Sam Jordan doesn’t do Nautilus.
He doesn’t use knee wraps, super-rubberized shirts or any of the other innovations that make power lifting, weight lifting and bodybuilding easier than it was in his day.
His gym has ancient steel gizmos with peeling paint and ripped vinyl. It has chain-link fences and heavy rubber cables Sam picked up at Ace Rubber Co. 20 years ago.
It doesn’t have mirrors.
“This ain’t Bally’s,” a sweaty power lifter says between grunts, as he curls one of Jordan’s homemade cables from its anchor on a fence that splits the gym in half. “This is the old school.”
And Jordan, 73, is the dean of the old school. He is official trainer for almost everybody who works out in Sam’s Gym at Kennedy-King Community College, which hired him to set up shop with his equipment on campus in 1990. Many paying customers have followed him since his days training lifters in the basement of a South Side church.
Jordan has a certain reputation around the aging set of the weight-lifting class. South Siders know him as the guy who trained Franklin Riley, a local boy and the 1971 middleweight world champion power lifter, and a string of state bodybuilding and weight-lifting champs in the preceding decade.
The reputation has faded. Jordan hasn’t had a world champion since Riley or a state champion since South Sider Charles Toliver won the Mr. Illinois bodybuilding competition in 1970.
But he does have a couple of the city’s more respectable competitors. And in general, when guys who train at Sam’s Gym go to Chicago-area and statewide competition, they make a decent showing.
He trains them the old-fashioned way, with loose weights and dumbbells. They don’t wear tight, springy bandages around their knees to help their legs straighten under heavy weight. They aren’t allowed to wear the rubberized shirts, which have the same effect on the upper body.
Jordan thinks people become psychologically dependent on them. Besides, he adds, they look silly.
“These guys look like Frankenstein, walking around all bound up,” he said.
If you go in search of the old-fashioned method of lifting, you’ll find it in Sam’s Gym in the basement of the college at the corner of 63rd Street and Wentworth Avenue, on the South Side. Jordan is easy enough to find, once you’ve tromped through the locker room for 20 minutes and finally stumbled upon the unmarked door to his gym.
Jordan is the one against the far back wall, behind the desk cluttered with old weight-lifting magazines and 5 1/2-pound disc weights, underneath the photos of Riley and others from his glory days masking-taped high on the cinder-block wall.
He’s the one shouting out instructions over the clanging metal.
“That thing’s just a paperweight. Lift it up,” he yells to one man. “Move it past the sticking point. Past the sticking point.”
And, to his favorite student, Howard Redmond, who aspires to achieve Riley’s stature: “Man, I need another world champion. Come on.”
Redmond, 27, won first place in his weight division in last year’s Illinois State Bench Press Championships in Chicago, sponsored by the American Drug-Free Powerlifting Federation.
Jordan’s other high-profile prodigy is bodybuilder David Neely, 42, a WVON radio talk-show host, attorney and law professor who has started to make a name for himself on the local circuit in the last couple of years. He placed fourth in the Ironman Bodybuilding and Fitness Competition in Detroit last year.
As his most serious trainees, Redmond and Neely are Jordan’s last shots at regaining his former reputation. They sought out his gym because of that reputation.
“Sam’s serious,” said Redmond. “He goes for strength over appearance, substance over style. You don’t play around with Sam.”
The two are in the gym at least 10 hours a week. Jordan designs their regimens the way he did it for himself when he was young and used to work out in his gym in a storefront at 63rd and Eberhart Avenue.
If Redmond says his arms are feeling weak, or some muscle group just looks deficient to Jordan, he gives him a weight repetition to add to his routine until it improves. He said he goes mostly by his gut instinct.
“There are a lot of old-fashioned techniques that a lot of people just don’t know about,” said Neely. “Sam knows them.”
He knows about tough times
But Jordan knows more than weight training, and that, say his students, explains why he’s so popular on the Kennedy-King campus. He remembers when he and his neighbors couldn’t vote. He recalls how his black Army regiment in the U.S. Cavalry was assigned strictly to chores in World War II. He recalls when the gyms in the black parts of town had such shabby equipment, and so little of it, that men had to wait in long lines to share the good dumbbells.
And he remembers his trainees beating the competitors of the “palatial” gyms while training with loose weights and with loose rubber cables that were soldered into a ring and used in resistance training.
