Bill Pearl is, without a doubt, in my top two or three list of "greatest bodybuilders of all time." In my opinion, he was the first bodybuilder to look truly massive while in competition shape, not to mention massive in all of the photos that you saw in the magazines. Pearl was before my time. But maybe that's why I hold him in such high regard. A lot of the bodybuilders and lifters that guys these days consider to be "old-timers" aren't old-timers to me. Hell, I'm considered an old-timer by many. And maybe that's why he's always been so mythic to me. I can still remember (sometime in the late '80s) thumbing through a stack of old Iron Man magazines that my uncle had kept from the '60s and the '70s. Many of the bodybuilders I first came across in those pages were impressive, no doubt. But THEN I came across Bill Pearl. Bill Pearl as I remember seeing him for the first time Everything was large on Pearl - his chest, ...
Essays on Old-School Strength Training, Classic Bodybuilding, Traditional Martial Arts, and Budo Philosophy