BEN WEIDER: THE 2008 GUARDIAN OBITUARY

In honour of Joe Weider's obit running in the Guardian, I went back and found my obit of his younger brother Ben, which I wrote for the G in December 2008, just around the time I started this blog, but which for some reason I never included here. You can link to it here

I love the contrast between the brothers. I mentioned in Joe's obit that, where Ben became a scholar of Napoleon, you might accuse Joe of harbouring a not-very-well concealed Napoleonic complex, the complex little man making himself big (in every sense of that word) with drive and ego to match.

They seem a perfectly matched pair: Ben staying in Montreal, becoming a philantropist, marrying a local girl and building the structure of their fitness empire, while Joe moved to California, married a pin-up, crashed Hollywood via Arnold, and constantly sold himself and his lifestyle alongside equipment, dietary supplements, and sage advice.

Both brothers were long-lived, but I wonder if they were the kind of men who would have been regardless of what avenues they'd pursued. I'm almost tempted to read Brothers Of Iron, except I suspect it contains a lot of, shall we say, mythologising--and any book with forewards by both Arnold and Juan A Samaranch can't be all good.

It's a fascinating story, and it makes me want to go back to Montreal and live near Park LaFontaine. The neighbourhood has changed, and I suppose it's too late for that now.

WAYNE COLLETT: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Wayne Collett (third from the left, UCLA vs USC), whose protest at the 1972 Munich Olympics failed to have the impact of Tommie Smith and John Carlos' in Mexico four years earlier, is in today's Independent. You can link to it here. As usual, Avery Brundage, the head of the IOC (or, as British papers called him in the recent obits of Juan A Samaranch, the 'American head of the IOC') gets to be the villain; the guy spent decades on the wrong side of every issue, but then, that's par for the IOC course. I thought most of those Samaranch obits went very easy on Olympic corruption,especially the ways Samaranch's inclusion of federations, and his stocking the IOC with friendly broadcasters and pliant ex-athletes encouraged it, on right-wing Spanish politics and the continuing preference of the IOC for hereditary privilege and totalitarian government. We need more protests like Colletts, not fewer.