The Strongest Man in the World

Apollon’s Wheels were named for one of the great strongmen of the nineteenth century, Louis (Apollon) Uni. A Frenchman from the southern city of Marsillargues, Uni was visiting a junk yard in Paris one day when he came across a pair of spoked railway wheels that were perfect for his stage show. Mounted on a thick steel axle, they formed a barbell that weighed three hundred and sixty-seven pounds. Apart from Uni, only four men had ever managed to clean-and-jerk the device: Charles Rigoulot, in 1930; John Davis, in 1949; Norbert Schemansky, in 1954; and Mark Henry, in 2002. Todd’s version weighed almost a hundred pounds more. The strongmen, rather than jerk it overhead (the easiest part of the lift), had to raise it to their chest, flip it up to shoulder height, then drop it and repeat the lift as often as possible in ninety seconds.

The strongman stage was at one end of the convention center, elevated above the crowd and flanked by enormous video screens. It was covered with black rubber matting and reinforced with steel beams—the contestants alone weighed close to four thousand pounds. As the strongmen trudged out one by one to attempt the lift, speed metal blasted overhead, and several thousand people whooped them on. But it was a discouraging start. On an ordinary barbell, the grip spins freely, so the plates don’t move as they’re being lifted. But these railway wheels were screwed tight to the axle. The men had to rotate them around as they lifted—murder on the arms and shoulders—then keep them from rolling out of their hands. Dealing with this, while holding on to the two-inch-thick axle, required an awkward grip: one hand over and the other hand under. “Even now, most of the men in our contest can’t clean it,” Todd said.

Travis Ortmayer, a strongman from Texas, took a pass and dropped to the bottom of the ranking. Two British strongmen, Terry Hollands and Laurence Shahlaei, managed one lift each, while Jenkins, Poundstone, and the Russian Mikhail Koklyaev did two. The surprise of the contest was Mike Burke, one of Shaw’s protégés from Colorado, who lifted the wheels three times, his face bulging like an overripe tomato. Then came Savickas. He’d put on considerable weight in recent years, most of which had gone to his gut—a sturdy protuberance on which he liked to rest the barbell between lifts. When he’d raised it to his shoulders three times in less than a minute, he took a little breather, like a traveller setting down a suitcase, then casually lofted up a fourth.

Shaw had done as many or more in training, in the thin air of his gym at five thousand feet. But this time, when he brought the bar up to his chest, something seemed to catch in his left arm. He repositioned his hands, dipped down at the knees, and flipped the weight up beneath his chin. But it didn’t look right. “I don’t know what happened,” he told me later. “The warmups felt really good, and the weight felt light off the ground. But when I went up . . . it’s a hard feeling to describe. Almost like electrical shocks—like three different shocks in a row.”

Afterward, Shaw reached over to touch his arm. By the time I found him backstage, the situation was clear: he had “tweaked” his left biceps. The strange shocks were from strands of tendon snapping loose, rolling up inside his arm like broken rubber bands.

Injuries, sometimes devastating, are almost intrinsic to strongman contests: the inevitable product of extreme weight and sudden motion. In 1977, at the first World’s Strongest Man competition, one of the leaders in the early rounds was Franco Columbu, a former Mr. Olympia from Sardinia who weighed only a hundred and eighty-two pounds—a hundred less than his closest competitor. Columbu might have gone on to win, had the next event not been the Refrigerator Race. This involved strapping a four-hundred-pound appliance, weighted with lead shot, onto your back and scuttling across a lot at Universal Studios. Within a few yards, Columbu’s left leg crumpled beneath him. “It was at an L,” he told me. “All the ligaments were torn, and the calf muscle and the hamstring, and the front patella went to the back.” The injury required seven hours of surgery and threatened to cripple Columbu for life, but he came back to win the Mr. Olympia title again in 1981. (He later settled a lawsuit against the World’s Strongest Man for eight hundred thousand dollars.)

The Arnold has a somewhat better track record—“We’ve never had anyone hurt so bad that they had to be carried away,” Todd told me—but its strongmen are a battle-scarred lot. “Man, you can almost go down the list,” Shaw said. Ortmayer had ripped a pectoral muscle, and Poundstone had fractured his back. One man had damaged his shoulder while lifting the Hammer of Strength, and others had torn hamstrings and trapezius muscles. “In strongman, everybody injured,” Savickas told me. “For us, stop just when it’s broken totally—joints, bones, or muscles.” In 2001, at a strongman contest on the Faeroe Islands, Savickas slipped on some sand while turning Conan’s Wheel and tore the patella tendons off both knees. “I can’t walk,” he recalled. “I am laying down. Everybody says that I can’t back. But I back—and won.”

