Back in October of '98, I got to go to a National League Playoff game between the San Diego Padres and the Houston Astros. I really don't remember a hell of a lot about the game, but one thing stands out in my memory. About mid-way through the first inning, I heard the drone of what sounded like a low-flying plane; one of those propeller jobs that looks like it's used to dust crops.
I looked up, and sure enough, there was a plane, but trailing behind it was a long banner with this peculiar message:
LISA U SOLD MY RING & GOT BOOBS NOW GIVE ME MY $4000 BACK
Now, I don't know anything about Lisa and her previous fiancée, but I do know this: Lisa and her boyfriend had a bad breakup, and that's putting it mildly.
Few people are mature enough to break up well, and I guess that's understandable, given that hurt feelings are almost always involved.
Along the same lines, I've got a theory about all those porn shots on the Internet. I figure that most of the naked pics out there were made available by pissed-off boyfriends.
Here's how I imagine most of the scenarios went: Boyfriend, during the "good days" of the relationship, talks girlfriend into getting naked for his Polaroid, swearing up and down that no one else will ever see them. Girlfriend has a few shots of Yeagermeister, starts to get into it, drops her panties, and spreads her legs about as wide as Jean Claude Van Damme when he's dodging errant gunfire. Months later, girlfriend leaves boyfriend because she caught him dry-humping her Pilates instructor.
Boyfriend is indignant, and gets revenge by posting the naked pics on the Internet, where they're picked up and added to the collections of a thousand porn sites. Girlfriend then joins a nunnery in the mountains of Spain, never to be seen again by friends or family.
Business relationships are also prone to bad breakups. If any of you have been even remotely associated with some sort of management position, you surely know what it's like to fire a bad employee. Within minutes of leaving the office, he's contacted all his former co-workers, bad-mouthed you to his next employer, and done everything to disparage your reputation, short of taking out an ad in USA Today.
Testosterone is a very young company, but we've already experienced our share of that sort of thing. In fact, we're currently experiencing what you'd call a bad break-up.
We recently told one of our former contributors that we couldn't use his work anymore. Now, this was a free-lancer who was completely unknown in the industry before we gave him a chance. This was a guy who was, despite his age, a novice writer, never having written anything for publication that we're aware of.
So we take a chance on the guy. But try as we might, he won't take any coaching. He refuses to crack open a textbook and his articles are rife with technical inaccuracies — so many that a few slip by and end up causing us big-time embarrassment. He turns every article, every interview, into a tribute to himself, even interjecting quasi-political viewpoints about such issues as gun control. We edit, rewrite, and edit, and we try to work with him, but most of our suggestions are met with resistance and a reminder of his allegedly high IQ.
Furthermore, he contacts practically all our other writers, privately, and tries to stir up trouble, playing one against the other, spreading half-truth rumors and downright lying — never satisfied with anything and jealous of everyone else with whom he has to share the limelight.
We fully realize we're working with someone who has some ego problems, but our patience starts to wear thin and reaches critical mass when we catch him putting his dick into Tim's lunch. Yep, we open up the kitchen door, and there he is, burying his unit into Tim's carton of Knudsen's cottage cheese.
That's the thanks we get. Okay, maybe that didn't happen, but it might as well have.
So we let him go, not that, as a freelancer, he was ever really employed by us.
We forget about him, forge ahead with the mission plan, but weeks later, he resurfaces on another site, this time talking about how he quit because we're "not hardcore" anymore; how we're "sellouts"; and how his high moral integrity wouldn't allow him to continue.
When I first read that, I choked up a little piece of tuna-fish sandwich I was eating and had to give myself a Heimlich. Any fool can look at our early issues and see that we're far more ballsy, interesting, and "hardcore" now. And ironically, paradoxically, gastrointestinally, and a whole bunch of other "ally" words, this guy was anything but hardcore, often trying to get me to accept milquetoast articles. A lot of his stuff, once reworked and massaged, was acceptable, but hardcore? Gimme' a break.
Maybe he's just pissed 'cuz, unlike Lisa who sold her boyfriend's ring, he didn't get any boobs out of the deal. But he did get a liposuction ab job (as part of an article), done by the world-renown Dr. Bruce Nadler.
Furthermore, this person of "high moral integrity" has joined up with some of the worst bastards this business has ever seen crawl out of the primordial ooze.
