THE RAGE OF THE SQUAT KING

BACK WHEN I WAS A COMPETITIVE WEIGHTLIFTER, there was a man we revered greatly, who was the world’s strongest squatter.

The squat is a lift that combines brute strength in equal measure with technique. You place the bar, loaded with its ponderous weight, across your back. You lift it up out of a rack and take one and a half or two steps backward. You wear a thick leather belt cinched tight around your belly, to keep your intestines from blowing out under all the pressure, and you wrap your knees tightly with elastic bandages to keep the somewhat fragile, intricate arrangement of ligaments, tendons, and cartilage from uncoiling, snapping and spraying out everywhere like the broken springs from a Swiss watch—but that’s all the support you get. Other than that, you’re on your own.

You sink down into a crouch, with that weight on your back. It’s heavy. It tries to keep driving you down, all the way down.

My lifter friends and I would occasionally see Fred Hatfield, the champion of this lift—aka “Dr. Squat”—perform his greatness on television, on obscure Saturday afternoon sports specials.

He would snort and do this odd little shuffle step, and then rush out to the bar that rested waiting for him in the squat rack. He’d be howling and huffing and puffing, rolling his eyes and his head like a Chinese dragon.

He would run up to the bar and grab it and shake it, get under it and maneuver his back beneath it, wriggling himself into position—not unlike someone taking pleasure in his lover’s embrace—and then he would lift the weights free of the rack and back out with the horrible weights draped across his back, the iron bar bending and bouncing, there was so much weight on it. He would plant his feet, look skyward, huff twice more, a third time, and then he would go down.

His mouth would open in a groan as he sank, and his eyes would roll and bulge as if about to pop. Veins would explode into view everywhere, not just in his arms and legs and shoulders, chest and neck, but in his face, in his hands, across his nose, everywhere, with his face turning red and then purple, his knees and elbows quivering.

And then the weight would begin going back up—being driven slowly, infinitesimally, upward again.

Twenty years later, I decided to track him down—to see if he was still squatting. I visited him at the headquarters of the World Wrestling Federation in Stamford, Connecticut, where he had taken a job training the wrestlers how to get bigger and stronger.

When I enter his office, my first thought is how very much he seems not to belong in this place, this building, with its well-dressed executives walking down the silent carpeted hallways. He’s dressed in a white sweat suit and tennis shoes, a red T-shirt, and wears a blazing pink baseball cap with the words SIMPLY THE BEST on it. He looks trim, almost nautical. He’s neither tall nor short, nor is he really either heavy or light.

We walk past office after office of accountants and public relations folks—so many young, pale, skinny white men, all the same age, all slightly skittish as we pass, and all seeming to fail to exude—is it presumptuous to say this?—any semblance of spirit whatsoever.

“The pencil-necks,” Hatfield mutters under his breath. He shakes his head. “Let’s just say I don’t have very much corporate acumen.” He’s rolling off the balls of his feet, rising up on his toes with each step, and maybe it’s just that the gearing of his body is all wrong for him to be walking without any burden.

In his office, he has a computer perched before him, a big one, such as you might use to pilot an airliner. He prints out his résumé or rather a twenty-page partial résumé for me, and though it would be interesting were it someone else’s—a kind of a caricature of some kind of superman—I scan it somewhat impatiently.

Gymnastics champion, soccer champion, author of sixty books, strength consultant to world class athletes such as Evander Holyfield and Hakeem Olajuwon; schooled in Naval Communications, Pensacola, Florida, for top-secret and crypto-clearance with the Office of Naval Intelligence . . . Taught statistics at Newark State College, 1972–1973 . . . Computer programmer for Pratt and Whitney Aircraft, enlisted as U.S. Marine Corps decathlete, cross-country . . .

“Did you ever have the feeling that this lift—the squat—was designed perfectly for your body?” I ask him. “That you had the perfect leverage and musculature for it?”

Hatfield doesn’t really bristle, but I’ve touched some nerve, way down there. “Everybody thinks I excelled because of a God-given gift,” he says, his voice a bit thick with emotion. “Obviously, I had the genetics. But my genetics alone weren’t enough to get me beyond a certain level.” He shrugs. “I spent several years squatting around only five hundred fifty pounds. I was wallowing in mediocrity. And I decided: Hey, enough is enough. I’m going to develop my own science.”

