MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina Like the man himself, the legend of Mark Henry just keeps growing. How much bigger can it get? How much bigger can he get?
Henry parked his 394 pounds in two stacked plastic chairs (when they’re not stacked he breaks them) and talked about being the strongest man in the world and about eating 60 chicken wings in one sitting, and the disappointment of getting through only 50 ounces of a 72-ounce steak in another sitting.
“I just got tired after 50 ounces,” he said. “I was so full. Have you ever been so full that your face hurt?
”
Henry is 23, and comes from a little Texas town called Silsbee. His goals include getting to an even 400 pounds do not bet against him and winning an Olympic gold medal, a much less certain proposition.
“I was born premature and I’ve been making up for it ever since,” said the man with the 48-inch waist.
In the Pan Am Games weightlifting competition, Henry won a gold, silver and bronze. His lift of 3911/4 pounds to win the snatch set an American record. Henry was the largest lifter in Olympic history in Barcelona, where he finished 10th. It would’ve made his late Uncle Chud proud. “Uncle Chud was 6-5, 440. Now, he was big,” said the man with the 38-inch thighs.
Henry’s mother tells stories about her son and swears they’re true. There was the time he pulled all the racks out of the refrigerator, when he was 1. Not long after, he reached in and pulled out a gallon jug of milk and carried it around the kitchen. At 10, he weighed 220 pounds. By high school, he was bench-pressing 525.
Only having started competitive lifting five years ago, Henry is a relative novice. He is still very much unrefined, which is why men who are smaller regularly outlift him. When he gets a little technique, it’s hard to imagine what the limits might be.
“To be as good as he is and as large as he is at 23 . . . he’s a wonder of nature,” said Terry Todd, a kinesiologist at the University of Texas and the man credited with getting Henry started.
The 6-3 Henry may be the size of a boxcar, but don’t be fooled. He can dunk a basketball. He says his vertical leap is 28 inches. Todd says he runs a 5.
0 40. Last year Henry placed third in a Slamfest competition, outdoing NFL stars Steve Atwater and Seth Joyner, to name two.
“You should’ve seen their faces when I beat them,” said the man with the size 16EEEEE feet.
Henry talked about playing offensive line in high school, about how “the running back would just grab my pants and I’d drag him five yards.
” He said he goes into clothes stores and asks for his size 64 XL and the salesmen will say, “What?
”
Henry said being as big as he is is great, as long as you know how to have fun with it. He has no interest in being small.
