Wisconsin native remembers wild 'American Gladiators' journey as Netflix doc premieres

"This is a stupid show."

Steve Henneberry hadn't seen "American Gladiators" when the first season aired on TV in 1989, but when a photographer handed him a VHS tape of the pilot episode, he wasn't impressed.

Henneberry, born in raised in Muskego and a 1981 graduate of Waterford High School, nevertheless continued to ponder trying out for a spot in the cast of the hyper-athletic reality competition. The next morning, he packed a cooler in his car and made the trip from San Diego to Los Angeles.

When he got there, he found he'd be competing with numerous other bodybuilders for a role on the still-fledgling program. Fortunately for Henneberry, a baseball and football player at Waterford, he separated himself from the pack thanks to his performance in the show's athletic tests. And then, he had something else up his sleeve.

"They sent me to go meet with producers and directors, and I'm standing in front of them while they're looking you up and down, (and they ask), 'Why do you think you should be on this show?'" he recalled. "Real seriously, I said, 'Look around here at all these other athletes. What do you see? We see a bunch of big buff guys, but they're all 5-6, 5-8, they're short. I'm 6-foot-4, I'm different and I want to be the Tower.'"

The producers agreed. The character Tower was born, and Henneberry's wild ride as an American Gladiator had begun.

Netflix series puts 'American Gladiators' back in the limelight

At the forefront of the reality competition oeuvre, "American Gladiators" became a sensation during its run from 1989 to 1996, pitting "average joes" against a team of mononym mercenaries in a series of one-on-one competitions. The show remains part of the zeitgeist today, first with a 2008 revival and now with documentaries both from ESPN and Netflix. The latter recently dropped a five-episode documentary, "Muscles & Mayhem: An Unauthorized Story of American Gladiators," and Henneberry is among those who participate in the miniseries.

Tower debuted as a gladiator in the middle of the second season in 1991, and he remained a regular until 1995. He was originally hired as an alternate but became part of the show when another member of the cast, Turbo, suffered a serious injury.

The Netflix series explores the injuries — there were many — suffered by the contestants and gladiators alike, with an intense filming schedule requiring the gladiators often compete through their various ailments and a costume aesthetic that emphasized flashy and scant over protective.

Henneberry's laundry list of injuries included bilateral elbow relocation on the nerve for both elbows, a pectoral torn off the bone, a head injury requiring 44 stitches, a compound fracture in his wrist and a torn patella tendon. He said he got addicted to pain medication and needed 14 surgeries during his days on the show.

The documentary also explores the show's drug culture, particularly as it related to performance enhancers, though Henneberry took issue with some of the documentary's details.

"I was in the '80s with bodybuilding, it was the era and I'm not going to tell you I didn't do steroids, but on the show, they drug-tested us," he said. "They made it sound as if we were injecting meth and heroin and sharing needles (on the documentary). I've never done coke, never done heroin, never done any of that stuff. We were athletes. We got hurt, we took pain medicine. It's unfortunate that sometimes the pain medicine got out of our handle."

Rigorous as it was, Tower never lost a round of the Joust competition, one of the flagship games within the show, and he's run into fans today who can cite his 110-0 record. The fame from "Gladiators" enabled him to hobnob with household Hollywood names. The experiences were surreal, from co-hosting "Celebrity Extra" with Pamela Anderson at a surf competition to an emergency flight to South Carolina. where he granted a dying boy's final wish by paying a visit.

When the show ended, Henneberry gave acting a try and made appearances on several familiar TV shows, like "Married … With Children" and "Knots Landing," and he even produced his own sitcom before running out of sponsorship dollars. Today, at age 60, he still lives in California, though occasionally gets back to Wisconsin, and works in real estate as the face of Big H Homes.

Henneberry finds time with his wife Terri, also a bodybuilder, to regularly visit two grandkids in Colorado. He even still trains for Masters Mr. America competitions; he's no worse for wear despite the injuries suffered on the show.

"I feel like I'm pretty blessed that I can still hit the gym six days a week," he said.

Two chance encounters put Henneberry's career on new trajectory

Unlike most stories about bodybuilding success, Henneberry's begins with pancakes.

His family ran a pancake-centric catering business, frequently serving church groups, Rotary Clubs and other gatherings. They often made appearances at the State Fair, and Henneberry said if his parents had their wish back in the early 1980s, he would have stayed in Wisconsin and continued in that business.

"They never understood the whole bodybuilding thing because of the commitment, the dieting," Henneberry said. "Mom always said I was starving myself."

He'd made up his mind midway through high school in 1979 that he wanted to win a Mr. America bodybuilding competition, and two encounters with high-profile personalities shaped his career from there.

The first was when he was visiting California and met Ed Connors, who orchestrated Gold's Gym's rise to national prominence. Connors suggested Henneberry try moving to California to continue pursuing the Mr. America dream, though Henneberry felt he couldn't leave his gym in Grafton, for which he'd secured a business loan to purchase in his early 20s.

"I went back to Wisconsin and remember it like it was yesterday. We were sitting around my front counter and, as I'm telling this story (of meeting Ed Connors), the FedEx delivery guy comes to my gym," he said. "It's 1980 and if FedEx comes to your door, it's something super-important; it was like $30 for an overnight. It was a check from Ed Connors and a little note saying, 'Thought this might get you out here a little faster.'"

Connors offered Henneberry a job at Gold's Gym in San Diego, and as it turned out, a member at the Grafton gym was willing to buy the property from Henneberry.

"My mom and dad were so against it. They're saying, 'You don't know this guy. He owns you now,' but I just had a feeling about this," Henneberry said. "He was just a genuine guy. He didn't say I owed him back, and $5,000 in 1980 is a lot of money. I had a lot of questions, but I think he answered them all for me. That's what got me to California, and then I could train and learn from the best."

The move paid off. He won his division of Mr. America in 1989 and intended to compete for Mr. Universe. But given the chance to speak with iconic actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger during early filming for "Gladiators," he was given advice to get out of bodybuilding and take a chance to establish himself as a "household name." That reinforced Henneberry's resolve to make the show his primary focus.

Schwarzenegger was already one of several celebrities who became enamored with the show, a list that also included sitting president Bill Clinton.

If it was a stupid show, it also proved to be a popular one.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Netflix 'American Gladiators' doc brings memories for Wisconsin native