Doug Hepburn strikes a pose with
his one extravagance in life.
Note: this is a beautiful rare find courtesy of good man John P. Published in the Vancouver Province on May 31st, 1981. Thanks BIG again, John!
Away we go in the ex-champ's Lincoln Continental, a black beast with sun roof, push-button everything and, best of all in his book, a car without a dime owing on it.
"This is my only extravagance," Doug Hepburn said. I always feel as if I am winning when I drive it."
It touches on the subject of the interview: "How's life for Douglas Ivan Hepburn, a man on a roller-coaster of highs and lows since he won the World Weightlifting title in 1953.
In his hefting prime at 26, he weighed 136 kilos (300 pounds) with arms as big as most men's thighs.
Now he's 54, with a sagging of skin over the triceps and deltoid muscles. He's down to 180 pounds, about right for his height. His hair is receding and he wears glasses.
But it's the brown eyes you notice first. They still have the riveting intensity that flashes out of the 1950's photograph of Hepburn as Hercules.
The sun roof slides open to the cool of the evening on the drive to his favorite Vancouver restaurant, a vegetarian place on Fourth Avenue.
I'll bet bacon to baloney it was this place.
Dollars to donuts?
Dollars to donuts?
Hepburn parks with caution, definitely not the big shot in the way he laughs at the care he takes against chafing the whitewall tires against the curb.
"It really bothers me when I get scuff marks on the whitewalls."
Hepburn talks about himself just as candidly over vegetarian borsch and chili and during a drive around Stanley Park.
He lives alone in a small apartment above his wholesale health food business on East Broadway. He's making about $35,000 a year. There is the prospect of more riding on the Exerciser, a muscle-builder he devised 10 years ago.
Hepburn expects to become a millionaire after the Exerciser goes into production and on to the market for about $100. That, he's hoping, will happen in about six months.
Here: the patent for Doug's Exerciser, with diagrams and description . . .
But the money isn't the main thing. It's the freedom that goes with it. Twenty years ago, fight promoters said he gave up an easy million bucks when he quit wrestling because he didn't like the violence.
Whither Doug Hepburn if he strikes it rich?
"My own little world in the country," he said, "A cabin in a ponderosa with a little creek running through, maybe a machine shop and music-taping equipment where I can create things."
"I've got more sophisticated exercise devices on the drawing board, music to compose and poems to write. Poetry just comes out of me. Tons of it.
He recites the start of a poem he's composing . . .
The night was clear
And I could hear
A haunting seabird's call,
And I hummed a tune
That night in June
As I walked along the wall.
It will be a narrative about a lonely young man often seen on a bench looking beyond the seawall to the park's shoreline statue, the Girl in the Wetsuit.
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At the end, Hepburn explains, the man's clothes are found on the shore and the wetsuit girl has vanished from her rock pedestal.
Hepburn has been rhyming for as long as he can remember. One of his best went to International Olympic Committee honcho Avery Brundage in 1955 to complain about rules about amateurism. First verse:
Dear Avery, it's slavery
To train and strain for naught.
I took some dough, now I'm a pro
- what darnfool tommyrot.
He got off some other good ones as a cabaret singer. He wrote words and music for a Christmas song still heard on Vancouver radio stations in December.
Is Doug Hepburn the lonely man in the poem? He seems to step outside himself to answer the question.
"How can you be lonely, Hepburn? You are sitting in he midst of creation. And you have me -- God and nature, all around you."
It leads to another question, posed and answered by the ex-champ.
"Am I a misfit? I don't think so but then I can't think of any organization or niche that I fit into." '
Near dusk, the car approaches a police dog, curled up head on tail at the side of the park road.
Hepburn stops and calls out the window to the dog. "Are you okay, fella?" The dog looks up at him, apparently okay, and Hepburn drives on.
"It really bothers me to see animals hurt in any way," he said. When I see an elephant or a tiger shot on TV, I can't bear it, I have to turn it off right away. All animals are my brothers. They are so pure and free and without guile."
Hepburn says he must have a monkish regimen to live by. For five years, it has been the vegetarian diet and a nightly three-mile run in Stanley Park. No tobacco or alcohol, in part a defense against a return to his grapple with alcoholism in the 1960's.
The date on this letter and the date of the newspaper article . . . my birthday. Go figure.
It is a need that goes back to his hard-training days -- breakfasts that started with a dozen eggs blended into a quart of milk and the iron-lifting buildup to the world title in Stockholm.
Not bad for a kid born cross-eyed and with a gimpy right leg. Botched surgery on the leg crippled him for good on that side. An eye operation straightened out his gaze when he was fifteen, the year he started lifting weights.
Doug at four months of age, with his Dad.
Four years old.
In 1954, he won another heavyweight title at the British Empire Games in Vancouver. Hepburn recalls it wistfully:
"The world was my oyster. They called me the strongest man in the world. I was breaking records at will. I had complete, unadulterated confidence."
He's still got the confidence -- intensity, he calls it -- that won the marbles in Stockholm.
"Intensity. That's what it was," he said. "I had no coach. What did I know about how to eat, how to train, how to lift. I had no technique to speak of. I did it all with upper body strength."
The dilemma now is finding a place to focus his intensity.
"I am being driven toward something," he said. "I'm still not sure what it is but it's becoming easier and easier for me to live my own life."
Back home on East Broadway he opened the door and called out to his cat."
"Hi, Sinbad," he said.
A nicely worn pair of Doug's lifting shoes.
Enjoy Your Lifting!
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