He punches away on the computer, drawing up data.

“I began the arduous task of categorizing all the various factors that could affect strength,” he says. “I fashioned a working definition of strength as ability to exert musculoskeletal force”—he’s speaking carefully now, reading from his computer screen—“given existing constraints stemming from: Structural, Anatomical, Physiological, Biochemical, Psychoneural/Psychosocial, External and Environmental factors.”

“Is that all?” I ask, like a smart guy, standing there in the shadows of five hundred pounds, but Hatfield either doesn’t hear me or ignores me.

“I cataloged thirty-five or forty different factors which must be accounted for to truly maximize strength,” he explains. “I used eight different ranking technologies and applied multiple-factor analyses . . . in the statistical sense of the word.

“Significant factors affecting a squat include muscle fiber arrangement, musculoskeletal leverage, freedom of movement between muscle fibers, sensitivity of glandular functions . . .”

“This is very enlightening,” I tell him.

Hatfield corrects me. “It’s revolutionary,” he says.

“I considered each point along the ATP/ADP glycolytic pathway,” he says in a quieter voice—almost conspiratorial. “I made graphs of the various percentages of the energy-delivering processes over time—CP-splitting, ATP-splitting, oxidation, glycolysis. I thought”—Hatfield’s almost whispering—“how will I be able to exert maximum force and how can I augment that application? And that, my friend, is why I broke world records.

“There is a place you go to,” Hatfield tells me, speaking carefully, precisely. “Call it out-of-body experience, call it state of mind, call it whatever you want—that is not achievable except by the most intense and pure focusing of your passion. And only after years of intense concentration are you able to reach this zone. It’s a place where the movement of your lift becomes perfect; it’s not even a part of your consciousness. You’re simply at one with the weights on your back: you’re part of the iron, and it’s part of you. You go down, and you come up.”

Hatfield leans forward, as if delivering a promise. “You could literally blow a muscle out in the process, and you’d never know it. You can’t hear the crowd screaming. You never feel the sweat that is dripping down into your eyes. Nothing.

“And then all of a sudden you’re done, and you’ve broken a world record by over a hundred pounds—and you literally cannot remember having done it.

“I got to the point where I was able to enter that state at will,” he says.

Hatfield grew up in an orphanage, in Cromwell, Massachusetts, where he was sent with his three older sisters when he was seven.

“Certainly I knew from that early age that I was not the same as the other kids. They all had mothers and dads, and all I had was seventy-two non-sibling rivals more than anything else. You had to fight for seconds at the dinner table. You had to fight for just a little affection from your counselor. But it was kind of a strange relationship, because on the one hand there was that inadvertent rivalry, and on the other hand, there was a sense of protectiveness and camaraderie and shared passion amongst all of us.”

Fred and I take the elevator to the top of the WWF building and walk out onto the rooftop patio. It’s a hot, hazy summer day, but there’s a good wind blowing, up high like that, and it’s a nice patio, with picnic tables and a view of the Long Island Sound, sailboats in their slips, blue water, and forests and hills beyond, steeples and rooftops visible through the trees.

“There’s my home, out there,” Hatfield says, pointing across the bay to a steeple rising from the woods on the farthest hill. “We live right there,” he says, with a pleasant, almost childish satisfaction. I like how long Hatfield stares out there, and the comfort I sense it fills him with. He stands there looking out across the water just a hair longer than you or I might.

Next, he takes me down to the gym that’s available for WWF employees. It’s a nice gym, of course, with a leg press, a squat rack, and a modest amount of iron. Dumbbells, barbells, etc. But it’s obvious Hatfield doesn’t train here. It doesn’t have enough weight, and more importantly it doesn’t feel quite right. It doesn’t have that lingering echo of grunts and groans and shouts. Hatfield admits that he trains at home now—he tried to work out here, but there were a few problems, not the least of which were technical. He points out with pride the powerlifting platforms he designed—“floating platforms,” he calls them, built out of polyurethane and hard rubber interlayering, to cushion the floor against the heavy weights being dropped on it, as happens at the end of a heavy deadlift, or any Olympic lift.

Hatfield explains that the whole building is a concrete frame, so that it’s rigid, and that even with his floating platforms, the whole building would shake whenever he was working out with his heavy weights. It made the pencil-necks and the “B-B’s” (as he calls them) nervous, but the most significant complication was that it kept shutting down all the computer systems. At the end of one heavy lift, the building shook so hard it did about fifty thousand dollars worth of damage to the computers, and they were down for a week.

