Strongman Beat the Hell Out of 20 Guys Back in the Day - for Real?

[MHaes]

The US had strong Nazi support at the time, guys.
And yeah, this story is true. The Mighty Atom was legit. He grew up under the tutelage of an old time strongman and continued his training. He was strong enough to bite quarters in half and break two or three chains with his chest. This is the same guy who could change a tire on a car with no tools. He wasn't a genetic freak either, he was basically a runty little kid who took his health into his own hands, and kept at it, for decades.
Since he had a bat I see no reason why he couldn't have shithammered twenty untrained Nazis.


For anyone interested, here's a clip I managed to find of him

State your sources.

 

[Lemmo]

Obvious BS. If people are out there who will believe something like this, I'm going into business selling overpriced crap to the gullible.

 

[Hades]

Haha, do you guys work for the Nazi Anti-Defamation league or something? If you guys want the source, buy his biography or google it and decide for yourselves if you think it actually happened.

I am not sure how to look up old court cases, but Joe Greenstein (the Mighty Atom) was brought to trial. "In 1939 Joe Greenstein was charged with aggravated assault, grievous bodily harm, and mass mayhem". According to the article the old Nazi headquarters was in New York, so if these sort of court cases were digitized (unlikely?) or in a library someplace, it's possible that it could be located here.

Edit: His son, Mike Greenstein, is still around at 93 and was on America's Got Talent doing strongman stunts not too long ago.

 

[Beyond Borders]

^ Way to revive a 2-year-old thread, Hades.

On another note, I've done more reading on this recently, and I believe it was legit.

 

[Pontifex Maximus]

I've been doing Convict Conditioning for 2 months now. It's really does sculpt your body towards that Adonis ratio that curls and squats don't. What I'm confused about is one man vs. 20 Nazi's at the same time?

Did the Nazi's run at him one by one like the Power Ranger goons?
The maximum possible configuration is 3 Nazi's vs Strongman. Anymore than 3 Nazi's, and the Nazi's would get in each other's way trying to hit him.

 

[Hades]

^ Way to revive a 2-year-old thread, Hades.

On another note, I've done more reading on this recently, and I believe it was legit.

Funny you mention that, I'd spent the last hour or two googling on the exact court date and information about the Nazi beatdown and this thread kept popping up in the search box. It got to the point where I tried looking up German American Bund records but I'm pretty sure they're long gone.

There are other interesting stories about the Mighty Atom that I'd found too, such as how he got his start in show business. Apparently a car broke down and he was flagged down to help change the tire, so he just picked up the rear end of the car and changed it with the passengers still inside.

Harry Houdini and his manager.

Still trying to verify that one, too.

There are still a lot of avenues to go through. A guy could contact Mike Greenstein (his son), or the strongman community (Slim "The Hammerman" Farman, "Blain Hoffmeister of Bath", his biographer Ed Spielman), or shell out fifty bucks on amazon for his biography -> http://www.amazon.com/The-Mighty-Atom-Greenstein-Superhuman/dp/0670475645 <-
I even looked up the registries of all the local libraries for the book but nothing is or ever has been available.

None of those options are easy or free. Too bad it's not fifty years ago, then I could just visit the guy.

 

[Beyond Borders]

I've been doing Convict Conditioning for 2 months now. It's really does sculpt your body towards that Adonis ratio that curls and squats don't. What I'm confused about is one man vs. 20 Nazi's at the same time?

Did the Nazi's run at him one by one like the Power Ranger goons?
The maximum possible configuration is 3 Nazi's vs Strongman. Anymore than 3 Nazi's, and the Nazi's would get in each other's way trying to hit him.

He had a baseball bat, and I'm sure he stayed moving.

I'm sure not all Nazis attacked. Some probably did all they could to stay back.

I also think people over-emphasize the Nazi thing. Being part of some Nazi political party didn't mean these guys were necessarily battle-hardened soldiers.

 

[Beyond Borders]

^ Way to revive a 2-year-old thread, Hades.

On another note, I've done more reading on this recently, and I believe it was legit.

