Larry Dalkoff is a man of few words, by choice and manner revealing just a few tidbits about his life since he graduated from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1970. Type his name into the Google search engine and you’ll find him just once.
That one hit, however, might grab your attention. It’s results from the Southwestern USA Natural amateur bodybuilding competition, in Tucson, Ariz., where Dalkoff, despite having no formal training or previous experience, and despite being an age by which most people consider public flexing a thing of the past, won his division.
“I wanted to show off a little,” Dalkoff says, in a gravelly voice. “See how good I was.”
Granted, he was the only competitor in the 60-69 age group (“Maybe people lose interest in it after 60,” he says), but in his mind that doesn’t detract from the accomplishment of joining the fray of younger, harder, muscle-bound men and women—some of them a quarter of his age, others posing dramatically with swords—and putting his own muscles on display.
The hardest part, he says, wasn’t the training or the flexing—it was building up the courage to don nothing but a pair of shorts and get on stage in front of hundreds of people. He learned the poses only just before the competition started.
To encourage himself, Dalkoff told himself that he “just had to do it once in a while.” And it worked, he says. The judges and crowd liked his performance.
His participation wasn’t entirely without preamble. He’s long been mindful of his fitness, jogging up and down Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles when he lived there, and, about a decade ago, picking up weightlifting. One day he spotted a notice on the bulletin board of Bally Total Fitness near his home in Tucson, and he signed up to learn bodybuilding.
After meeting with a private trainer for a week or two, Dalkoff set off on his own training regimen. After work at the pizza parlor, he worked out four times a week for an hour and a half, following the same routine of calisthenics, treadmill, incline bench, and free weights. He concentrated on eating small portions of food (one banana for breakfast).
His unusual accomplishment comes as no surprise to Andrea Smith, his friend from Los Angeles, where Dalkoff lived before transplanting to Tucson.
One of Smith’s more vivid memories of Dalkoff came one night during a trivia contest at the synagogue they both attended. Even then Dalkoff was reserved, and that contributed to everyone’s shock when the contest started and he began blowing away the competition.
“Any time you asked a trivia question he knew the answer, and almost in every category. He was just amazing,” she says. “We had no idea he could do this.”
He may have a few more surprises before he’s done. Dalkoff’s advancing age hasn’t stopped him from considering a repeat of this year’s performance at the 2009 body-building competition. Nor has it put a crimp in another late-starting endeavor: Judo. He just earned a second-degree brown belt, and he soon plans to compete in that, too.
