The man we'd like to introduce to you today is Vince Taylor, who won the light heavyweight and overall championships at the 1988 NPC Nationals, and over the next 20 years fought in 72 professional circuit fights, winning 24 of them and boasting an amazing win rate of 33.3%!

Let's take a look at this photo. I took this picture in 1991 when I went to Florida, where he lives, to do some research. Vince was born in 1956, but he got his pro card at the age of 32. You could say he was a late bloomer compared to American bodybuilders, some of whom go pro as teenagers.

Vince was 35 years old when this photo was taken, and that year he had competed in a total of 10 professional contests, placed third at the Olympia for the second consecutive year, and then won five of the six European Tour tournaments. This was the most dynamic period of his career. You can see the stretch marks all over his shoulders, chest, and latissimus dorsi.

Speaking of Vince Taylor, he must have been quite popular in Japan, and I'm sure there were many people who looked up to him.

In 1992, he won the Arnold Classic, also known as the "Spring Olympia." I hope you can sense the deep separation in his thighs and the way his muscles are perfectly formed. His external obliques shine with reflections, the striations from his deltoids to his pectoral muscles are like a "twisting rod," and even though his right biceps are stretched and raised in the air, they are as thick as a balloon full of water.

Vince Taylor was also known for his stage presentation. During his amateur days, he would dance to slow ballads like Luther Vandross's "If This World Were Mine," posing in a style that "seemed to be singing along with the music, and dancing as if he was dancing along." This style represented bodybuilding as a highly artistic form of "muscle sculpture," and Shawn Ray was also of this style.

However, after turning professional, he focused on "enchanting the audience while also making sure they had fun," and changed the structure to two parts. The first part, an introduction, follows a ballad with slow and captivating poses. The second part then has a completely different melody, with an up-tempo beat, and at one point he adds a robot dance to liven things up.

In particular, when he incorporated the "Macarena Dance," which became a social phenomenon after reaching number one on the Billboard charts in 1993 and went viral along with the song, something I had never seen before happened: the audience started dancing along! Vince was a true "entertainer."

He has a cheerful wife named Randy, two sons, and one daughter. When I first visited him in 1991, he still had just one child and was driving a white Fairlady Z, which was far from being a family car.

The Fairlady Z was produced in 1969 by Yutaka Katayama, the first president of Nissan USA, nicknamed "Mr. K." As a Japanese person, I remember feeling a strong affinity with Vince because he drove a Japanese-made car, even though many people who became professional and earned money drove European cars, including German cars.

Vince has participated in and won numerous competitions, thrilling the audience and livening up the atmosphere, but it seems he hasn't participated in a contest since 2008.

I hope that Vince will continue to pursue bodybuilding for the rest of his life and show us his heroic figure again someday, somewhere.

<From the "Click-Click" article in the July 2015 issue of IRONMAN>

[Mitsuru Okabe]
Born in Tokyo. Moved to the US at the end of the Showa era. In 1993, he became the chief photographer for Muscular Development magazine. Since then, he has provided photographs for Ironman, Muscle Mag, Flex and other magazines. In 1996, he founded MOCVIDEO and produced around 50 videos of Olympia-level athletes such as Coleman and Cutler.

*Click・Click/Click・Click The original meaning of click is the sound of a click, the sound made when the shutter is released. Click! It has the same meaning as saying, "Hey! Hey, camera kid!"