Mr. Big (Cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine September 2003

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Mr. Big (Cont.)


	Phillips at Mile High Publishing, circa 1992; inset, the debut issue of Muscle Media 2000 (Jeff Riedel)

IN 1992, PHILLIPS MOVED OUT of Mom's basement into a full-time office and began to broaden his reach with the launch of Muscle Media 2000, a magazine aimed at hardcore enthusiasts. The readership was already in place, thanks to the newsletter and Mile High's 1991 publication of the Anabolic Reference Guide, his 245-page A-to-Z handbook on steroid use.

The new glossy monthly allowed Phillips to juxtapose his rather dry, technical writings on the science of bulking up with more enticing editorial content—namely, full-color photos of snarling pros posed midlift, hair spiked, muscles at maximum bulge, entire vascular systems dilated and crackling across their skin like electrical storms.

Muscle Media 2000 took off—eventually reaching a circulation of 500,000—as did Phillips's mail-order sales of vitamin and protein supplements, but it brought with it new problems that come with managing a burgeoning company and its staff. According to various people who have worked for Phillips, up-close-and-personal has never been his strong suit.

"You want to know what Bill's like?" says T. C. Luoma, 44, a former editor of MM2K who now runs a bimonthly bodybuilding magazine called Testosterone. "You know the movie Nixon? Well, Nixon—that's Bill."

"Phillips is a smart guy," says bodybuilding historian Terry Todd. "Writing to the steriod crowd was dead-end road. He knew you could make a certain amount of money building monster trucks, but you could make a whole lot more building Fords F-150's"

As Luoma tells it, Phillips was a crummy manager who had trouble communicating with his employees. When he wanted something done, he would send Luoma a note or fax—even though their offices faced each other across a hall. In 1997, when Phillips decided to overhaul the magazine and focus on mainstream fitness, in came another fax, this time telling Luoma he was fired.

Phillips has a clear response to all this: He was a very busy man. "I was managing over 300 employees," he says. "And that didn't afford me much time for one on one."

Whatever his interpersonal qualities, Phillips's empire was growing fast. By the mid-nineties, he'd made a tidy fortune selling a new protein powder called MET-Rx, courting celebrity athletes and signing them on to endorse products. But the success of protein supplements was nothing compared with a new muscle-builder that was about to hit the market: creatine.

In 1994, Phillips met a nutritional biochemist from California named Anthony Almada. Almada had come across an obscure Swedish study in the journal Clinical Science that alerted him to the muscle-building potential of a naturally occurring amino acid called creatine monohydrate. He'd started a small company called Experimental and Applied Sciences to sell it to bodybuilders, and he asked Phillips if he wanted to invest his time and energy helping market it.

Phillips jumped in, creatine took off, and for two years the men had the market cornered, selling a powdered form they named Phosphagen. "A lot of former steroid users told us, 'Man, this feels like I'm on the juice again,' " says the 42-year-old Almada, who now runs a supplement consulting company in Laguna Niguel, California, called IMAGINutrition. "You could gain four to eight pounds of lean muscle a week. That's where you got this enormous buzz and viral spread of enthusiasm. Bill saw the landscape of opportunity. Combined with his marketing wizardry, it was unstoppable."

The arrival of creatine coincided with another windfall for the supplement biz, a controversial piece of legislation called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, or DSHEA. Ushered through Congress in 1994 after blitzkrieg lobbying by Utah senator Orrin Hatch—who was helping out Utah's lucrative supplement-manufacturing sector—DSHEA lumped nutritional supplements in with food, rather than pharmaceuticals, and thus created what amounted to a regulatory no-fly zone. With many supplements no longer subjected to expensive testing and time-consuming approval from the Food and Drug Administration, new products could hit the shelves faster than ever.

"DSHEA pretty much flung open the doors for supplement sales," says Terry Todd, a physical-education professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on the history of bodybuilding. "Unfortunately, the legislation was based on economic and political factors more than scientific ones."

By 1997 the synergy between the magazine, which was now simply called Muscle Media, and EAS was in full swing, helping the company pull in more than $10 million a month. That year, Phillips built a new corporate headquarters in Golden, a gleaming mirrored-glass-and-steel cube that shimmered above town like a Bauhaus Xanadu. He unveiled the palatial digs with a gala event filled with sports stars like NFL Hall of Famer Marcus Allen and Broncos wide receiver Anthony Miller. He capped the party with an ostentatious fireworks display.

There was plenty to celebrate. EAS had become the most successful sports-nutrition company in America. Phillips had scored a beautiful girlfriend, a former stripper turned Playboy model named Ami Cusack. And he had just launched his Body-for-Life contest—then called the EAS Grand Spokesperson Championship—a move that would soon give rise to a commercial supernova.

"Phillips is a smart guy," says Todd. "Writing to the steroid crowd was a dead-end road. He knew you could make a certain amount of money building monster trucks, but you could make a whole lot more building Ford F-150s."

Indeed, business was flying, as were the social missteps that made it clear why Phillips probably worked best out of the public eye. During the party celebrating the completion of his headquarters in Golden, Phillips went up to the microphone to address his guests. According to several people who attended the event, most of the revelers ignored him until, finally, he lost it.

"If you don't shut the fuck up," he reportedly snapped, "I'm gonna come down there and break your fucking knees."

It was, by all accounts, an attempt at humor rather than a fit of rage. But the crowd of friends, employees, local celebs, and families with kids and grandparents piped down all right, leaving Phillips facing them, the PA system screeching feedback.

"In the beginning, I would've taken a bullet for the guy," says T. C. Luoma, who witnessed this awkward incident. "But things just got too stressful. There was no laughter in the building anymore. When Bill came in to work, your gut just knotted up."

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