Funny you mention that, I'd spent the last hour or two googling on the exact court date and information about the Nazi beatdown and this thread kept popping up in the search box. It got to the point where I tried looking up German American Bund records but I'm pretty sure they're long gone.

There are other interesting stories about the Mighty Atom that I'd found too, such as how he got his start in show business. Apparently a car broke down and he was flagged down to help change the tire, so he just picked up the rear end of the car and changed it with the passengers still inside.

Harry Houdini and his manager.

Still trying to verify that one, too.

Yeah, a guy with this kind of strength could definitely lift something like the rear end of a car. Changing the tire while holding it and with everyone sitting inside sounds kind of goofy though - not even plausible on a human behavior standpoint. Probably some embellishment.

I was actually going to do a strongman training thread (not to suggest I have any specialized knowledge in it haha) but decided not to. Guess I'll go ahead and post it.

Here's the link:

http://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-42446.html

 

[Suits]

It's too bad that elite forum member Little Dark got banned before he could weigh in on this thread.

 

[Beyond Borders]

^ haha That crossed my mind earlier.

 

[Praetor Lupus]

This smells strongly of having been exaggerated. Just like the Jesse Owens shit, where they make it out like it was some great defeat for National Socialism when a black dude won a gold medal at the Olympics. In reality Owens was treated better in Nazi Germany than he was in the United States: he was afforded the luxury of sitting on white people toilets, which was a no-no back in the good old land of freedom.

Indeed. And while Hitler didn't shake his hand, he didn't 't shake any of the athlete's hands. He did meet Owens afterwards, which reportedly is more than FDR, Owens' own president did.

Fucking shameful.

 

[Marmite]

Little Dark must be a descendant of this guy.

 

[SteveMcMahon]

I came here for the Little Dark story.

Free Little Dark!

He's their only hope.

 

[Kitsune]

A friend was second in state in wrestling at 163 and recruited heavily by Iowa.

I trained hard, boxed, but was four years younger.

Me and a bunch of my friends tried taking him down. We were between 14-16, football players, boxers, wrestlers...So it's not like a game of "How many vie year olds can you take in a fight?"

It's hard to explain...But even wrestling him hurt. His shin bones felt like steel. It was just uncomfortable.

Five of us couldn't take him down. He just threw us all off or let us hang on him.

He was all natural, too. He's one of the only people I've ever been jealous of.

I have to bust my ass for my gains. He'd simply show up to the gym or wrestling room and be elite. (He had a spot at Iowa if he would have graduated high school.)

He was coming of age in the early UFC era. Pat Militech called him trying to get him to train.

If he had pushed himself, who knows what he could have done. Militech built a lot of champs and wouldn't have wasted his time on a nobody...

Some guys are just 1-in-10,000 genetic specimens. Unless you've personally dealt with some freak like that, it's something that's just really hard to comprehend.

Yeah, look at Fedor.

If you saw Fedor in a bar, you'd think, "That is one chubby 5'10 Russian." If I showed you a picture of him and you'd never heard of him, you'd never think he'd be the guy at MMA.

Even during his fights, he looked like he should never win. He wasn't explosive like Randleman, wasn't a bodybuilder type, didn't even display any signs of super testosterone like a lot of the Pride guys. Still, he just had it. Could take bombs, could get out of subs, could lock an armbar on so quickly, insane handspeed, that natural judo positioning thing.

You wouldn't believe Fedor could beat a dozen guys up, but I wouldn't want to be the first, second, third or twelfth guy to fight him.

On the flip side as far as genetics go, look at pics of Brock Lesnar when he was young. Guy was always going to be a genetic freak. His MMA career proved it; he didn't like getting hit, relied on a limited skill set and still became a defending world champion.

Also with "one guy beats up 10 guys" type stories you have to remember most people can't fight. Those Nazi's in the OP story might have been bad guys - but if they can't throw a punch, they aren't scaring anyone. Floyd Mayweather is probably about 150lbs. To beat twenty guys it'd take him twenty punches. Loads of guys on the internet and in bars puff their e-chests, but most people would be done after one punch to the chin from someone who knew how to throw a punch.

 

[TheWastelander]

He was a strongman, had a bat and was fighting German American Bund guys. I believe it.