Shaw’s injury was a small thing by comparison. But there were four events left, each of which would put a terrible strain on what remained of his left biceps. “It’s wide open now,” Mark Henry, the former Arnold champion and a judge at the contest, told me between rounds. “I think Brian’s going to have to withdraw. It’s like your daddy probably told you: if the stove’s hot, don’t touch it.”

Ten minutes later, Shaw was back onstage. Using his right arm only, he proceeded to lift a two-hundred-and-fifty-five-pound circus dumbbell above his head five times. “I was hoping to do eight or nine,” he told me afterward. “My left arm is really stronger than my right.” Even so, he took second place in the event—bested only by Jenkins, who did seven lifts—and was now within striking distance of the over-all lead. But how long would his arm hold out?

Strength like Shaw’s is hard to explain. Yes, he has big muscles, and strength tends to vary in proportion to muscle mass. But exceptions are easy to find. Pound for pound, the strongest girl in the world may be Naomi Kutin, a ten-year-old from Fair Lawn, New Jersey, who weighs only ninety-nine pounds but can squat and deadlift more than twice that much. John Brzenk, perhaps the greatest arm wrestler of all time, is famous for pinning opponents twice his size—his nickname is the Giant Crusher. And I remember, as a boy, being a little puzzled by the fact that the best weight lifter in the world—Vasily Alexeyev, a Russian, who broke eighty world records and won gold medals at the Munich and the Montreal Olympics—looked like the neighborhood plumber. Shaggy shoulders, flaccid arms, pendulous gut: what made him so strong?

“Power is strength divided by time,” John Ivy, a physiologist at the University of Texas, told me. “The person that can generate the force the fastest will be the most powerful.” This depends in part on what you were born with: the best weight lifters have muscles with far more fast-twitch fibres, which provide explosive strength, than slow-twitch fibres, which provide endurance. How and where those muscles are attached also matters: the longer the lever, the stronger the limb. But the biggest variable is what’s known as “recruitment”: how many fibres can you activate at once? A muscle is like a slave galley, with countless rowers pulling separately toward the same goal. Synchronizing that effort requires years of training and the right “neural hookup,” Ivy said. Those who master it can lift far above their weight. Max Sick, a great early-nineteenth-century German strongman, had such complete muscle control that he could make the various groups twitch in time to music. He was only five feet four and a hundred and forty-five pounds, yet he could take a man forty pounds heavier, press him in the air sixteen times with one hand, and hold a mug of beer in the other without spilling it. [cartoon id="a16554"]

The convention center was full of people searching for a shortcut to such strength, and venders trying to convince them that they’d found it. There were seven hundred booths in all, staffed by muscle-bound men and balloon-breasted women, handing out samples with complicated ingredients but simple names: Monster Milk, Devil’s Juice, Hemo Rage, Xtreme Shock. “That’s the fastest-acting testosterone booster on the market,” Ryan Keller, the marketing director for Mutant, a maker of “experimental muscle modifiers,” told me, pointing to a product called Mutant Test. “Then there’s Mutant Pump. It’s for the hard-core guys.” Mutant Pump contains a proprietary compound called Hyperox, which pushes the body’s nitric-oxide production “past all previous limits,” according to its marketing material. This allows the muscles to stay pumped full of blood long after a workout. “You can stop lifting, get in your car, and it’s still working,” Keller said. “Some guys say it almost hurts, it gets so hard.” Shaw uses a similar supplement, called Dark Rage, designed to increase his red-blood-cell count. “When he drinks it, he gets excited and does this little dance,” his girlfriend told me.

Here and there among the salespeople were a few who claimed to be doing damage control. I talked to an insurance agent who said that her firm had a strong “appetite” for extreme sports. When I asked if she would indemnify a strongman, she frowned. “Probably not,” she said. “We do mixed martial arts, but if they have a fifty-per-cent loss ratio we aren’t going to do it.” A few aisles over, I met Tom O’Connor, a physician from Hartford, who called himself the Metabolic Doc. A longtime weight lifter, O’Connor was in the business of treating muscle dysmorphia—a kind of reverse anorexia. The condition is often marked by obsessive bodybuilding, abetted by anabolic steroids. “It’s an absolute epidemic!” O’Connor told me, leaning in so close that I could see his pupils dilate and sweat bead on his forehead. “The men come to me broken and hurt. They come to me with cardiac problems and libido problems and erectile dysfunction.” His solution: low-dose hormone-replacement therapy. The sign above his booth read, “Got Testosterone?”

