Pecs, abs and the occasional knickers

Dublin Lads Buff Bods
By Lindie Naughton
Phat Traffic Productions

Turn off North King Street into Lurgan in Dublin's north inner city and a large, white building at the end of the street immediately smacks you in the eye. You have found the Hercules Amateur Weightlifting and Wrestling Club, affectionately known as the "Herc" and the oldest gym in Dublin Town.

Not that it looks much different to your regular gym as you walk in the door. On the top floor, there's the cardiovascular room, with state-of-the-art treadmills, steppers, rowers and bikes. A floor down and you'll find a collection of weight training machines, in the style beloved of the executive keep-fitter. A floor down again and you're amongst strange sphinx-like mannequins, used by the club's wrestlers.

Where the "Herc" is different, however, is on the ground floor. Here lie weights as big as bicycle wheels, large enough to need two normal people to lift them. (Let them fall and the entire building shakes). Here, wimps turn into Mr. Atlas. Here, athletes of the caliber of Nick Sweeney, Terry McHugh and John Menton -- all of whom represented Ireland at the Olympics in Sydney -- not to mention the county's top rowers, cyclists and gymnasts, congregate and train.

Keeping a benevolent eye on it all is Tommy Hayden, an Olympic weightlifter who made the 1960 Games in Rome. Now 74, he's one of the club's two honorary members and his memories go back to 1938, the year he joined the club. It had been founded a year earlier at 33 Ormond Quay, he remembered, by an English visitor named George Dale.

"He had come over for a few years and when he couldn't find a gym anywhere, he decided to open one himself. But he didn't stay long," Hayden said. "Fellows were starting body building in those days. The club was in a garage and there were a few barbells and weights. The fee was one shilling a week.

Of the early members, most were involved in wrestling. "Then, people from other sports started coming in, especially from the cycling. Matt Lownes was a member -- he was the first Irish man under the hour for 25 miles. He used to go so fast that one day he went into the back of a car and from then on, sadly, he wasn't right," Hayden reminisced.

Sprint cyclists in particular would do a lot of weight training. "When one fellow came, he would bring another and so it went," said another member, Paddy Kelly. The cyclists trained as hard as any modern day road racer. "On Sundays, they would meet up at the Hercules in the morning and go off for a few hours around Crumlin and the Navan Road. Then they'd come back, have a bit of lunch, and after that, head down around the south side of the city."

Other members such as Martin Hennessy were boxers, although there was a view at the time that if you trained with weights, you'd become musclebound and hence less speedy around the ring.

These, of course, were the days before the tracksuit. "Fellows used to train in swim suits. There they'd be, blue with the cold in the middle of winter lifting freezing cold weights. One fellow even trained in girl's knickers!" And of course, in those days, as part of the ritual, the showers were always cold," Tommy Hayden said.

One of the best known characters in the club back then was John Moriarty. "His wife used to play the concert harp on Grafton Street," Hayden recalled, "and every evening, John would carry the harp back to their home. They were circus people. John told us that he came from Cobh, the same town as the boxer John L Sullivan. His speciality was an open handed lift that depended a lot on flexibility -- that none of us could do. He used to come in late in the evening, smoking a pipe, and he always wore a beret, criss-cross boots and a leotard -- a circus outfit -- when he trained. But one year, someone complained about him coming in so late. He was a sensitive man and he just left," he said.

When Hayden joined the Hercules in March 1946, he was more interested in weight lifting. "Like Paddy, I was working for Odlum's (flour mills) in the Alexandra Basin. I was lifting weights long before I knew there was a club. I was a little fella, but I found this was something I could do -- better even than some of the bigger lads. Paddy heard about me in Odlum's and came and had a chat." 

The obsession with building fine, rippling muscles, even in those more innocent, drug-free days, got a mixed reaction. "The girls would often say to us, sure you're only sissies! I remember us all going out to Sandycove one summer and stripping off, all out to be admired. We were feeling very pleased with ourselves until one of the girls shouted, 'will you look at those builder's laborers!'"

Though the premises were small, the Hercules would probably have stayed forever, Hayden lamented. "But the owners wanted to sell. We had a20-year lease and they didn't renew it. Then they didn't take rent off us for two years and one morning, we got the letter."

What started as a crisis, however, mushroomed into the club's biggest opportunity. "Some of the boys went off searching around for any suitable buildings and they came up with this place." As a tightly managed club, they had no difficulty raising a loan. The timing was lucky too -- this less than 10 years ago, when the current property boom would have been wishful thinking even for the most optimistic of estate agents.

And so today, with neighborly disputes over noise and vibrations sorted out, the club has 400 members. They range from doctors to laborers. All men mind you - the women didn't stick around, Hayden said, "and their dressing room is now used as a store room").

But what all these guys have in common: they know their way about a weights room.