Norbert Schemansky Lifting the Queen Mary

“One t

ime I figured it out, and I’d lifted enough weight to lift the Queen Mary.”

At just under six feet tall and weighing 265 pounds or so, Schemansky had tree-trunk thighs, wrists like two-by-fours and, by all accounts, steel in his sinews since childhood. The Detroit Free Press called him “born strong.” At 11 years old he had gotten a job at a Detroit market unloading 100-pound bags of potatoes.

“What Muhammad Ali and Joe Louis are to boxing, what John Grimek and Arnold Schwarzenegger mean to bodybuilding, and what Gordie Howe and Wayne Gretzky represent in hockey, Norbert Schemansky is to Olympic weight lifting,” Richard Bak wrote in his 2007 biography of Schemansky, “Mr. Weightlifting.”

“The worst part of competing was coming home.”

Obit