Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993 TAG: 9307080086
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GREG SCHNEIDER LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: CENTREVILLE LENGTH: Long
The eternal fate of the kid brother. Punching bag. Dweeb. Second-best. Except that when it comes to arm wrestling, poor little Ray Patton happens to be one of the best, a national champion.
Which makes Dave . . .
Let's put it this way: Dave Patton lost an arm wrestling tournament, once.
In 1985.
He holds 33 world championships and an uncounted number of national titles in the under-160 weight class. They put him on ESPN last year, and when Sports Illustrated - holy chronicler of Michael and Magic and Montana - devoted nine pages to arm wrestling in the June 14 issue, Dave Patton was the featured star, his oiled arm flexed across a double-page spread.
And oh, man, those arms. You can't help but notice. His biceps seem as blocky as shoeboxes - almost odd hanging off a slender body that curls up out of black boots and black jeans and flares like a cobra into a black T-shirt.
Not your average 33-year-old computer programmer.
Sports Illustrated called him a "he-man," and that's partly what Patton is: the neatly trimmed moustache, the aroma of after-shave even at 7 p.m. when the guys are coming over. His is a machismo so honed, so safe on its turf that it's OK to be single and living alone in the Washington suburbs in a tidy brick Colonial with a wreath on the door.
But Patton is more than just a record-book testosterone boy; he is a competitor, in a sense of the word every bit as pure and overwhelming as, say, Michael Jordan. There has to be some reason one person can go into a field of experts, any field, and seem effortlessly to rise above the rest.
Patton is so focused on winning that it almost has become boring. He picks a kid in the crowd and gives him his trophy. He has dramatically cut back on his number of tournament appearances in a year. Prize money - maybe $1,000 a title - doesn't go so far anymore.
But he keeps on. Nationals are next month in San Francisco. Patton will be there to defend his title.
Patton is one of those guys who found his ticket in high school and has been able to travel on it ever since.
Arm wrestling was just something everybody did at Chantilly High in Fairfax County; no one's lunch money was safe around the lockers at midday. By senior year, Patton did it better than everybody else.
At 5 feet 10 and, at the time, about 135 pounds, Patton thought he was too small for organized sports - though Ray, three years younger, competed in football and wrestling at the same size.
"I didn't want to be grabbing some guy, you know?" Dave Patton says. "It just didn't turn me on."
He was after a different kind of glory, one that sounds good years later while shooting pool with a buddy. Which is what Patton is doing when he tells the following story:
He was 16 and he walked into a Chantilly pizza place and there was Ron Saul, offensive lineman for the Washington Redskins. Saul went about 250, 260 - twice Patton's size. "Want to arm wrestle for 50 bucks?" Patton asked.
"Get away from me, punk," Saul growled back.
About two weeks later, the Redskins "got the hell kicked out of them by the Cowboys," so Patton went back to the restaurant with a friend in a Dallas cap. They started playing pinball, and Saul sauntered over.
"Apparently he had been talking about me, this kid who asked him to arm wrestle, so when he walked over, everybody was watching. `Learn how to arm wrestle yet, punk?' he said. He told me he'd tripped over bigger things than me," Patton says, pausing to softly sink the 8-ball into a side pocket, then leaning on his cue while his buddy racks up for another try.
"So I said, `If you've got 50 bucks, I'll arm wrestle you,' and he put his arm up on the pinball machine," Patton says. The moment Patton took Saul's hand, the lineman tried to pin him, make him look like a fool.
Patton caught himself inches from defeat, then slowly raised Saul's arm back to vertical. "And I just started laughing at him. Next thing I know, he takes his arm away and picks me up and slams me on the pinball machine."
Patton ran for his life. He never got the $50, but he got that story. Trophy enough. nn
A year after Ron Saul made him a lifetime Cowboys fan, Patton was working a summer job and met a guy who competed in arm wrestling tournaments. This was something he had never considered.
He went to a tournament, beat one guy, then faced Junior Hostler of West Virginia, who knew what he was doing. "He dropped me," Patton says, "like a steaming . . . " Well, Hostler won easily; arm wrestle-talk isn't always printable.
