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Outside Magazine September 2003

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Mr. Big (Cont.)


	2002 BFL Challenge Champ Jill Augello (David Barry)

"THESE ENCHILADAS ARE SO GOOD," says Bill Phillips, scraping his plate and eyeing my stack of sweet-potato fries. "You gonna eat all those?"

Phillips, Jim Nagle, and I are eating lunch at a busy Mexican cantina on Main Street in Golden. Nobody in the restaurant seems to recognize Phillips, which makes sense—he's in town only six months of the year, spending the rest of the time sequestered in his two other homes, one in Maui and the other in Los Angeles, where Nagle keeps an office.

Bill was born in 1964 and raised here in Golden, the third of three children. His dad, William Phillips Sr., was a company man, working his way up the ranks at the Coors Brewing Company while taking law classes at night. He topped out as a corporate analyst at Coors, then quit to open his own law practice. The family's middle-class ride hit a slight bump when Bill was 15 and his parents split. "It didn't seem like that big a deal," Phillips told me about the divorce. "We all stayed pretty close."

Bill was distracted by his own goals. To a testosterone-addled teenager coming of age in the eighties, no path of transcendence seemed more noble than making it as a professional athlete. Inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger and other professional lifters, Phillips decided to become a champion bodybuilder. He started lifting at 11, and by the time he reached junior high he was arguably the strongest kid in Colorado, able to crank out 265 consecutive push-ups and 52 pull-ups. In high school, he excelled in track, wrestling, football, and baseball, but team sports were only a passing flirtation. When he turned 18, riding the momentum of several state and regional power-lifting titles, Phillips headed west, to the bodybuilding foundries of Southern California.

Phillip fully embraced anabolic steroids, at different times cycling on Deca, Andriol, Sustanon, and other supplements that helped the five-foot-eight weight lifter bulk up from an already brawny 185 pounds to a tottering, squarish 215.

For the next three years, from 1983 to 1986, Phillips worked out at Gold's Gym in Venice Beach, the famous (and infamous) epicenter of the bodybuilding universe. Schwarzenegger had worked out there a decade earlier, as had Lou Ferrigno—a.k.a. the Incredible Hulk. Indeed, Gold's famous-guest list was long; among others who trained there were Muhammad Ali, Jane Fonda, and Hulk Hogan.

But getting huge wasn't as glamourous as it may have appeared at first. In SoCal's hypercompetitive post-Arnold atmosphere, Phillips watched his roommate start abusing steroids and descend into depression, broader drug addiction, and hospitalization. Other bodybuilders, bottom-feeders who were strapped for cash, joined what was informally known as the California Posing Club, pimping themselves out to wealthy, fetishistic clients who wanted private stripteases and sex acts, tricks that could pay as much as $5,000 a pop.



	2002 BFL Challenge Champ Thomas Phillips (David Barry)

Phillips says he steered clear of the extracurriculars, but he fully embraced anabolic steroids and various supplements, at different times cycling on Deca, Andriol, Sustanon, and other drugs that helped the five-foot-eight lifter bulk up from an already brawny 185 pounds to a tottering, squarish 215. The new body armor earned Phillips moderate success as an amateur poser, but it also erased the last of his illusions.

His own use notwithstanding, Phillips was dismayed by the amount of drugs pro bodybuilders were taking to stay in the game. "You had these guys who would eat perfectly healthy diets, get plenty of sleep, stay away from booze, and then just drown themselves in huge amounts of anabolics," he told me.

Some, including Phillips, tried to hover within acceptable levels of steroid dosage. Testosterone levels in normal males can range between 200 and 1,100 nanograms per deciliter of blood, and you can get pretty big if you spike yourself to the top end of that range. But levels among pros were off the charts, sometimes as high as 3,000 nanograms.

In 1986, at age 21, Phillips left California and moved back to Colorado, where he took classes at the University of Colorado at Denver, immersing himself in the study of exercise physiology and sports nutrition—with an emphasis on steroid chemistry. He also started a company called Mile High Publishing and, from the basement of his mother's home in Golden, began sending subscribers a newsletter he produced, The Anabolic Update.

Phillips was through with pro bodybuilding himself, but he knew what the muscle market needed: straight talk about training, diet, drugs, and motivation. He would take on the big boys, like Joe Weider, who he believed played a subtle shell game with the public. In magazines like Flex and Muscle & Fitness, Weider dodged the steroid topic entirely, suggesting that bodybuilders nurtured their freakish physiques solely by pumping iron and sucking down protein. Phillips knew you didn't get there without drugs, and he intended to say so.

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