What's it like ... pumping iron with Hulk Hogan and a Hell’s Angel?
Originally published December 19, 2008
By Ron Cassie
News-Post Staff
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Photo by Graham Cullen
Irv Dickstein, now 70 and a personal trainer at Fitness First on West Patrick Street, trained with Hulk Hogan and the Hell’s Angels.
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In the early 90s, Irv Dickstein was an executive in Southern California with a hair restoration company. He had a natural thick, curly crop and always kept in shape, figuring it was part of selling a youthful, vigorous image. He pumped iron at Big Bucks, a gym in Woodland Hills named after the local stuntman who owned the place. "I traded the company's service for a membership," said Dickstein, now 70 and a personal trainer at Fitness First on West Patrick Street. "It was an exclusive club, (with) a lot of celebrities who didn't want to be bothered. "So, one day I'm in there and I see this guy. I say to an employee at the desk, 'You gotta be kidding me, look at this guy, he thinks he's Hulk Hogan. "Except, he was too much Hulk Hogan -- like he was in character -- like a cartoon figure," Dickstein said. "He had the bandanna, the whole nine yards, except he looked smaller than what you see on television. I can't believe it. I'm telling the guy at the desk, I feel sorry for this character, I'm embarrassed for him -- like 'Get a life, buddy.' "The desk guy finally gets me to shut up and he says, 'Irv, that is Hulk Hogan'." Hogan and Dickstein became training partners and friends. Today, Dickstein, who can still bench press 80-pound dumbbells a dozen times, is happy to share the knowledge he picked up as a teen at Abe Goldberg's gym in Manhattan. Although, "happy" might be the wrong word for Dickstein. Once a wise guy, always a wise guy. "People ask me all the time, 'Irv, is it too late to start getting in shape?'" he said. "I tell them, 'Yes it's too late. You should've started a long time ago.' It's like saving for your retirement, you can't start when you're 50, 60 years old." After Dickstein and Hogan began lifting together, spotting each other an trading training tips, they eventually took their motorcycles out, too. "I was into bikes then," Dickstein says. "Of course, he was a pain in the (expletive) to ride with. He had this yellow bike with flames, as if he really needed to draw attention to himself. He looked like an action figure É he'd get surrounded by fans at every traffic light. Hogan, Dickstein says, was a good friend and intense in the gym. He did brutal, mass-building weightlifting exercises, but never went heavy-heavy, preferring grueling sets of high repetitions. "He'd go well 300-pounds plus on the bench, but not 400, and knock out sets of 12-15 reps with very little rest in between. He did the same thing with squats, deadlifts, all the different parts of the body. He had a plan every day he came in. "He considered the gym his office and he was serious, except when he was with his kids, who were little then." Hogan headed to Hawaii after he signed a deal to make a long-forgotten television series, "Thunder in Paradise." For Dickstein, a gym buff since his Brooklyn days and Mr. North America 1948, Hogan was not his only brush with B-list celebrities. Among his clients over the years were Erik Estrada, Frankie Valle, David Cassidy and Bob Barker. He helped sponsor a big Orange County bodybuilding competition one year, met Lou Ferrigno (the first non-animated Incredible Hulk), and became good friends with Rachel McLish -- the woman who put female bodybuilding on the map. In the late 80s, Dickstein lifted with Hell's Angel founding member Sonny Barger at a gym in Oakland owned by the Angels. "We got very tight for a time," Dickstein said. "He was a genius with business. And he mastered the arts of controlling some of the worst people around." Like Hogan, Barger was a family man who doted on his grandchildren," Dickstein said. "He had a little girl's pink bicycle in the back of his minivan the first time I walked out to the parking lot with him." Barger's vocal cords had been removed by then, after a laryngectomy following his diagnosis with throat cancer. That didn't stop him from smoking. "He'd come around the corner and have a cigarette dangling from the middle of his neck," Dickstein said. The two worked out for about a year and a half, Dickstein said. "Then he went to jail, which I think he knew was coming." Barger spent four years in prison for conspiring to blow up the clubhouse of a rival motorcycle club. Dickstein avoids sugar, processed food, smoking and heavy alcohol use, so he doesn't think cancer or high blood pressure will get him. "Montgomery County drivers, that's what is going kill me," he said. "One day, probably when I'm in my 80s or maybe 90, I'm going to jump out of my car and go after one of those punks who cuts me off on 270. I'll probably have a heart attack from the adrenaline and die on the spot, which -- all things considered -- would be a fine way to go to me."
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