“I don’t have very much corporate acumen,” Hatfield says again.

In the orphanage, it wasn’t as if everyone was chosen except for young Fred. That might be too horrible to imagine—seventy-two other orphans being selected for adoption, while year after year, strange Fred, young Fred, and then not-so-young Fred was bypassed, every time. That might be too much for any human body, cell-split or not, to stand up to, though who knows what the real outer limits are? Would he have gone on to squat past his record eleven hundred pounds, to twelve or thirteen hundred pounds? Probably not. Surely his record is very near the outer limits.

Several kids from the Home were adopted. And Fred had his chance.

“It was a family from New Jersey,” he says. “These people had a rich grandfather. In fact, as I understand it, the grandfather—I’m remembering things that haven’t been in my mind since the time I was twelve—he had something to do with the machinery that Friendly’s Ice Cream used to make ice cream. He invented all that stuff.”

They chose Fred, this strange young bull, to go with them on a trip across the country that summer—to take him out on a test run, a ninety-day trial.

Except they didn’t want to take Fred’s three sisters, who were also in the Home—one younger, nine, and two older, thirteen and fourteen. Fred was twelve.

He went anyway. Just to say he’d been. And to check it out: to give it a chance.

They drove west in a big brand new 1955 Cadillac, a yellow hard-top. The deal was that the grandfather, who wasn’t going on the trip, would let the mother and father take his Caddy on this trip if they brought the grandmother along with them. There was a daughter, too, who was Fred’s age.

They left New Jersey and went through Pennsylvania. Fred remembers that, because it was the first time he’d ever seen an oil well. And even though they didn’t have any air conditioner, they drove in the day and stopped at motels in the evenings. There weren’t many superhighways back then, if any, so they went through a lot of small towns. It was all new to Fred, stuff that he’d never seen before, maybe never even dreamed before, and it must have wedged in his mind like a crack of light: must have pried open some spaces inside him, like roots spreading, and tried to let something else in. Some abatement of the franticness and rage, though perhaps it only allowed in oxygen, which enabled the flame to burn brighter.

“We stopped at all the typical tourist places,” Fred says. “The Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon . . . We drove through Yosemite, including the tree, which was almost impossible to do, with that big brand new Cadillac . . . There was only about one inch on either side of the car.”

It didn’t work out. Fred rode in the back seat and knew, they all knew, it wasn’t going to work out. He sat back there with the daughter, this quintessential American family, and surely they must have been able to sense even then his otherness, his animal-ness—his hot raw heart burning in the back seat of their car like a lump of lead that has just. been pulled from a bed of coals.

“We were driving across the desert,” Fred says. “I remember the guy was driving, the father—his name was Emmett Huntz—and I had my arm out the window with a little piece of paper in my hand, and it was flapping in the breeze, making a horrible racket, and I was doing it just to piss everybody in the car off.

“And all of a sudden Emmett was swerving the car wildly like this!”—Hatfield waves his arms, flaps them like a stork’s wings.

“Well, I come to find out I had my arm out the window so far that it was about to get taken off by this bridge that we were passing!

“It became very clear to me that I didn’t want to have any part of this family,” he says. “And I missed my three sisters, who were at the orphanage without me. I felt sort of a sense of protectiveness, and I said, ‘There’s no way these three girls are going to grow up without my influence.’ And so I opted to go back to the orphanage.”

You mention the squat to Fred Hatfield, and the old lifter will talk to you about concentric strength, static strength, and eccentric strength; about starting strength and explosive strength. He will talk about tissue leverage (interstitial and intracellular leverage stemming from fat deposits, sarcoplasmic content, satellite cell proliferation and the accumulation of fluid). Extent of hyperplasia (cell splitting). Stroke volume of the left ventricle. Ejection fraction of the left ventricle. Motor unit recruitment capacity.

“Do you ever get under a heavy weight,” I ask him, “and find yourself thinking, ‘I can’t get this today?’ And if so, what do you do?”

There is a long pause while Fred searches his memory valiantly for a time when he might have been mortal.

“If I ever have felt that,” he says finally, speaking very carefully, “it was only extremely occasionally. Offhand, I can’t remember any.”

