In 1953, an admirer recalled that watching Bert Goodrich run the 100-yard dash in college was “a horrible sight.” Perhaps because he stood 6 feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds, Goodrich always got off to a slow start. But after spotting his opponents up to 12 feet, he “would get rolling in a tremendous cloud of flying cinders and dirt and come storming up at the finish to win.”
While he’s remembered as the first “Mr. America,” Goodrich may have been the most versatile athlete in Arizona’s history — and without a doubt, he was one of the most interesting.
The Tempe native won his first athletic competition at age 14, when he became state diving champion. Once, after winning a Fourth of July diving meet, Goodrich joined a road race from Tempe to Phoenix and back. Still wearing wet trunks and running barefoot over scorching asphalt, he nearly won.
During his time at Arizona State in the late 1930s, Goodrich broke records in most of the track and field events he tried, scoring more points than all of his squad mates combined. But his attendance in college was erratic as he traveled around the country, performing as an aerialist.
He also boxed professionally before moving to California to work as a stuntman. A Los Angeles Times reporter called Goodrich the best one of those in Hollywood, writing that “he jumped off cliffs, trains, motorcycles, horses and castle walls” as a stand-in for John Wayne, Buster Keaton and Gene Autry. Between movies, Goodrich appeared at venues around the country, performing balancing acts while ice skating at top speeds and executing handstands atop a 125-foot pole perched on bicycle handlebars.
Goodrich learned bodybuilding through mail-order courses from Charles Atlas and Earle Liederman. Picked from the crowd of spectators to compete, he won his first physique competition in
1939 while wearing borrowed trunks. Two months later, he beat 88 men in a then-unsanctioned national contest that was the predecessor to the Mr. America event.
After serving in World War II, Goodrich opened the first “glamour gym,” on Hollywood Boulevard, with celebrity patrons that included James Arness and about three-quarters of the Los Angeles Rams. Ultimately, he opened seven gyms, including one in Phoenix.
When he died in 1991, at age 84, his wife of 45 years said that before a recent intestinal surgery, Goodrich had still been riding his bike every day and doing 75 pushups while his coffee brewed. And Jack LaLanne told The Arizona Republic that Goodrich was always doing something for someone. “He was really something,” he said. “A hell of a fine human being.”