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On some level, I’d known this going in. I have to admit I was petrified the first day of practice. While the coach timed us, the team swam 16,000 yards—that’s ten miles of hell—with our shoes on for part of it. With each waning stroke, the thought ran through my mind that they were going to kill me. By the time the ball hit the water, I didn’t have the strength to pick it up.

I hadn’t come to college to swim; I’d come to play water polo my way. That wasn’t really an option here.

Since it turned out that I majored in failing and minored in partying, by the end of the first year I was on academic probation. This made it easier for my coach to approach me about redshirting the next year, meaning I would train but not compete.

I had a friend who’d redshirted the year before, and he told me it sucked. Being the levelheaded, rational guy I was, I said, “Shove your red shirt,” and walked out the door.

I try not to have regrets, but being a dummy during my abbreviated college career would probably be one of them. When I dropped out, my dad blamed himself for not being around enough. I moved in with my mom, who was now living in Irvine, and enrolled at Orange Coast College, a two-year junior college. But like CSULB, that wouldn’t last long.

One day, I got on my motorcycle and just started riding. To where, I couldn’t really tell you. Both figuratively and literally, my life suddenly lacked any sense of direction. We are all creatures of habit, and sports had always been mine. Without sports, what was I supposed to do?

On my way back home, I stopped at a random gym on East Chapman Avenue in the city of Orange. Samson’s Gym was a no-frills operation, where only serious lifters needed apply. In the corner, the gym had what they called the Power Pit, littered with racks of black weights, dumbbells, plates, and benches.

I worked out at Samson’s Gym for the next few months and caught the eye of the owner, Jim Dena, a former Anaheim police officer who would often come onto the floor and lift with me. Jim turned me on to bodybuilding and eventually gave me a job at the gym.

A group of powerlifters also worked out at Samson’s Gym, and one day they called me over to them. “You shouldn’t do that pretty posing lifting,” one of them told me. “It’s always better to be stronger than you look than to look stronger than you are.”

Turns out, I wasn’t getting advice from your typical muscled meatheads. These were some of the greatest powerlifters of the time. Terry Shaw had been a world’s record holder in the dead lift, and Terry McCormick was the world’s record holder in the dead lift (848 pounds), while Marv Phillips, also a police officer, held twenty world records and was called the King of the Squat.

So I dropped my weights and migrated to their side of the Power Pit to do some powerlifting. You know those lifting competitions you see on TV, where a constipated-looking guy in a uni-tard and tube socks squats, grunts, and huffs and puffs to stand with a massive weight bar on his shoulders? That’s powerlifting. It’s pure strength lifting and differs from bodybuilding, where you build and tone specific muscles to get an aesthetically appealing appearance.

In powerlifting, there are three lifts: squats, dead lift, and bench press. There is no powerlifting in the Olympics, but there is Olympic lifting with maneuvers like the clean and jerk and the snatch, which require speed, agility, and of course strength. However, Olympic lifters’ weights are light compared to the ones professional powerlifters use.

When I started lifting with the pros, it was a rush to feel myself getting stronger. I dedicated so much of my time to it that they decided I should try a competition. At my first show, down in Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corp Recruit Depot in San Diego, I took third place.

After I got a taste, I didn’t want to stop. My lift numbers kept going up, and I started entering competitions every couple of months. But my body could go only so far on its own. It was time to take the next step,