NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry is said to have such a keen shooting eye that he could detect even the slightest variance to the target. Once, upon entering a visiting arena with his San Francisco Warriors, Barry took a look at the basket and said, “It looks a little low.” A tape measure was produced and, sure enough, the rim was an eighth of an inch below specifications.
When it comes to an innate knowledge of his own body, it might be said that former undisputed middleweight champion Bernard “The Executioner” Hopkins is Barryesque. It’s not that he’s studied human physiology and kinesiology; he just knows.
So when Hopkins hired renowned physical conditioning guru Mackie Shilstone to help him bulk up for his June 10 bout with IBO light heavyweight champion Antonio Tarver, it was not unlike the recent colloboration of Don King and Bob Arum to hype the Zab Judah-Floyd Mayweather Jr. bout. Hopkins, like King, is a street-smart guy who relies on his own best judgment; Shilstone, like Arum, is the guy with the formal training and wall full of framed degrees.
“He has a way of doing things and, obviously, it’s been very successful,” Shilstone said of Hopkins’ methods for keeping fit. “I did it through learning. He does it instinctively.”
If it were only a matter of instinct, the 41-year-old Hopkins likely would not have brought in Shilstone and John David Jackson (a lefthanded two-time former world champion who is an expert at helping orthodox fighters prepare for southpaws) for what he insists will be his final training camp.
Hopkins has been making the 160-pound middleweight limit for years with no difficulty, so to do so again would not require augmentation of his support crew. But he is doing what he always said he would do, which is to make his final ring appearance as a light heavyweight, and if there’s anyone who knows about the correct way to put pounds of muscle onto a fighter – or to take pounds of flab off – it’s the trim little guy from New Orleans who once was hailed as one of the 50 most influential figures in boxing history for his historic transformation of Michael Spinks, who on Sept. 21, 1985, became the first light heavyweight champion ever to win the heavyweight crown when he upset long-reigning titlist Larry Holmes on a unanimous, 15-round decision.
Shilstone never claimed to be an expert on boxing, but he knows the inner workings of the human body as few ever have. It was his job to reconfigure Spinks from a spindly 175-pounder into a rock-solid 210-pounder, which he accomplished so successfully that it launched a revolution in boxing that continues to this day.
“Mackie has worked with many fighters – fighters who made history when he worked with them,” said Hopkins, whose publicist, Kelly Swanson, a former flack for another Shilstone client, Riddick Bowe, brought the two together.
“I could be 200 pounds if I chose to do that. Putting on weight ain’t that difficult to do. You just have to eat a lot. This is not about being 175 pounds or whatever. It is about being strong at whatever weight you’re fighting at. And I will be. Mackie has a reputation for putting what I need in my body the safe way, the legal way, the right way. With Mackie’s help, I will not only be bigger, but better.”
And the cost to Hopkins for temporarily volunteering his body for another of Shilstone’s lab experiments?
“Let me tell you,” Hopkins says with a smile, “Mackie don’t come cheap.”
Nor does he come to you. Those fighters who seek Shilstone’s services do so with the understanding that at least a part of their training camp must be conducted in New Orleans. That wasn’t much of a problem when New Orleans was, well, New Orleans, a unique American city known for its fine (and fattening) cuisine. Maybe Shilstone wanted to see for himself if his clients had the mental discipline to subject themselves to his rigors while simultaneously resisting such local delicacies as beignets, crawfish etoufee and crème brulee.
But Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans a rotting shell of its former splendor. So why hasn’t Shilstone moved his base of operations? He said it’s because he’s as loyal to his hometown as he wants his clients to be dedicated to the torturous programs he individually tailors for them.
Hopkins’ willingness to shift part of his training to New Orleans, Shilstone said, was part of the reason why he agreed to take him on. “I don’t work with just anybody,” Shilstone noted. “But Bernard was so sincere about wanting to do this the right way, I couldn’t help but be won over.
“He told me, `This is the last fight I’ll ever do and I want to make it something special.’ What a way to end a career – on a positive of an upset win. Look, not many people are going to pick him to beat Tarver. That’s what hooked me. I know what it’s like to work with people who aren’t as committed to the end result as I am.”
That might or might not be interpreted as a swipe at Bowe, whose alarming tendency to pack on pounds of flab in between bouts brought him to Shilstone. And, for a time, the two-time former heavyweight champion adhered to Shilstone’s dictums. But once a bout was completed, Bowe invariably yielded to his appetite and fell off the health-food wagon. It wasn’t unusual for Shilstone to bring “Big Daddy” down from 272 jiggly pounds to a flat-bellied 235.
During one of his intermittent fitness kicks, Bowe not only employed Shilstone, but comedian-turned-nutritionist Dick Gregory, who had the fighter gulping down as many as 100 vitamin pills a day.