It was tempting, to a flabby outsider like me, to dismiss all this as anomalous—an extreme subculture. But to athletes it was the new normal. “Are you kidding me?” O’Connor said. “Have you seen what’s happening around here? It’s never going to end.” When I asked Jim Lorimer, the co-founder of the festival, what he thought about rising steroid use, he called it a “knotty problem.” Then he told me a story. In 1970, when he brought the world weight-lifting championships to Columbus, the event was a bust at first. “We were at Ohio State University, at Mershon Auditorium, and the first three days—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—it was empty. Maybe a few family members.” Then, on the third day, a scandal broke: eight of the nine top lifters tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. * “Well, that Thursday evening Mershon filled up,” Lorimer recalled. “Friday, Saturday, Sunday—it was filled every day. Now, what lesson do you think I learned from that?”

The bigger the body, the bigger the draw. When it comes to steroids, public censure and private acceptance have tended to rise in parallel. In 1998, after Mark McGwire admitted to doping while setting his home-run record, he was attacked in the press and later blackballed from the Hall of Fame. But sales of steroids skyrocketed. Eight years earlier, George H. W. Bush had both criminalized the use of steroids and appointed Arnold Schwarzenegger—the world’s most famous steroid user—chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. “It’s like an oxymoron,” a strongman said. “Arnold is the poster boy. But if you got into a private conversation, do you really think he’d say, ‘I never should have done that’? Of course he would have done it! He’s a movie star and a millionaire because of it. He was governor of California! He could never have done any of that without it.”

Late one afternoon, when the thumping soundtrack in the main hall was giving me a headache, I ducked into one of the side rooms to watch the women’s Olympic weight-lifting trials. The crowd here was a fraction of the size of the one outside, and the atmosphere was almost monastic by comparison. During the lifts, the room would go completely quiet—no whoops or catcalls, just the deep silence of absolute concentration. The athletes, too, seemed to be of a different species from the strongmen: flexible and surprisingly slender, with muscles that had the almost slack look I remembered in Alexeyev. There was a terrific fierceness about them—some would stamp their feet and let out a shriek before grasping the bar—but its focus was inward. The best female lifters can toss the equivalent of two very large men above their heads in a single motion. It’s the closest that humans come to being superheroes, and these women acted accordingly.

“Weight lifting is fifty per cent mental and thirty per cent technique,” Tommy Kono, among the greatest of all American lifters and a spectator in the crowd that day, told me during a break. “Power is only twenty per cent, but everybody has it reversed.” Kono was a prime example of the miraculous change that weight lifting can effect. A Japanese-American from Sacramento, he was a spindly twelve-year-old in 1942, when his family was relocated to an internment camp at Tule Lake, in Northern California. “The name is a misnomer, really,” Kono said. “It was the bottom of a dried-up lake. When the wind blew, it really kicked up a sandstorm, but the dry air helped my asthmatic condition.” It was there, in another boy’s house, that Kono discovered weight lifting and began to train in secret. (His parents didn’t think his body could handle it.) By the time his family was released, in 1945, he had put on ten or fifteen pounds of muscle. By 1952, he was the Olympic gold medalist as a lightweight. He went on to win another gold as a light heavyweight, and a silver as a middleweight.

Kono blamed the decline in American lifting on an influx of foreign coaches. “They brought in the European idea of training five or six days a week, twice a day,” he said. “Instead of being athletes, they became like workers. Rather than improving, they started getting injuries and overtraining. Even the South American countries started passing us up.” This women’s team was an exception. Unlike the men, they’d qualified for two spots at the Olympics. The best athletes were in the middleweight classes: Amanda Sandoval and Rizelyx Rivera, at fifty-eight kilos, and Natalie Burgener, at sixty-nine. But the competition at those weights was so stiff overseas that the heaviest lifters were more likely to get the spots. (At the trials, all that mattered was how your lifts compared with those of others in your weight class worldwide.) And so, once again, Lorimer’s rule held true: the bigger the body, the bigger the draw. To judge by the cheering between lifts, most of the crowd was there to see Holley Mangold.