Had they actually been SA street fighters it probably wouldn't have gone so well.

 

[iop890]

Fuck, I always find these threads after all the good Little Dark jokes have been taken.

 

[Sp5]

It's possible since he was in excellent shape, had some kind of training in "combatives" and so had given some thought to the problem of hand-to-hand combat. He could have hit a couple of guys hard, disabled them, and then most of the rest would be deer in the headlights.

This is an good memoir on training for close combat when your life is at stake and then getting into fights.

Richard Sale: Close Combat part 1

Richard Sale: Close Combat part 2

I had previously been trained by a private eye in New York City who had been a former French Foreign Legionnaire. His name was Armand Sereghetti. Like Boomer, he was a man of enormous charm. One of the first things he taught me was never, never to advance on an opponent. You let him advance on you. Plus, you never ever made eye contact with him. You kept your eyes fastened to his chest, watching for any tensing of muscles that telegraphed a punch. Armand had once found himself on the brink of a bar fight with another man who turned out to be a legionnaire, but Armand didn’t know it at the time. He discovered it in a strange way. The two men refused to advance on each other. Instead, they kept their eyes fastened to each other’s chests for twenty minutes until one of them took a safe step back and sought eye contact, found it, and the standoff was ended.
He taught me never to exchange insults before you palm jabbed someone or struck the side of their neck with the edge of your hand. The Hollywood scenes where men stood chin to chin, jeering at each other, were not only fatuous, they were dangerous. Armand taught me excellent judo throws and arm and wrist locks. When I was an assistant coach, (I was still a teenager), a burly football player tried to knock me over in practice. He had knocked me over the first time. The second time, I threw him over my hip, and he landed flat on his back.

So the training with Boomer began. I had lived with the 4,500 member Blackstone Rangers, a black gang in Chicago. I got many death threats, but I still saw them as human beings. At first, Boomer’s practices were pretty taxing. He used to spar with his brother, and Boomer once told me: “My brother had me by my nut sack, and he wouldn’t let go, so I bit him across the bridge of his nose until he passed out.” After that, the two brothers didn’t spare any more. Boomer played for keeps.

One day, Boomer asked me if I had every done squat jumps. I never had, so he asked me if I could do fifty. To my own amazement, I did them, and he remarked, “A lot of guys cannot to that amount even after a lot training,” which made me less of a hopeless case in my eyes.

At that time, I lived in an apartment complex in Southwest Washington across the street from a black, lower-income housing project. (I know that, today, blacks are called African-Americans, but they weren’t called that then.) The day before my family arrived, a lawyer named John Black, white, age 40, and had been shot dead in the parking lot near a black high school. A gang ran the black housing project, headed by a guy named “Skinny Pimp.” He was supposedly the terror of the neighborhood.

I had been doing a lot of weight lifting when I met Boomer. I was doing 328 pounds at a body weight of 170-2. I did a 425 squat or something. That strength Boomer taught me to employ with effect. In the gym where I worked out, there was an old punching bag hanging from the ceiling. Over time, all the sand in it had settled into a rock-hard layer at the bottom. If you sat on your knees, you had to hit your knuckles 300 times a day to toughen up your knuckles to drive the sensations out of them. The same thing had to be done for your shins and the knobs of your wrists and ankles. Three hundred or more times a day, you had to take a short club and hit those spots. Finally the day came when Boomer could come up with his paratrooper boots and kick my shins without hurting them.

Because my knuckles had no sensation, I could hit an object very hard. One man bet me $50 that I would ruin my hand if I hit a tree with all my might. (We had been drinking, needless to say.) I smashed at it with all my force, and while my knuckles with a little red and a little swollen, my hand wasn’t damaged at all. That is what conditioning can do. At a drunken Georgetown party, the owner of an apartment bet me I couldn’t knock his front door off the hinges. I did.

 

[pitt]

I am not impressed.

Little dark took down 30 guys and he is only 18.

Little dark is Irish and has beaten 30 guys in Germany, it can't get more gangster than that, how many of you had fights overseas?

Little dark never had any formal training.

Little dark is humble, even though he took down 30 guys, he says '' that is not the point guys''.

Top that motherfuckers.