It's almost as if this site was developed with the sole purpose of attacking Biotest and Testosterone, and they "hired" this ex-Testosterone writer so he could badmouth us. Because of his hurt feelings, he's taken back all the good things he said about our supplements, our company, and us, as individuals.
Bad break-up. Lots of boo-hoo hurt feelings. Man, we're just lucky we didn't pose naked for him!
Face it, most relationships, business or otherwise, eventually come to an end. And we think a man's character is best defined on how he ends things, rather than how he managed through the good times.
Anyhow, I fully understand what this individual and this other company is doing. They act like they've got Mad Cow Disease, but in reality, they probably don't.
When you start a new company, particularly a new bodybuilding Internet company, you struggle for recognition and hits. You do everything short of posting nasty pictures of your wife to get people to check out your site. So maybe you decide you have to get down and dirty, maybe even attack someone who's successful. You take credit for their products, call them shysters, and maybe even throw some high drama into the picture by saying that their products will kill users, kill them dead just by opening up a bottle and taking a whiff! Omygod! Omygod!
So, in most cases, the company that's being attacked is forced to reply in some fashion. In doing so, they give the name-calling, libel-slewing company instant credibility, and they create curiosity about the sleezeballs. Instant hits to their site! Here comes the moolah! "Mr. Ferrari dealer? Order me that-there red Testarossa, please!"
I've even been guilty of the same thing, but to a much more benign degree. When we started Biotest/Testosterone, I tried to gently goad my previous partner/employer into mentioning us in Muscle Media by making jokes about him. But noooo, Bill Phillips was way too smart for that. He never mentioned us (the bastard)! So, we had to get readers the old-fashioned way; we had to earn them by doing quality work.
We've learned to show some restraint, too. When the snot-nosed eight-year-old down the street rides his bike over your freshly planted lawn and rips up the turf so that it looks like you just staged a Monster Truck rally, and then sticks his tongue out at you as he rides away, you have an impulse to beat the Holy Hell out of him. But you don't. You hope he grows out of it and becomes a respectable citizen.
Of course, once in awhile, he grows up and ends up perched in a clock tower, plugging people, and you would have done the world a favor if you had thrown the kid in a leaf mulcher, but hey, whadda' ya' gonna' do?
Similarly, when we read some libelous attacks, we may initially feel like dropping everything and attacking the bad men, but ultimately, the reader suffers. He reads the Hatfield-McCoy bullshit, sighs, looks at his smallish biceps, and says, "Who cares about that stuff? What about my guns?"
It's funny, but I liken the whole Internet/bodybuilding business to Stephen King's novel, The Stand. It's like the "Walking Dude" and his evil minions have taken up residence in one part of the Internet, while the good guys have congregated with Testosterone, which must make Tim, in accordance with the novel, the oldest living black woman in the world. The only difference is that he lives in Colorado Springs, and not Boulder.
We sometimes imagine what it would be like if other companies in other industries acted like the bodybuilding business. "Your brand of toothpaste blows!" "Our diapers can hold a lot more shit than yours!" "If you wear their brand of bra, your breasts will get all waffly looking, and no man will love you!"
Of course, no industry is so rife with fraud and really, really, pathetic advertising like bodybuilding is.
So we sigh, shake our heads, and take up business as usual, making sure that we find the best writers, strength coaches, scientists, and generally all-round cool guys to give you what I think is easily the most informative, innovative, and entertaining site out there.
So far, it's been an incredible success. We write what's exciting and interesting to us, and we make the supplements we want to use. And hopefully, you like the same kinds of things we do, or we're in big trouble — because that's all we know.
Thankfully, you guys and us guys do think alike, which has resulted in phenomenal growth over the last three years. In fact, the rate at which we're growing is making the rest of the industry wail and gnash their teeth. And that's why they want us to talk about them so they'll at least attract some foot traffic.
Fat chance, suckers!
So if you stray off the path occasionally to check out a new website or chatroom and you note that they're bashing us with all the fervor of a methamphetamine-crazed sociopath, don't expect us to roll out the heavy artillery every time. After all, they're just trying to raise a ruckus and get noticed, the same way a spoiled three-year old does when his parents and friends try to have an adult conversation.
Either that, or they're trying to exact a certain measure of revenge, like Lisa's boyfriend, who, for all his troubles, doesn't even get to play with her boobs.
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J/k bro