Mangold was something of a local celebrity. Born and reared in Dayton, she had played football in high school, on the offensive line, and come within a point of winning a state championship. (Her older brother, Nick, is an All-Pro center with the New York Jets.) Although she’d come late to lifting, Mangold had quickly climbed the ranks and was threatening to supplant the country’s top super-heavyweight, Sarah Robles. “My little girl is all about pure power,” her father, Vern, told me. Five feet eight and well over three hundred pounds, Mangold was astonishingly quick and flexible for her size—she could drop into the full splits with ease. “I’m a huge girl,” she said to me. “I’ve always been huge. At three hundred and fifty pounds, I feel sluggish. But at three hundred and thirty I feel like I can conquer the world.”

In the end, Mangold and Robles both made the Olympic team—Mangold winning the clean and jerk, Robles the snatch. But their lifts were well short of medal contention. To Mangold’s coach, Mark Cannella, the gap wasn’t a matter of too much European-style training but of too little. “We need to be more like them,” he said. “They’re breaking it down, videotaping and analyzing every single lift.” Like gymnastics and dance, Olympic lifting requires such balance, flexibility, and form that it greatly rewards early training—it’s like “barbell ballet,” Vern Mangold said. But most American schools have long since replaced their free weights with machines. “It’s a national disgrace,” Arthur Drechsler, of USA Weightlifting, told me. “If you want to fight childhood obesity or increase fitness, no sport can transform you as much as weight lifting—look at Tommy Kono. And it’s one of the safest things you can do. We don’t have spinal-cord injuries. We don’t have head injuries. They just don’t happen. But weight lifting is not part of the public schools.”

Even with the right training, Americans might still not reach the podium. Unlike strongmen and bodybuilders, Olympic athletes are subject to stringent drug tests in this country, including unannounced visits to their homes. Oversight tends to be much spottier abroad. Since 1976, twelve lifters, all but one of them from Eastern Europe, have been stripped of Olympic medals owing to drug use. A weight lifter can expect about a ten-to-fifteen-per-cent boost from performance-enhancing drugs, Terry Todd estimates—just about what separates Mangold from medal contention. It’s a situation that reminds him of Mark Henry, another prodigy who came late to lifting, stayed clean, and fell short of Olympic gold: “If he had started early and didn’t take drugs, he would have beaten them,” Todd said. “If he had used the drugs and started later, he would have beaten them. But two hurdles was too much.”

The strongmen didn’t have that problem. Theirs, for better or for worse, was a sport without a rule book—an unregulated experiment. It set no limits and allowed no excuses. In the elevator at the hotel on the last night, I heard a groan and looked over to see Travis Ortmayer, the strongman from Texas, doubled over with his elbows on his knees. “You all right, Travis?” I asked. “I’ve been better,” he said. “A thing like this puts the beat on you.” The smallest man in the contest by twenty pounds, Ortmayer had been a late substitute for Benedikt Magnusson, an Icelandic strongman who tore one of his biceps in training. “I’ve never zeroed out of a competition like this before,” he said. “Usually, I would have been getting ready since December. But after the World’s I took three months off to give my body a rest.” When I asked him what hurt, he said pretty much everything.

Earlier that day, Ortmayer and the others had completed two more rounds. First came an event called the Austrian Oak, in honor of Schwarzenegger’s nickname as a bodybuilder. This involved lifting a ten-foot log from a stand at close to shoulder height, then pressing it overhead repeatedly. Banded with steel and coiled with thick rope at the ends, the Oak weighed four hundred and fifty-nine pounds—it took five large men to carry it onstage. Four of the strongmen declined to try to lift it at all, and four tried and failed. That left Savickas, who managed one lift, and Jenkins, who did two. Shaw, his left arm in obvious pain, was among those who had to settle for a lighter Oak, of three hundred and ninety-three pounds. But in a display of incredible grit he lifted it seven times in a row—screaming himself hoarse on the sixth try—putting him in fourth place over all.

