Dave Bourbon never set out to be a world-champion arm wrestler. He and his wife were out one night in 1973 at the Black Eye Bar (now Rick’s) in Santa Maria when he was told to get weighed.
“What for?” he remembers asking.
The answer: There was going to be arm wrestling that night. Bourbon says he’d never arm-wrestled before in his life, but his wife told him to try it. (“You might like it,” she’d said.)
He must have. Bourbon won five matches that night, kicking off a career that would pit him against the best arm-wrestlers in the world, from Russia, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico.
And now he’s retiring from the sport. So with such an impressive career—200 wins, nine losses—what was his secret to winning?
“No matter who I go up against, no matter how strong or how big, I don’t get intimidated,” he said. “I imagine he hurt my wife and kids, he burned down my house, burnt my pickup. When I meet him, I just touch him, I have so much anger I can’t lose.”
In such a long career with so many wins, it’s his first loss that still sticks with him after all these years (though, in his defense, his first loss was against a five-time world champ).
“He was 199 pounds and solid muscle,” Bourbon said. “I was 176, and I don’t think I was solid muscle.”
Bourbon says he never got a rematch against the guy, but that’s okay: “We both made it into the Hall of Fame at the same time.”
This article appears in Jan 22-29, 2009.