant concrete balls, known as Manhood Stones. Across the room, a flat steel frame leans against the wall, a pair of handles welded to one end. It’s designed to have a vehicle parked on top of it and hoisted up like a wheelbarrow. (Shaw has lifted an SUV 11 times in 75 seconds.) Next to it sit piles of enormous tires, which will be threaded onto a pipe for the Hummer Tire Dead Lift.
Strongman events tend to be exaggerated versions of everyday tasks: heaving logs, carrying rocks, pushing carts. Awkwardness and unpredictability are part of the challenge. When I visited, Shaw was coaching his lifting buddies in the Super Yoke and the Duck Walk. The former harks back to the ancient strongman tradition of carrying a cow across your shoulders. (In the sixth century B.C., Milo of Croton, the greatest of Greek strongmen, is said to have lugged a four-year-old heifer the length of the Olympic arena.) The cow, in this case, was in the form of a steel frame loaded with weights, which the men took turns shouldering around the gym. The Duck Walk was something that a blacksmith might do. It involved lifting an anvil-like weight of around 300 pounds between your legs and waddling down a path with it as fast as possible.
Tyler Stickle, a 24-year-old strongman from nearby Lakewood, took the first walk. A bank manager by day, he had a line of Hebrew letters tattooed around his right calf: I CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH HIM WHO STRENGTHENS ME. It was a prayer from Philippians long beloved by followers of Muscular Christianity, a movement that sprang up in the mid-1800s with the notion that God deserves burlier believers. (As the Giants center fielder Brett Butler once put it, “If Jesus Christ was a baseball player, he’d go in hard to break up the double play and then pick up the guy and say, ‘I love you.’”) Muscular Christianity went on to give us the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the Touchdown Jesus mural at Notre Dame’s stadium, and a stained-glass window depicting wrestlers, boxers, and other athletes in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York. But Stickle just hoped that it might help him waddle a little faster. “I hate the Duck Walk,” he said.
By the time he’d gone back and forth across the gym, his face had puffed up like a blowfish, and the tendons stood out from his neck. When he bent over to catch his breath, he saw that his inner thighs were chafed an angry red. “Wait till you see what it looks like a couple of days from now,” one of the other lifters said. “It just chews up your legs.”
“I hate the Duck Walk.”
“You’re mentally weak.”
For a long time, strongmen didn’t bother with specialized training. When CBS televised the first World’s Strongest Man contest from Universal Studios, in 1977, the competitors all came from other sports. There were bodybuilders like Lou Ferrigno, football players like Robert Young, and weight lifters like Bruce Wilhelm, who won the contest. Even later, when the dilettantes had mostly dropped out of contention, there was no standardized equipment. Shaw had to cast his own Manhood Stones from a plastic mold, and he practiced the Keg Toss in his parents’ backyard, in a large sandpit that they’d built for volleyball. “Even 10 or 12 years ago, you wouldn’t have had a place like this,” he told me at his gym. “But a guy can’t just come in off the street anymore and be amazing.” These days, most of Shaw’s equipment is custom-forged by a local company called Redd Iron; his diet and his workout clothes are subsidized by his sponsor, the supplement maker MHP—short for Maximum Human Performance.
“I see guys accomplish things that are just blowing my mind,” Dennis Rogers, a grip master in the tradition of Thomas Inch, told me. Although the lifts vary from contest to contest, the most popular strongman events and records are now well established, and the latest feats circulate instantly on YouTube. “The weights they’re moving, the dead lifts they’re doing, the things they carry—it wasn’t until 1953 that the first 500-pound bench press was done,” Rogers said. “Today, you have guys who are doing a thousand pounds. How much can the human body take?”
The urge to perform feats of strength for no good reason seems to be deeply embedded in the male psyche. Shaw’s Manhood Stones are just modern versions of the thousand-pound volcanic boulder unearthed on the Greek island of Santorini. It was etched with a boast from the sixth century B.C.: EUMASTAS, SON OF KRITOBOLOS, LIFTED ME FROM THE GROUND. Similar accounts crop up in countless early histories and anthropological studies. The Vikings tossed logs, the Scots threw sheaves of straw, the ancestors of the Inuit are rumored to have carried walruses around. Even a man as brilliant as Leonardo da Vinci felt the need to bend horseshoes and iron door knockers, just to show that he could.
By the 19th century, men like Thomas Topham, Louis Cyr, and a succession of German Goliaths had turned such feats into lucrative theater. Topham, an English fireplug who was five feet ten and weighed 200 pounds, could bend iron pokers with his bare hands, roll pewter dishes into cannoli, and win a tug-of-war with a horse. According to a playbill from 1736, cited in David Willoughby’s classic history, The Super-Athletes, Topham’s act included the following feats: “He lays the back Part of his Head on one Chair, and his Heels on another, and suffers four corpulent men to stand on his Body and heaves them up and down. At the same time, with Pleasure, he heaves up a large Table of Six Foot long by the Strength of his Teeth, with half a hundred Weight hanging at the farthest end; and dances two corpulent Men, one in each Arm, and snaps his fingers all the time.”
The World’s Strongest Man was a title of cheap coinage in those days: no circus ever made a shilling claiming to have the second strongest. Still, like other athletic skills, it eventually ceded to a stricter accounting. Equipment was standardized, rules established. The debatable merits of bouncing four fat men on your belly—because how fat were they, really, and how high did they bounce?—gave way to a pair of uniform and highly regulated lifts: the snatch and the clean and jerk. In the first, a barbell is gripped with both hands, thrown into the air, and held above the head in a single motion. In the second, the weight is swiftly lifted to the shoulders (the clean),
then flipped up and caught overhead (the jerk). Carrying cows was left to amateurs.
Olympic weight lifting made its debut at the first modern Games, in Greece, in 1896. But it wasn’t until 1920, when weight classes were created, and 1928, when one-hand lifts were abolished, that it settled into a predictable sport. Americans were soon the dominant power. Under the savvy sponsorship of Bob Hoffman, the founder of the York Barbell Company, in Pennsylvania, the national team produced a succession of gold medalists in the 1940s and 1950s, including Tommy Kono, John Davis, and Paul Anderson. Early on, to get around rules restricting Olympic participation to amateurs, Hoffman would hire the lifters at his factory for as little as $10 a week and let them train on-site. They would also promote York products in Strength and Health—the house organ, “edited in an atmosphere of perspiration and horseplay,” as Fortune put it in 1946.
“Bob took a bunch of nobodies and turned them into the greatest team in the world,” Arthur Drechsler, the chair of USA Weightlifting, told me recently. To Drechsler, a former junior national champion, Olympic weight lifting remains the finest test of strength ever devised. “This thing was created to cut through all the BS,” he told me. “Are you the best or not? Let’s see. Let’s do two events and we’ll see who’s really good. Everyone lifts the bar from the same place; everyone is competing at the same level. We haven’t discriminated by race, creed, or color since the 1920s. So we have a legitimate claim to having the strongest people in the world.”
The awkward part, for Drechsler, is that this elite no longer includes Americans. Since 1960, the United States has suffered through an extended drought in the sport. Bulgarians, Hungarians, Cubans, Poles, Romanians, Koreans, an East German, and a Finn have all topped the podium, and Russians and Chinese have done so dozens of times. (Weight lifting, with its multiple weight classes, is an ideal means of amassing medals, they’ve found.) But aside from Tara Nott—a flyweight from Texas who won her division in 2000, when women’s weight lifting was introduced at the Sydney Games—no American has won the gold. This year, the men’s team didn’t even qualify for the Olympics. (One American, Kendrick Farris, later qualified individually.)