“Blood, sweat, and tears, broken bones and torn muscles,” the commentator, a former World’s Strongest Man named Bill Kazmaier, told the crowd. “This is strongman. It’s the last man standing.” On the speakers overhead, Alice in Chains sang “Check My Brain.” The Hummer Tire Dead Lift was next: up to eight oversized tires hung on a bar with steel plates—the heaviest of all the lifts. Jenkins conceded the lead early, topping out at nine hundred and twenty-eight pounds. Derek Poundstone, ranked third, outlifted him by over a hundred pounds—more than enough, I thought, to beat Shaw with his biceps half gone. “Get behind an injured man who’s shot in the arm,” Kazmaier shouted. “C’mon, Brian! Everybody’s behind you!” [cartoon id="a16707"]

Shaw’s left hand had begun to lose its grip, but the rules allowed him to secure it to the bar with a nylon strap. As he bent down to take the weight—a thousand and seventy-three pounds, eleven pounds more than Poundstone’s lift—he raised his face toward the crowd and bellowed. Then he blew out his cheeks once, twice, and lurched upward. The crowd was on its feet, as Kazmaier thundered into the microphone, “Power! Power! Power!” The barbell bent beneath its load, and Shaw’s body began to oscillate like a tuning fork. By the time his back was straight, his eyes were burning and blood was streaming from his nose, into his mouth and down his chin. But the lift was good.

He was now tied for second place with Jenkins and Poundstone, just two and a half points behind Savickas. The latter had set a new world record in the dead lift: eleven hundred and seventeen pounds. But the last event—the Timber Carry—was one of Savickas’s worst, whereas Shaw had won it in record time the year before. If he could hang on one more time, the championship would be his.

On their way to Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium that night, for the final event of the contest, the men sat quietly in a private coach, submerged in their thoughts. They had the half-desperate look of soldiers in a convoy, advancing toward a beachhead. Strongman is a brotherhood, they said. There wasn’t much trash talk or posturing at contests like this—the lifts were daunting enough on their own—but I’d often seen them cheer and comfort one another between lifts, and even offer advice. The year before, at the World’s Strongest Man, they had to drag a twenty-two-thousand-pound Titan truck more than eighty feet down a road. Shaw, who prided himself on fastidious preparation, had ordered a pair of custom truck-pulling shoes from England, with high-friction soles. He would have won the contest, had he not given his spare pair to Björnsson, who beat him by half a second.

Victory at the Arnold meant much more than bragging rights: it was a rare chance to earn a living at this sport. The purses for most strongman contests are paltry—three to five thousand dollars—especially given the risks involved. But the winner of the Arnold would take home fifty-five thousand. Shaw and his girlfriend were living in a small two-bedroom apartment not far from his parents. And Jenkins had been laid off from a teaching job that fall, at a high school for troubled teen-agers in Harrisburg. In November, he’d opened up a gym with money that he borrowed from his parents, but business was slow, and he was getting married that summer. “My gosh, fifty-five thousand dollars could change your life,” he told me.

At the auditorium, the bodybuilding finals were just wrapping up. A line of women in high heels and glitter bikinis were posing for photographs backstage, their skin bronzed and lacquered, their implants all in a row. Theirs was the least bulky of the bodybuilding categories—which rose, in order of ascending mass, from Bikini to Figure to Fitness to Ms. International—but they looked as sinewy as velociraptors. When I asked the winner, a diminutive brunette named Sonia Gonzales, what set her apart, she flashed her teeth. “My sex,” she said. Behind the curtain, the male bodybuilders were preparing for the final pose-down. They’d been dehydrating themselves for days, so every vein and striation showed, but their limbs were cramped, their minds depleted. They sat hunched on benches or stood flexing in front of mirrors, as hollow-eyed as statues in a sculpture garden.

The stage set had a classical theme—broken columns against a fiery sky—and a long, low ramp ran in front of it. When the strongman final began, a huge wooden frame, roughly bolted together out of barn timbers, was carried out and placed at one end. The object was to stand inside this frame, lift it by a pair of handles along the sides, and run up the ramp as fast as possible. The frame weighed nearly nine hundred pounds—more than most strongmen could deadlift—and, unlike the previous year, no wrist straps were allowed. This was a problem for Shaw, but no less so for Savickas. The great Lithuanian had lost some of his grip strength over the years, as the weight he’d gained had gone into his fingers. “It’s like putting on a tight pair of gloves, then another pair, and another pair,” Todd told me. “Each one makes it that much harder to grip—there’s flesh where there used to be space.”

The Timber Carry was the climax of the contest and extremely hard on the body. Four of the strongmen never made it up the ramp. The weight tore calluses from their hands, and the frame kept tipping and slipping as they ran. Savickas looked strong at first, then lost his grip, dropping the frame six times before leaving it for good—two yards from the finish line. Others fared better. Travis Ortmayer reached the top in just under nine and a half seconds—good enough for a touch of redemption—and Derek Poundstone was almost two seconds faster. Afterward, Poundstone tore off his shirt and flexed for the crowd, just as Jan Todd had predicted.

