June 2021
Instead of heading back towards the city after work, I drove north to Durbanville, to my first practice with the Karma Bulldogs, an arm-wrestling club. I have been obsessively watching arm-wrestling videos on YouTube for more than a year, and before the gyms were shut in this latest round of Covid restrictions, had been training for it, doing odd-looking wrist lifts that approximated what I was seeing online.
Practice — “oefening” — was at a private home within earshot of the R300 flyover. I followed the voices coming from a bamboo gate in a boundary wall on an overgrown servitude and found eight men in their 20s standing around two arm-wrestling tables, their breath steaming in the cold air. I gripped up with a bear-armed fellow called Marc and we waggled our clasped hands to warm up our wrists, and lightly pressed this way, then the other, in a parody of the contest to come.
When the fight started, I gave it my all, pushing his hand down to the cushion. “Strong,” someone said. A man called Raymond, his blonde hair combed back in a sort of Viking pompadour, pointed out that I was standing a long way from the table. “Get in as close as you can, keep your arm near your chest and your knuckles high,” he said.
After that I had access to my shoulder and back strength, though my similarly inexperienced opponent had taken the tip too and pinned me repeatedly. We stepped back and others took our place. It went like that, moments of physical intensity interspersed with lighthearted banter and advice on technique.
A clothing designer called Tiaan arrived and it was immediately clear his was the dominant arm — he took my hand down to the pin-pad with the evenness of a hydraulic stamp. “He’s strong in the hook, try to rather post high and hit into his fingers. Try to open up his hand,” someone advised — they might as well have spoken in Urdu. Towards the end of the night I was hooking my right thumb in my jeans pocket to take weight off my throbbing elbow joint. I worried about driving home.
July 2021
A session at Raymond’s place in Bothasig — two tables in an organised, single-vehicle garage, and at the far end a series of pulley systems Ray has rigged up to train the main arm-wrestling actions: side pressure, cupping, pronation, supination, rising. Imagine a gymnasium in a postapocalyptic world — this is what arm-wrestlers’ garages look like.
A barrel-shouldered 40-something newcomer called Jaco — aka Bosveld Vuur — effortlessly pinned all of us on the right, leading to a great deal of excited chatter. Jaco is a family man and Eskom project manager from Lephalale, now working at Koeberg. He was with Lynx Armwrestling in Polokwane for a couple of years and is a fount of information on the arm-wrestling scene in South Africa. There are clubs at all compass points of Tshwane and Johannesburg, apparently, and Jaco says the standard is very high — “I am nothing up there”.
On his slab of a phone we watched the country’s top arm-wrestler, Terence Opperman, pinning none other than John Brzenk in a 2010 right-hand supermatch. Brzenk is the most successful arm-wrestler of all time — pinning him once is the equivalent of winning a round against Mike Tyson or taking a set off an in-form Roger Federer.
Jaco has come to us like an emissary from a bigger, more militarily advanced tribe, his message both a warning and an exhortation: you are yet small
Jaco has come to us like an emissary from a bigger, more militarily advanced tribe, his message both a warning and an exhortation: you are yet small. There and then, an informal resolution was made: the Cape would send forth its best arms to do battle in the national arm-wrestling championship. Perhaps not next year but soon.
August 2021
Word went out on the Cape Town Arm-wrestling WhatsApp group that De Wet Botha would be attending a pulling session at the Durbanville workshop of Theuns Kroon.
It is difficult to describe what it is like to take the hand of a world-class arm-wrestler like Botha, who once beat Italian maestro Ermes Gasparini. The first thing you register is the bulge of muscle below the thumb, called the thenar eminence — it’s like finding a squash ball between your clasped hands. The fingers combine the prehensility of tentacles with the hardness of bone — if long (and Botha has a surprisingly big hand for a person with a relatively small frame), they enwrap and compress your hand, severely limiting your range of motion as you attempt to set up to pull. Nothing suggests such a hand could be opened up or otherwise manipulated, to say nothing of the wrist, which looks and feels like it belongs on a marble frieze.
