By now, enough has been written about Bill Dobbins’ passing to firmly establish that our community has lost a legend. And we did. I’ve had a few different kinds of relationships with Bill over the decades, some contentious. That can happen when women have any influence at all on any particular situation. At the time, I was in the girls’ corner, which can sometimes—ultimately, as it did in this case—prove unfortunate.
Over the years, things cooled, and one night in Columbus, at the Arnold, long after said females were out of the picture, Bill came up to me and said, “You know, you and I should really start talking to each other.” That was fine with me, so we did. And I’ll be forever grateful Bill stuck out the olive branch. As Greg Valentino would say, Bill was a good guy.
During the ’90s, while male bodybuilders were setting the world on fire, producing icons that still, to this very day, have not been eclipsed, female bodybuilders were setting their own course—and Bill was smack dab in the middle of it, advocating for female physique athletes like few other people on the planet. I can’t even count how many women he helped get a foothold in, and navigate around, our industry. While wildly benevolent on its face, there was a dark side to it. At the time, some of the women were very openly doing some very naughty and perverted things with strange men in hotel rooms to pay their bills. That fact created an automatic aura around anyone who doth profess too much the allure of female muscle—a penchant of Bill’s that got him labeled a “schmo.”
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? “Schmo.” But it’s funny—it actually just sounds like a malevolent term. I think it’s the “sch” sound. Some people did label others with the term, intending some kind of malevolence, or to describe them as just plain icky, to the point where I had several women—both clients and my wife at the time—who insisted I accompany them to any of Bill’s shoots. And that’s where I kinda got to understand the guy.
First, we’re all schmoes. If you like girls with muscles—especially enough to befriend, date, or marry them—then you’re a schmo. I’m a schmo; most of my friends are schmoes. Just how fanatical a fan you are of it determines how schmoey you are. And, for better or worse, Bill was up there.
The next thing you have to understand is that artists are quirky. And Bill was definitely an artist. I’ll give you an example…
Back in those days, photographers loaded this stuff into their cameras called “film.” There were no SD cards. The picture they took was projected onto the film, and then the film had to be sent to a lab for processing, either into prints or slides. That took days. The only instant kind of photography that existed back then was called “Polaroid.” The pictures were not nearly the quality of film, but you did get glimpses of what the real pic would look like so you could correct lighting, angles, etc.
Let’s just say that Bill took a lot of Polaroids and studied them intently. To the uninitiated, it was grueling. Each Polaroid took a minute or two to develop, then he had to look at it and absorb what it was telling him, move something, change something… A string of those and your pump starts to fade. While most photogs would shoot three or four Polaroids, Bill would shoot twenty.
Then the guitar would come out—and not as a prop. OMG, he’s playing the guitar? Most shoots are scheduled either immediately before or immediately after a show, while the subject is in “contest shape.” So you can imagine: they’re starving, irritable, exhausted—they just want to get it over with. But Bill shoots for Joe Weider. You don’t get any higher up the food chain than that. So you just kind of nod along while he strums.
Eventually, he stops, has you get back on set, touch up your oil, do a few more towel pulls—and guess what? He shoots another Polaroid! AAAAAAGGGGG!!
Yes, I was being cheeky about the tech, but not about the experience. If you’ve ever shot with Bill, you know that it takes two days to recuperate. But why? Simple answer: respect for you gifts and the prestige of being in print. Bill was a consummate artist who took pride in his work and put every ounce of himself into it. His eye, his mind, his vision—the Polaroids, the guitar—all combined to elicit some of the most artistic images that will awe people for hundreds of years to come.
All the photographers and writers of that era operated the same way. The magazines were the only source of news and information we had, and they were all in direct competition with each other. We wanted what we put out to be the best. That’s not to say that there isn’t great content being produced today, but my dog – the dumb one – could get a byline online. Almost anyone who had their byline in print carried prestige enough to become a legend, especially if you were working for Weider.
Compared to today, there was just a handful of us contributing to just four or five magazines. Today, there are literally thousands of writers, photographers, videographers, and social media experts contributing to a firehose of media deposited on numerous online platforms all over the world. It’s watered down. No one knows who these people are—or if they’re even actual people and not AI. During Bill’s tenure, if you were following bodybuilding, particularly the women, you knew his name.
The last time I saw Bill, I said to myself that he didn’t look too good. But then again, none of us do—we’re all getting old. Some of us do it a bit better than others, and in an industry completely absorbed with how we look, people such as Lenda Murray, Mike O’Hearn, Monica Brant, and others set the stage for a remarkableness befitting our aging industry. But they also set the bar kinda high; we all look terrible next to them—at any age. So for me to say Bill didn’t look so good, he still looked pretty good. But I could tell something wasn’t right, and we didn’t talk about it.
Whatever killed him only took his body. The enormous amount of artistic media Bill left behind has immortalized an entire segment of our sport. As history remembers and admires the ’90s era of bodybuilding—particularly the women—Bill’s photos will be among those in the pantheon that defined perhaps the most glorious era of bodybuilding. Countless athletes, many of them legends, bear the mark of Bill’s immortal art.
We can be sad about him being gone, but that accomplishes nothing. Being grateful he was here and sharing his work is the best way to celebrate Bill’s life. It’s a celebration well deserved. Godspeed, my old friend. You are one who will live forever.