When Shaw came to the starting line, he looked loose and light on his feet. He shook the kinks from his arms and bounced on his toes like a boxer, then bent down to pick up the frame. It seemed, for a moment, as he charged up the slope, that he might just make it in time. “I could see the finish line,” he told me the next morning. “But then you’re trying to hold on, and your grip starts to lose it, and it’s just opening, opening, opening. And it’s just . . . pain. I feel the worst pain. I don’t know anything else.” He was less than two feet from the top when the last strands of his biceps tore free, and the frame came thudding down. He managed one last, agonizing push to the finish line, as blinded and enraged as Samson in the temple. Then he stumbled backstage and collapsed.

Victory, in the end, went to Mike Jenkins. He hurtled up the ramp in just under seven and a half seconds—fourteen-hundredths faster than Poundstone—and won the championship by a single point. Later that night, at the trophy presentation, Schwarzenegger asked him how he’d done it: “For schlepping up this weight up the ramp—I mean, how do you train for something like that?” Jenkins levelled his eyes at him, deadpan. “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I do yoga at 6 a.m.,” he said. “Then Tuesdays, Thursdays, I have Zumba at 7 p.m.” Schwarzenegger grinned and nodded. “That’s very impressive,” he said. “I can really visualize you in yoga positions. This is exciting. I think we can sell tickets to that one.”

When I last saw Shaw, he was back home in Colorado, recuperating from surgery. The injury had been worse than he feared. The tendon had all but exploded—“It looked like the end of a mop,” his surgeon, Peter J. Millett, told me—and the muscle had fully retracted inside his arm. To reattach it, they’d had to trim the tendon down, drill a hole through the radius bone, then pull it through and secure it with a titanium button. “He said my tendons were three times the size of normal,” Shaw said. “They had to use a hip retractor.” Still, if he was lucky, the repaired biceps would be even stronger than before and more sturdily attached. “I heard the sutures they used are like the strongest industrial space-age stuff they could find,” Shaw said. I thought of a line that Terry Todd had quoted at the Arnold, from “A Farewell to Arms”: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Shaw’s left arm was in a removable cast, and he said that his skin felt rubbery and numb, but he insisted on driving me around anyway. “There’s never a right time to get hurt,” he said, as we circled past the old basketball courts at his high school, the fields where he used to bale hay for his uncle. “This was supposed to be the performance that people would talk about for years. That’s probably what makes it harder to swallow.” He shook his head. “What’s crazy is, if it had happened on the third rep of that first event, instead of the first, I still would have won.” Even with the injury, Shaw had come within seven seconds of victory—perhaps his greatest feat, though it earned him only fourth place over all. In Fort Lupton, the city council had recently hung a banner across Main Street, declaring it “Home of the World’s Strongest Man.” But the wind had blown the banner down, and it was nowhere to be seen.

Shaw hoped to be back in top form by late summer—time enough to get ready for the World’s Strongest Man, in September. In the meantime, he had nothing to do but wait for his body to heal. Late in the afternoon, he pulled into a Toys R Us to buy a present for his nephew Caiden, who had just turned one. “This isn’t exactly my specialty,” he said. “When my niece had her birthday, I bought her a battery-powered Jeep. Turned out she couldn’t even ride it.” He spent the first few minutes in the electronics section, looking at toys marked for kids age four to nine—“I’d like to buy him a robot or something,” he said—then finally settled on a car with a built-in cannon that shot rubber balls.

By the time we arrived at his parents’ house, the party was in full swing. Relatives were circled in chairs around the living room, while toddlers romped across the carpet in the middle. Shaw sat on the couch, holding himself as still as possible as the kids crawled all over him. He looked happier than I’d seen him in a while. “When Caiden was born, Brian was too intimidated to hold him,” his sister, Julie, told me. “He was six pounds ten ounces and nineteen and a half inches. Curled up in a ball, he was the same size as Brian’s shoe.” She sighed. “I pray my son won’t take after him. Finding clothes is so hard. But I’m sure Caiden will want to bring Brian in for show-and-tell—holy cow! he’s like a superhero!—and he’ll want to rough around with him. I’ll be, like, ‘Brian, you just sit there. Don’t give him a high five. You’ll knock him out.”