“I told Riddick there’s nothing I can do to help improve his boxing skills, but maybe we can lift the hood and overhaul the engine,” Gregory said while a member of Team Bowe. “A lot of athletes think you can get all the carbohydrates they need from pasta, but the best carbohydrates are from raw, uncooked fruit. That’s where you get maximum nutritional value. If you fed pasta to a gorilla or a rhinoceros or an elephant, they’d probably end up dead.”
Gregory, like Shilstone, floated in and out of Bowe’s career as a potential all-time great often found it more difficult to fight pangs of hunger than his opponents.
For his first fight with Evander Holyfield, Shilstone devised perhaps his most creative program ever for a fighter. “The thing I wanted to try with Riddick was heart-rate telemetry,” Shilstone said at the time. “It’s a technology that’s never been applied to boxing before. The idea is to push Riddick to a point of (physical) failure, monitor the results and determine the target training zone … a program that will prevent him from undertraining or overtraining.”
Did it work? Well, Bowe outworked Holyfield, himself a conditioning buff, down the stretch to capture the heavyweight title for the first time.
Shilstone generally has fond memories of Bowe, at least the Bowe who was focused enough to stay on the straight and narrow. There was a particular day – May 9, 1995 – that stands out in the memory of Rock Newman, Bowe’s longtime manager. The skies had opened up in New Orleans, flooding the city with what one meterologist described as a “once in 500 years” rainstorm. An incredible 18.6 inches of rain was recorded over a six-hour span at New Orleans International Airport.
“I wish someone could have taken a picture of Bowe walking a half-mile up West Esplanade Avenue in knee-deep water to Muss Bertolino Playground so he could do his roadwork,” Newman said. “They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this picture would have been worth 10 million words.”
Dismissed by Bowe, Shilstone later was brought back to find a picture worth another 10 million words, or at least 10 million calories. Shilstone popped in at Bowe’s rented apartment, went to the kitchen and discovered, to his horror, a refrigerator full of “lard and chicken.”
Given his druthers, Shilstone finds it easier to add muscle weight onto athletes who are already in shape rather than to take it off sloppy ones who are addicted to Twinkies and French fries. In addition to Spinks, he helped Roy Jones Jr. gain 24 chiseled pounds in preparation for his winning challenge against WBA heavyweight titlist John Ruiz.
What about steroids?
“Obviously, they work,” Shilstone says of the short-term benefits of juicing. “But there’s enough science now to achieve the same thing without resorting to steroids.
“When an athlete comes to me, I put him in a CT-scan. I can determine how much fat he has in his body down to a single gram. I have a book coming out in January, `Lean and Hard: The Body You’ve Always Wanted in 24 Workouts.’ It goes back to a study I did when I was at LSU. We had 20 people that we put on a program I did with diet supplements and training. We did extensive medical screening like you wouldn’t believe – pre- and post-physiology on their aerobic thresholds.
“We were able to put 10 pounds of muscle on them in 24 workouts while losing 4.82 pounds of fat.”
In no small part due to Shilstone’s work with Spinks, other fighters began hiring non-traditional types to gain them an edge. Holyfield, an inveterate tinkerer, at various times worked with a physical conditioning coach (Tim Hallmark), strength coach (bodybuilder Chasee Jordan), flexibility coach (gymnastics instructor Marya Kennett) and computer analysts (Logan Hobson and Bob Cannobio). Bowe also took a flier on a South Korean massage therapist, Daeisak Seo, for a bout against Jesse Ferguson.
All the top guys in the field are aware of one another, which is why Shilstone raised an eyebrow when Mike Tyson’s co-managers at the time, Rory Hollyway and John Horne, hired an unknown commodity, Carlos Blackwell, in 1995. Blackwell said he had a “five-stage program” that would improve Tyson’s fitness to near-superhuman levels, but he declined to specify what was involved in any of the stages, or to release the names of the other famous athletes he claimed had benefited from his services.
“I know of Tim Hallmark,” Shilstone said. “I know of Pat Croce. I know most of the more accomplished conditioning coaches. We don’t live in a vacuum, nor does anyone else. None of the top guys are going to hide their light under a basket. If I work with professional athletes, I’m going to want to get that information out.”
Maybe Carlos Blackwell is out there, performing wonders out of the spotlight. More than likely, not. What we do know is that Shilstone still is the pioneer, the trendsetter, the legend the big names come to when they need a non-pharmaceutical physical metamorphosis.
“Mackie is not going to tell me what to eat and not to eat,” Hopkins said. “I think he knows that’s not going to be a problem with me. When I met him for the first time in New Orleans, he didn’t talk bad about other fighters. But he did say there had been fighters he’d worked with that he had to detox them from the food.”