Sixteen years ago, walking down Cape Town’s Church Street, I happened on a crowd of people at the launch of a public artwork called Arm Wrestling Podium by Johann van der Schijff, and it was exactly that: a bronze, steel and rubber arm-wrestling table with elbow pads, pin pads and handles, and plaques on every side bearing 14 US Armwrestling Association rules in English, Xhosa, Afrikaans and braille. The master of ceremonies was John Maytham, who kicked things off by saying: “Arm-wrestling is fundamentally a silly thing to do and here is a piece of public art that celebrates that silliness.”
To Maytham’s mind (echoing the artist’s thinking) the piece presented an alternative vision for relatively nonviolent conflict resolution in a country where conflict is all too often worked out in blood.
When two muscular individuals mounted the podium to give an arm-wrestling exhibition, I wanted very much to challenge the winner. I had, after all, dabbled in this silly sport: at boarding school, where it was one of the things boys did to work out physical dominance, and university, after too many drinks. And then there were the months I spent in the Klein Karoo town of Ladismith. After a day’s work I would walk to the Royal Hotel on a potholed road lined with geelkeur trees and join the usual lot of apricot farmers, butchers and mechanics in the small, smoky bar.
The hotel was owned by Groot Kris Steenkamp and his son Jong Kris ran the place at night. Jong Kris had played a few games for the South Western District Eagles rugby team and might still be playing if he had not been needed back at the hotel. Arm-wrestling him was a rite of passage — if you did well (there was no chance of actually beating him) it accorded respect.
Night after night I planted my elbow on the oak tabletop and as our friendship developed I began to understand that Steenkamp’s supremacy wasn’t entirely due to his genetics. He taught me the value of gripping high on your opponent’s thumb, to gain more leverage. He suggested starting with the wrist cocked inwards, but not so that your opponent would notice, then converting this small advantage by hitting quickly at the start.
“We call it armdruk (arm-pressing), but your English word, wrestling, is much more accurate, because if you want to win you don’t press sideways, you fall backwards with your opponent’s hand,” Steenkamp used to say.
The hotel was sold the next year and not long afterwards Jong Kris was killed in a joyriding accident, undefeated at a fundamentally silly thing called arm-wrestling.
Despite arm wrestling's appeal as entertainment and a form of boosting the ego of the winner, the activity is detrimental to participants and should not be considered a professional, competitive sports challenge
October 2021
My first competition and the first held in the Western Cape since 2019. The venue: a rural bikers’ bar called Klippe Kabana. D came along to support (“Ooh, a biker bar, I’ll wear boots”) and seemed oblivious to my rising nerves as we sailed through the canola fields around Mikpunt. Last night, unable to sleep, I read a paper called Spiral Humeral Fracture During Arm-Wrestling by M Wael et al, and the words weighed heavily on me as I approached the registration gazebo and duly indemnified the organisers against the risk of injuries.
“Spiral fractures are potentially the result of bending, axial pressure load compression, and torsional forces applied to the humerus during the match,” is how the paper described these injuries, concluding (somewhat imperiously) that: “Despite arm-wrestling's appeal as entertainment and a form of boosting the ego of the winner, the activity is detrimental to participants and should not be considered a professional, competitive sports challenge.”
On the draw sheet, echoing a North American arm-wrestling tradition, several contestants had given nicknames: Thaabiet ACTION Jackson, Vincent THE ANIMAL Woudberg.
“Wild!” said D, eyes agleam.
The competition was organised by Jaco “Tugboat” Underhay, an experienced super heavyweight arm-wrestler from Deneysville who was contestant and head referee, donning a white and black referee’s shirt between his own matches. D listened attentively as a vast farm manager from Paarl explained that the head referee is always supported by a spotter, or downside referee.
“They try to keep the matches safe and fair, which is easier said than done because there are many ways to cheat in this sport,” said the giant, and when D said “show me”, he gallantly grabbed the hand of a passing contestant and proceeded to demonstrate how, with microscopic movement of the fingers and wrist, unfair advantages can be gained.
Competitions tend to be double-elimination format (lose twice and you’re out), but this was a series of supermatches — best-of-five bouts between two pre-matched individuals — with bragging rights going to the club whose members take the most wins. There are only three clubs in the Western Cape — Karma Bulldogs, Power Guns and newcomers Cape Viperz.
