Believer Recommends VII

Documentary

Ronnie Coleman: The King


Vlad Yudin

Few documentaries opt to follow a top athlete into the deep winter of his career. It’s a credit to the extraordinary legacy of bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman (and probably also to a glut of Netflix funding) that this one does. Coleman, known as “the King,” was, not too long ago, the world’s greatest male bodybuilder. On YouTube, you can watch him back squat 800 pounds—for two reps. In photos, his muscle shirts hang from his traps like decorative ribbons. On stage, his back—maybe the biggest of all time—unfurls like a waxed, oiled, and spray-tanned mountain range of perfect symmetry. If Arnold’s goal, as he professed in Pumping Iron, was to balance a beer bottle on his pecs, Colemans’ could serve as a full bar. In 2005, Coleman won his eighth Mr. Olympia title. (Arnold peaked at merely seven.)

In footage from those days, Coleman is pure joy to watch. He grunts, hoots, and hisses during his lifts, the barbell visibly curved under the weight of the plates. He had catchphrases: “Ain’t nothin’ but a peanut,” he’d grunt, barely finding the breath, after finishing a set of dumbbell curls. Or, he’d yell, “Light weight babyyyy!” cheerleading himself through deadlift reps. Or, “Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it!” Another trademark phrase, “Yeah buddy!”, labels his brand of pre-workout powder.

In the documentary, released last year, Coleman is fifty-four, and you could be forgiven for thinking his image was run through FaceApp. The stress of heavy lifting and subsequent spine surgeries have left Coleman unable to walk without crutches. He watches the news on the couch of his Texas home, swallowing fistfuls of oxycodone. He tries to keep up with his four young daughters. He preps for further surgeries. (To date, he’s undergone twelve.) Despite this, he continues to hit the gym—the same no-frills basement weight room he started in.

This isn’t as self-delusional as it sounds. Though I’ve often imagined the special tragedy of an athlete feeling her body crumble with use and age—and how it must feel to only remember such exquisite control of strength and musculature—Coleman thinks of it differently. Gains at the gym, for him, are promises for a bigger and better tomorrow, no matter what today looks like: “I’m really tiny at the moment but it’s all good because we all know muscles have memory,” he wrote on Instagram last year, after a particularly brutal surgery.

In other words, like a true bodybuilder, Coleman sees no reason to stop where he’s at. His words say it best: “In closing, I would like to say, oh yeah it ain’t over mulbuckers, once again it’s on like Ding Dongs.”

—Camille Bromley,...