Bill Curry and the Gospel of Physical Fitness – Iron Game History – May, 1993

“One of our sport’s grand old men,” announced another of the same sport’s “grand old men” when I told him that I was writing this “Where Are They Now?” column about W. A. “Bill” Curry. The phrase itself—the quickness with which it came to his lips—jolted me a bit: not the compliment implied in “grand,” of course, but that word “old.” Bill Curry, “old”? Momentarily he had been, at least to the “jolted” kid in me, the super-lifter and athlete who, between 1937 and 1951, held all the South’s weightlifting records in the light-heavyweight class: all of them for 14 years.