My middle school P.E. coach and Olympic weightlifting instructor, Lou Kruk, was not merely a teacher. He was a force of nature. Standing well over six feet, barrel-chested beneath tight T-shirts or black turtlenecks, sporting a Tom Selleck mustache, wavy brown hair, perpetually tanned legs protruding from gym shorts, and a voice that rumbled like Wolfman Jack after three cups of espresso, Kruk looked less like a school employee than the star of an action movie who had wandered onto campus by mistake.
The mythology surrounding him only enlarged the legend.
He drove a bronze Porsche. Rumor had it he spent weekends sailing with impossibly beautiful blonde women who, in our adolescent imaginations, might as well have been Scandinavian supermodels. Whether any of it was true hardly mattered. At thirteen, facts were powerless against charisma.
To us, Lou Kruk embodied manhood itself.
Naturally, we craved his approval with the desperation of medieval squires hoping to earn a knight’s blessing.
So we lifted.
Not casually. Fanatically.
Kruk demanded perfect technique. He regarded sloppy form as a moral failure disguised as athletic incompetence. A wandering knee or rounded back earned immediate correction, usually delivered with enough volume for the entire class to hear. Public embarrassment was simply another teaching aid. If you couldn’t discipline your body, he reasoned, you probably couldn’t discipline your life.
He preached through barbells rather than sermons.
Discipline.
Precision.
Toughness.
Master yourself before the world masters you.
Oddly enough, Kruk possessed another passion that seemed entirely at odds with Olympic lifting.
Henry Mancini.
Instead of blaring hard rock through battered speakers, our weight room echoed with Mancini’s lush orchestrations. As we practiced snatches, clean-and-jerks, and deep squats, elegant movie themes drifted through the air. Kruk had assembled a respectable stereo system, transforming what should have resembled a dungeon into something closer to a strangely sophisticated temple of iron.
We trained with style.
Some of us trained with obsession.
I belonged to the second category.
Soon I wasn’t content to squat only during workouts. I squatted beside my locker. I squatted while inching forward in the cafeteria lunch line. I squatted during P.E. while playing goalkeeper as soccer balls sailed harmlessly overhead. If there was an idle moment lasting more than five seconds, I considered it wasted unless my knees were bent and my thighs were burning.
Eventually my classmates stopped calling me Jeff McMahon.
I became “Squats.”
At the time, I regarded the nickname as a badge of honor. I was no longer merely a skinny kid trying to become stronger. I had become an exercise, a living advertisement for relentless self-improvement.
Only years later would I understand what was really happening.
I wasn’t simply building legs.
I was constructing an identity.
The barbell had given me my first Great Mutation—not because it transformed my body overnight, but because it convinced me that reinvention was possible.
And once a boy discovers the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone else, he spends the rest of his life wondering whether one more transformation might finally make him whole.
Cinemorphosis 
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