“There was this one kid, Poindexter was his name,” Jordan said. “He was, what, 234 pounds? Yeah. And he’s competing, you know, power lifting, against this other guy from this palatial gym. The Illinois state power lifting competition, that’s what it was; 1970s sometimes.
“And so he’s lifting, and the other guy’s lifting. It was just the two of them left (in the round). The other guy, he weighed 275.
“My man, he lifted 555 pounds. Then the other guy, he goes for 600. He lifted, lifted, oooh, he couldn’t get it past his knees. The judges said, `Put it down.’ So he did.
“Now my man, he had already automatically won. He lifted more and he weighed less. So he had it automatically. But he said, `Uh-uh. I’m going to do 620.’ I said, `620? You don’t have to. You won.’
“But he did it anyway. And he got it up there. He lifted it.”
You can try to get a moral of the stories out of Jordan, but you’ll probably fail. He’s not into cheap summaries.
“This is the old school,” he said with a wry grin. “You got to draw your own conclusions.”
Starting early
The best thing about weight training for Jordan, he says, is that it kept him out of trouble as a teenager. Walking home from Englewood High School one day, he discovered some men working out on the playground at Carter Elementary. He joined them-a 16-year-old hanging around with men 15 years his senior after school. It made him a huge, intimidating-looking kid, he recalled.
“They just used the chin bars to work out, pretty much. . . . They’d do the wide-grip chin (lift). There was this one guy, Howard Harris, he was the leader. He wasn’t huge. But he had a wiry strength. He’d jump up on the bars, one hand in his back pocket, lifting himself up.
“I got into that.”
His size served him well when he was drafted into the military. He served in North Africa until the Allies took Rome, then moved to Naples to unload ship cargo. He stayed in shape handling heavy loads and using the rubber cables he’d brought in his duffel bag.
Like other Chicagoans returning from the war, he went to work at the stockyards. With the money he earned, he started buying iron for his own home gym. When he got enough equipment together, he opened a storefront gym at 63rd and Eberhart, charging people $7 a month to use his weights.
He trained Riley, Thomas Poindexter and others after moving to the church basement. Five years ago, Kennedy-King invited him to move his operation there.
Now students and anybody who just wants to work out with Jordan pays the college, which pays Jordan. He supplements his income with the lemonade and protein drinks he mixes at home and brings to the gym.
A miracle worker?
Jordan isn’t one to advertise himself, but he will, at the slightest provocation, provide anecdotal evidence that training with him makes men more, well, virile.
“This one guy, he told me his wife didn’t ever get pregnant until he started drinking that protein drink,” he said, gesturing to the jug on his desk. “Well then, his wife got pregnant. I said, `Well, maybe you’re just eating right.’
“About a year later, his wife was pregnant again. She told him, `You better quit going down there and drinking Mr. Jordan’s protein drink.’ “
Jordan has one female trainee. Angela Barner, 31, said she likes hanging around Jordan and the other men in the gym mainly because they don’t treat her like a “girl.”
“At the other clubs, guys come up to talk to you, to say, `Hey, baby, how you doing?’ ” she said.
“Here, if they come up to talk to you, it’s to say, `You need to do this.’ And they all want me to train abs with them because they think I’ve got a good stomach. I work them hard, too, like Sam. They’ll be crying and complaining.”
One day, Barner said, she might compete.
Pictures of Jordan’s best trainees are posted with masking tape like crude frames on the cinderblock walls of his gym. His world champ, his state champs and a local legend have earned the honor. He goads his current students that none of them are pictured there.
“You’re the next one,” he told Redmond one recent day, spotting him as the younger man bench-pressed 335 pounds.
In truth, Redmond has a way to go before he wins a world competition. He did garner some attention last year when he won the powerlifting federation’s bench-press championship. But the sport’s best lifters in Redmond’s heavyweight class are lifting close to 500 pounds in the bench-press event. Redmond, who weighs 205 pounds, lifts 365.
And Neely, while he has bulked up quickly for a newcomer, still has only two years of bodybuilding under his belt.
But Jordan, despite teasing his students, doesn’t really seem to judge their success-or his-by trophies and certificates. What standard does he use? Jordan, typically, shrugs and answers the question in a round-about way.
“Thomas Poindexter, he didn’t win that competition by lifting 555,” he says at last. “He lifted 620. He didn’t have to. But he did.”
