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SIERRA VISTA — Two friends and competitors who’ve been a part of bodybuilding since its infancy, are reunited this weekend at the 25th annual Copper Classic today at the Buena Performing Arts Center.
Hank Diaz, the 73-year-old owner of Buena Health Fitness in Sierra Vista and the godfather of bodybuilding in Cochise County has never had much success in competition against Karl Marshall, a 79-year-old from Riverside, Calif.
“The only time I beat you was that time when you weren’t in good shape at Venice Beach in like, 1996, Diaz said to Marshall shortly after Marshall arrived to Diaz’s gym for the first time.
“There was a period there I was winning so long and so much, I relaxed a litte,” Marshall ribbed.
 Seventy-three-year-old Hank Diaz, left, and 79-year-old Karl Marshall will both be guest posers at tonight’s 25th annual Copper Classic Mr. and Mrs. Arizona Bodybuilding Competition. The event begins at 5 p.m. at the Buena Performing Arts Center. (Ed Honda-Herald/Review) |
Over the last 14 years, Diaz has finished second to Marshall 12 times, and tonight they’ll both be flexing on the stage as guest posers, technically, not in competition.
For Diaz, it will be the first time he’s posed in the competition he created since 2000.
Marshall competed in, and won, his very first bodybuilding competition at the age of 14 in Toledo, Ohio in 1943.
Over the next 65 years, Marshall has won more than 400 amateur titles around the world. In that span, he has seen the sport grow from a curious off-shoot of weightlifting into the glamorous spectacle it is today.
“It’s changed immensely,” Marshall said. “It started out just with powerlifting, and guys would just get up and pose. Then, it started generating more people, but the first 50 or so contests I was in were mostly just weightlifters. Very seldom were they training to be proportioned.”
The rise of the sport was aided in large part by the introduction of steroids, which Marshall said dated back to the mid-1950s, when American powerlifters got the idea of shooting up from their dominant Soviet counterparts.
As the years passed and the muscles got bigger and unnaturally bigger, Marshall saw friends and colleagues suffer serious health consequences.
“I personally know of 21 guys way younger than me who are dead because of steroids,” Marshall said. “Steroids, growth hormone and insulin, which was getting really big by 1985. That stuff was really dangerous.”
Marshall said he never took steroids, but not necessarily because he was so righteous.
“I thought about it some,” he said. “The trouble was I was older. If I was 17 or 18 at the time, I probably would have.”
But because of his restraint, Marshall considers his victory in the NPC Nationals his greatest achievement.
“I beat five guys in the Mr. USA who had been taking drugs,” Marshall said. “They weren’t aging as well as I was.”
The only break in Marshall’s bodybuilding career was an eight-year lapse between 1970 and 1978 after he nearly died as a result of a construction accident. He fell from the steeple of a church 92 feet.
“The doctor took care of me,” Marshall said. “He said, when you fall a great distance, you’ve gotta fall flat on your back or flat on your stomach to have any chance of living. Fortunately, I landed flat on my back.”
The then 42-year-old Marshall began a long and painful convalescence that kept him away from bodybuilding until 1978, when having ballooned to 247 pounds, he saw an opportunity in the over-40 national bodybuilding scene.
“I saw that guys who won the big ones aren’t going to be back for the Mr. America over-40,” Marshall said. “I told the guy who owned the gym I went to I would win the Mr. America this year, or the next.”
After four months of training, Marshall, forsaking all fast food and beer, lost 57 pounds in four months, and after 20 months of training, he won the Mr. America over-40.
Tonight in the lobby of the Buena Performing Arts Center, Marshall, a full-time artist specializing in portrait painting, will have several of his works on display.
He sees similarities between perfecting the actual human form and replicating it with a paintbrush.
Rapidly approaching 80, Marshall doesn’t see an end in sight to his bodybuilding career.
“Jack LaLanne said to me when I was in my late 30s, ‘You’ll probably quit when you’re 50 or so,’ ” Marshall said. “But I told him, if I make it to 80, I’m going to shoot for 100.”
