My Friend Jim Cash

I consider Jim Cash my friend. We spent a lot of time together in one long week in Slovakia in 1993. He and I were members of the United States team powerlifting squad competing at the IPF world master’s championships. With 36 member nations, this was the toughest competition in the world. He and I would take bronze medals, he in the 220 class, I was the 242-pound class entrant. I had a terrible competition for a lot of extenuating circumstances.

The erroneous thinking of the day was that in order to maximize athletic performance, teams should arrive a week ahead of time to acclimatize to the time difference. In other words, so that you won’t have to lift at 2am your time, come to the foreign country a week ahead of time, eat their weird food, drink too much because you are bored out of your mind, lose weight, debauch, degrade – all to avoid lifting at 2am your time.

George Herring said, “To hell with all that, I’ll sleep all day on the day I’m supposed to lift at 2 am.” He flew over the day before he lifted. Sleep all day before the meet, got up, made all his lifts, won his class, won champion of champions and flew home. Meanwhile I lost 16 pounds the week before the competition eating the Slovakian diet of boiled pork, cabbage, potatoes and alcohol. The first day we arrived we were shocked at the mob at the bar when it opened at 10am. By the end of the week, we were part of the mob at the bar at 10am.

Jim Cash, myself and Texas Bob ran and drank together everyday pretty much all day. There was nothing to do. This was a destitute city just past the fall of the wall. The food was terrible, the beer was cheap and the days were long. What are a bunch of bored alphas going to do?  In another odd quirk of fate, I stood next to him the first time he laid eyes on the woman that would become his wife.

We were at the national master powerlifting championships in Seattle. We were talking when he said midsentence, “Who is that?” He left our circle like a just-ignited heat seeking missile and deadheaded to the scorers table where he began intensely talking to an exquisite looking young woman. Jim always was a persuasive talker.

As a lifter, he was the Man in the 220 pound class in the 80s. He squatted and benched a tad behind the best in the world. He was routinely hit below parallel 775 pound squats. He backed that up with 475 + in the bench and 825 any day of the week in the deadlift. No one could beat him in his peak years.

Check out the links below for profiles on other remarkable men I have met in my almost 60 years of training. Each have influenced me in different ways over the course of my strength career. 

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