Patton got hurt at the next tournament. He won fourth place in the next. Somewhere in there, he started lifting weights, transforming himself from amateur-kid-natural to studious professional. At his fourth tournament, in 1979, Patton beat a former world champion to win first place. Since then, except for the no-excuses slip-up in 1985, if Patton entered a tournament, he won it. For a while, he competed in more than 15 a year.
"He let me win a match one time a few years ago; he knew he could beat everybody, and he wanted me to win some money," says a now-humbled Hostler. Tournaments are double-elimination, so after taking a fall the first round, Patton faced his friend again, this time with more on the line. "I put him out of the tournament," Patton says.
It's almost Zen for him. He doesn't eat red meat, smoke or drink sodas or liquor of any kind, despite that fact that distiller Yukon Jack is the biggest sponsor of tournaments, and Patton is their spokesman.
He works out three times a week, with a special regimen for his arms: He curls 135 pounds 21 times, then curls 125 pounds 21 times, then curls 115 pounds 21 times. Then he does it all over again. Twelve times.
Every Tuesday night, other arm wrestlers from as far away as Maryland and West Virginia descend on Patton's house to practice with the king. Such festivals of guyhood can only take place in the basement, where the ceiling is low and pipes are exposed and the thick-limbed combatants can grunt and bellow freely.
Except for Dave Patton. His face impassive, his breath only sometimes constricted with effort, the Champion is unfailingly dignified and composed. Others - his brother and Hostler, for instance - flail and contort and sweat before facing the inevitable plunk as Patton niftily and courteously pins their corded arms to the table.
Eric Gates, a 20-year-old student at the University of Maryland, still seems nervous around Patton, even though he's been practicing here about seven months. When Patton, in finest big-brother-figure tradition, makes a belittling comment about Gates' sexuality, the youngster laughs self-consciously and then sputters, "Yeah, where's that girl, uh, where's your girlfriend, uh, that you were dating? That stewardess?"
"Oh, no, I broke up with her," Patton says soberly. Gates frowns and nods.
Others aren't so intimidated, but seem to enjoy basking in the aura of invincibility that surrounds Patton.
Ben Vos is 47 and only started arm wrestling competitively nine years ago. Square-jawed and rugged like a stockier Robert Conrad, Vos sits by and grunts with approval as Patton tells the story about confronting the Redskin.
"They are football players; we're arm wrestlers," Vos says. "We're not gonna compete with what they do, and they're not going to beat us at arm wrestling. I could beat some of those guys right now, and I'm old enough to be their father." He lets out a big yawn.
The greatest challenge left for Patton is to do for arm wrestling what Jordan has done for the NBA: make it popular. Or more than that, really: make it legitimate. Get it out of the barroom. Into the Olympics.
The article in Sports Illustrated, he hopes, will help. Others disagree.
"It was a crazy, mixed-up article. It starts out with Patton, then it ends up with a guy who wins in a beer hall. I mean, come on, that only puts it back as the barbaric, barroom sport everybody's been fighting for so long," said M.G. Harmon of Wytheville, president of the U.S. Armwrestling Association.
The USAA is an upstart league founded in 1986 as an alternative to the American Armwrestling Association, which Patton favors.
(Patton's 66-year-old mother, interested in the exploits of both her sons, has cheered and promoted her way onto the AAA board of directors).
With Patton down to about a half-dozen tournaments a year, Harmon's not sure he still lives up to his reputation as the pound-for-pound best arm wrestler in the world. "When I came into the sport, the first person I heard about was Dave Patton," Harmon says. "But until I actually see Dave Patton do more than what he's doing today, I cannot honestly say he's the best of the best. I mean, that's just how I feel."
But you won't hear talk like that in the basement on a Tuesday night. And, really, it's hard not to be impressed by the way Patton dispatches his peers, a Ferrari in the company of Camaros.
Even during practice, there's a harsh light in Patton's eyes. Something won't let him give in to whatever temptation there is to quit while he's ahead. The trophies hold no allure, and the money isn't that great, but something drags him back.
It's as simple as the sport itself: "Fear," Patton says, arm locked once more against his brother's, "of losing."
by CNB