Thread by @hradzka

Okay, so I have had an epiphany about what is going on with Brooks Kubik's series of weightlifter novels

(For new people who missed the previous posts: Brooks Kubik is an attorney and weightlifter obsessed with old-time lifters. He is writing basically York Barbell Club fanfic.)

The pitch that makes the series sound cool: it's basically WINDS OF WAR except the main characters are legendary weightlifters in the York Barbell Club

Alas: Brooks Kubik is not capable of writing the book(s) that he sees in his head.

What Brooks Kubik wants to write: WINDS OF WAR but everybody is a weightlifter

What Brooks Kubik actually writes: "LET ME INFODUMP ABOUT THIS HISTORICAL WEIGHTLIFTING MEET"

I have read some but not all of the books because I will pay a few bucks for a Kindle version but not full price for print only because dammit I have some pride

anyway, the epiphany:

BROOKS KUBIK'S NOVELS ARE FANFIC ON BEHALF OF A WEIGHTLIFTING FANDOM WAR

that's right: *weightlifting had a fandom war*

this epiphany came to me reading a bit of bodybuilder Ricky Wayne's memoir

the fandom war was York vs. Weider

Back in the day (and we're talking pre-WWII here) Bob Hoffman of York, PA reigned supreme. The previous big barbell maker had gone out of business; York Barbell stepped into the void with weights and courses and efforts to grow weightlifting in America

Imagine if you will: once upon a time American weightlifters *did not know wtf a squat was*

Hoffman and York did a lot to popularize weightlifting and one of the ways they did this was showing that guys who used York barbells won physique competitions

So bodybuilding was part of the appeal. Dudes like John Grimek.

York reigns supreme through the war and postwar years, and then along comes an upstart guy named Joe Weider, who becomes the Bob Hoffman of the 60s and 70s -- what's now called the Golden Age of bodybuilding. The era of dudes like Dave Draper, Sergio Oliva, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Bodybuilder Ricky Wayne, a Weider guy, says there were a few reasons Weider had an opening. One was that in his view York saw bodybuilding as chiefly a way to sell tickets for extremely long and boring weightlifting meets, when the bodybuilding audience didn't want meets at all.

The second: Wayne, a black bodybuilder from the Caribbean, was not alone in his view that Weider offered more opportunities to men of color who had outfuckingstanding physiques. York overlooked them.

To be fair to Bob Hoffman, he did promote and support black weightlifters, most notably the legendary John Davis. But, as Hoffman partisan Brooks Kubik notes, Davis didn't get to use the spiffy York gym. He set records training in the basement of a church.

Anyway, Weider cannily exploited an opening, and THERE WAS A FANDOM WAR. You were a York guy or a Weider guy.

Weider came to dominate, and so many new fans came in bc of Weider's guys a lot of people today don't even *know* there was a fandom war.

Brooks Kubik is the perfect age to have fallen in with Weider's heroes of the Golden Age of bodybuilding.

Except, and God knows how or why, *he is an undying York partisan, the last Japanese soldier holding out from a long-since-ended fandom war.*

if you put Brooks Kubik on a retrospective BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER panel he'd be like, "okay, first thing: XANDER FUCKING LIED"