“How do you know who is who, the logos all look the same?” asked D, clocking a failure of imagination that runs much deeper than our Cape Town scene: all over the world, arm-wrestling logos are variations of two ridiculously muscular and beveined arms, locked at the hands.
A wave of sound went around the beer garden when the first contestants stepped up to the table (“Kom my liefie, kom my LIEFIE!”). Underhay checked that the competitors’ hands were centred, his hands adjusting fingers and wrists with the delicacy of someone finishing a pyramid of cards. Once satisfied both contestants had their shoulders squared, he lifted his hands and bellowed: “Ready…” one-second pause … “Go!”, and the fight began.
As the day wore on, D’s puzzlement grew.
“I can’t work it out. Half of the guys here look like the kortbroek khaki dudes I grew up with in Kokstad and the rest look like a mixture of steampunk hipsters and IT technicians. You’ve got Christian Afrikaners going against Muslim brothers from Heideveld, and the audience is all bikers,” she said. There are two distinct camps in Cape arm-wrestling: an older, Afrikaans-speaking crew, and a more diverse crowd of city youngsters, with the new wave exemplified by a metalworker called Arthur, who wore a Hawaiian shirt with yellow socks to complement his pink-tint Lennon glasses, and who caused a major upset when he won his left-arm supermatch against Karma Bulldogs’ Tiaan T-Bolt van Eeden.
You do not have to look very hard to find Nels at the annual South African Armwrestling Championship, or Botha’s, for that matter. Arm-wrestling is dynastic -- experienced fathers and mothers are able to give their sons and daughters a head start in this obscure and highly technical sport
The right-arm competition went off first, followed by the left. I won my match on the right and lost convincingly on the left. I could think of nothing to say in the car, heading home. My head hurt from too much sun and my mind replayed my losses over and over. I was suffused with a desire for vengeance. Into the silence, D rapped a series of Jessie Reyez songs at high volume.
“What do you think?” she asked, at the end of a song in which Reyez hits several D5 notes.
“Could do with some work,” I replied, failing to sound playful.
“A bit like your left,” said D.
June 2023
“That’s a Nel, I’d bet my life that’s a Nel,” Oom Willie Botha said of the stout three-year-old who joined our table in the garden of the Wild Winds Pub & Grill outside Tshwane.
“Hoekom praat oom so?” asked the child, causing Botha to laugh richly.
“He means, ‘Why am I speaking in a strange language.’ I guess he doesn’t hear much English,” he said, ruffling the kid’s hair. The boy walked off, but turned suddenly and, with a run-up, threw his little fist into Oom Willie’s back.
“Oof, definitely a Nel,” Botha wheezed.
You do not have to look very hard to find Nels at the annual South African Arm-wrestling Championship, or Bothas, for that matter. Arm-wrestling is dynastic — experienced fathers and mothers give their children a head start in this obscure and highly technical sport. In the nearby lapa, the under-95kg open left-arm competition featured three formidable Nel arm-wrestlers — brothers Rico and Philip Nel, and Rico’s son, Ruan Nel.
In the final, Ruan, known for his speed and ability to “flash pin” his opponents, ending matches before average synapses have had a chance to fire, faced his father, who after successfully blocking Ruan’s hit, countered with a successful top roll to take the championship. Ruan left the stage looking crestfallen, but not before embracing his familiar opponent.
“If you are not a humble person, this sport will teach you those lessons. It’s written right there,” said Botha, pointing at the Karma Bulldogs logo on my personalised tracksuit.
“Karma: what goes around comes around.”
Cape Town had arrived on the national stage, a dozen of us, encamped as far as possible from the busy bar and its stuffed baboon. The juniors and masters competitions had taken place the day before and two of our juniors, Matthew and Alexander Hoy, had won gold, a proud moment.
“How did you do?” Botha asked.
“Two golds in my weight class and two bronzes in the heavyweight division.”
“I was the only contestant in my weight class,” I clarified, “and there were only three of us competing in the division above.”
“You had the courage to turn up,” said Botha, without missing a beat.
“You hang those medals with pride.”
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