Dave Draper Prepares To Catch Shannon Tate In “Don’t Make Waves”
MPTV vias Reuters
hide captions
switch captions
MPTV vias Reuters
Dave Draper Prepares To Catch Shannon Tate In “Don’t Make Waves”
MPTV vias Reuters
Dave Draper, former Mr. The sinewy Universe known as the “Blonde Bomber,” who inspired a generation of bodybuilders including Arnold Schwarzenegger, has passed away. He was 79 years old.
His wife Laree Draper wrote on Facebook that he died on Tuesday, without giving a cause of death.
“I was with him and it was so calm and peaceful,” she said. “As his doctor told me a little while ago, is a good death.”
Draper, born April 16, 1942 in Secaucus, NJ says that at the age of 12, weights and dumbbells has become very important to him.
“They are my solid steel friends that I can count on,” Draper writes on his website. “When the road gets tough, when I keep missing baseball, and when the girls are too cute to talk to, the weights are there and they speak my language.”
After being crowned Mr New Jersey in 1962, Draper took a job at the Weider Barbell Company in Santa Monica, California and trained at Muscle Beach – an icon of the 20th-century fitness boom – alongside Joe Gold, founder of Gold’s Gym, and famous bodybuilders like Frank Zane and Irvin “Zabo” Koszewski.
Draper is 6 meters tall and his ragged body weighs 235 pounds. Among the titles of the International Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation that he won was Mr. America in 1965, Mr. Universe in 1966 and Mr. World in 1970.
A young Austrian bodybuilder he coached at Muscle Beach, who would later become governor of California, recalls how he admired Draper.
“Dave Draper is an inspiration to millions around the world, myself included. He is one of my idols,” Schwarzenegger wrote on Instagram Page.
Growing up in Austria, he kept a magazine cover of Draper “on the wall above my bed for motivation”, and when he saw him starring in the 1967 film Don’t make waves, “I thought, ‘My dreams are possible.'”
“When I went to America and finally met Dave, I learned his heart was as big as the pieces of mine,” Schwarzenegger said.
Draper has been featured in dozens of bodybuilding magazines cover image and then open about his past steroid use, said, “If you don’t take them, don’t. If you have, you’ll wish you never did.”
Draper also writes books about bodybuilding and fitness. His last, a memoir titled A glimpse of the scene in the background, published in 2020.