“Have you ever had to scramble, to continue training?” I ask him. “Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t have access to a good gym?”

Hatfield rejects that notion out of hand; bats it away.

“You have to learn to take control of your life!” he cries. “You have to ensure that doesn’t happen!

“Only a fool would go into the desert without water!”

“Have you ever felt passion, Rick?” he asks me later. “Do you know what it is?”

“Well, yes,” I begin, “I’ve—”

“Passion,” says Dr. Fred Hatfield. “Allow me.

“Passion,” he says, “is not ‘the need to achieve.’ Instead, it is a burning desire to exceed all bounds!” He pauses, then says, “It is not a ‘commitment to excellence;’ rather, it is utter disdain for anything less!

“NOT ‘setting goals,’” says Dr. Squat. “Goals too often prescribe performance limits!”

There is a stern pause.

“There is not force of skill or muscle. Rather, it is the explosive, calamitous, force of will!”

It should not surprise a gentle reader that just a few weeks before my visit, at the age of fifty, he broke the record for the one-hundred-ninety-eight-pound bodyweight class, with a squat of eight hundred sixty pounds.

Hatfield drives me out to his house, where I meet his friendly and hospitable wife, Joy, who also used to be a competitive powerlifter. I look at pictures of their children and pet their dog T-Bone, who they adopted from a pound. He’s a fine dog; it’s a fine nuclear family.

On the drive back, we get caught in a traffic jam. Hatfield’s driving. I ask him if he has any secret rituals in preparing for a record squat, such as the eleven-hundred-pound lift that he and Joy referred to as “The Giant Squat.” Once more, Hatfield referred to being able to “go to another place.”

“There’s a place within each person’s mind where there is no pain, no negative force,” he tells me once more. “Where only positive forces dwell. And that’s the place I need to be, to put that kind of weight on my back and have the capacity to ignore the sound of the crowd, and the pain; the fact that my shoelace is untied, or that the judge is picking his nose—or any of the other disconcerting cues in my immediate environment. Those things must be completely ignored in order to execute the task at hand, which is nothing more than sheer movement: going down, and coming up.

“I can’t feel anything, I can’t see anything—and yet I must feel and see everything, at the same time. And it’s a matter of pure movement, with no other sensations creating distracting noise.”

The jackhammers blast away, up ahead of us. Cement mixers groan and growl and roar. It’s some kind of construction ahead, instead of a wreck, or perhaps it’s both. Hatfield jerks in his seat, as if willing himself to be free of the jam. “I don’t know what happened with this traffic,” he says. “Aw, Gawd,” he huffs. “We’re only half a mile from our exit.”

The jackhammers chatter louder. “It’s right there,” he says, “the exit that we’re trying to get to.” He exhales. “In sight of it!” he says. Blows out steam; rocks, fidgets.

To try and calm him down, I brag on that dog of his—that sweet hound, T-Bone.

Hatfield looks uncomfortable for a minute, uncertain.

“I wouldn’t know the first thing about what constitutes a good dog,” he says finally. “If it’ll not crap on my rug, I like it.” He laughs nervously. “That’s why T-Bone is still there. And he loves kids, too. We got him at the pound when he was less than a year old.”

“First dog you’ve ever had?” I ask.

“No, out in California, we had a couple of Lhasa apsos. They were fine, you know? They weren’t real nuts about being on a leash, but other than that, they were fine. Then we moved to a bigger house, and they turned—I swear to God—into Satan. They started chewing up my furniture, peeing everywhere. I had to sell ’em both.

“Then we got a pit bull. But then he ate a Brittany. So then we had another dog, sort of like a dingo type of dog. And I just couldn’t housebreak that dog for anything. I have not had good luck with dogs,” Hatfield concludes.

“Somebody had already worked with T-Bone, though,” he adds. “It was obvious. Because he would fetch, and heel, and sit, and all of those things.” Hatfield stares out at the glacier of traffic, none of it going anywhere. “He appeared to be a very well-trained dog already, when we got him from the pound.”

I remembered the way he used to rage, when he would approach that iron bar in the olden days. What I think might have finally happened within him is that the calm has finally arrived, or almost arrived—that it has come as if from within the iron, leaving it like a fever.

Serenity lay beneath the rage, it seems, but surely it must have been a long way down there, and the iron, the weight, so heavy.