Bob Carpenter, the son of former Phillies owner Ruly Carpenter, was among those who trained religiously with Gus Hoefling for years.
DAVID MAIALETTI / Staff Photographer
Ruly’s son, Bob Carpenter, was 13 when he first met Hoefling during spring training. The younger Carpenter grew curious about the “bald, jacked guy in shorts and boxing shoes” who was showing several Phillies what appeared to be unusual exercises.
Carpenter remembers Hoefling enlisted him to join with blunt humor: “Hey, kid, you can’t be a fat little **** all your life. Get up here and start training!”
Hoefling’s training room soon became the source of league-wide intrigue. Members of the team were challenged to reach to the bottom of a 55-gallon drum that was filled with rice, and move their arms around, a task at which Carlton, the future Hall of Fame lefthander, thrived. A dark, enclosed space — nicknamed the “mood room” — was used for meditation.
Players wore flat, thin-soled boxing shoes, which slipped easily on the carpeted floor. To disrupt their balance and focus, Hoefling would kick at their legs.
Schmidt compared Hoefling’s physique to Oddjob, the stout villain in Goldfinger, the 1964 James Bond film.
Bowa heard stories that Hoefling sometimes traveled the city’s subway in disguise, and grappled with muggers.
Hoefling told others, like pitcher Don Carman, of sneaking, years earlier, into China, to deepen his studies of kung fu — at a time when Americans were barred from visiting the country.
“This is where we weren’t sure if it was a myth,” Carman said, “or what really happened.”
“He had that mysterious martial arts tattoo on his arm,” Schmidt said. “He commanded tremendous respect. If he said ‘Do it,’ we did it.”
Steve Carlton was among Gus Hoefling's most devoted pupils. (AP Photo/Bill Ingraham)
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“If I had gotten into a fight with Gus the first year I worked with him,” said Boone, the former catcher, “he could have killed me in about 30 seconds.”
Hoefling’s most devoted followers continued their workouts at Veterans Stadium during the offseason, meeting five days a week. When the temperature outside turned bone-rattling cold, Hoefling had them run the stadium’s steep ramps.
For three consecutive seasons in the mid-to-late 1970s, the Phillies had suffered devastating losses in the National League Championship Series. Hoefling urged players to build a deeper resolve, to remember how fatigued they’d be in the summer, when the Vet’s AstroTurf could heat up to 165 degrees.
“He’d say, ‘Right now, you might think I’m nuts,” Bowa recalled. “But it’ll come into play when it’s August, and it’s the 8th inning, and the game is tied.’”
When his students excelled — Carlton won three of his four Cy Young awards while working with Hoefling, and Schmidt won three MVP awards — Hoefling didn’t seek any credit.
“I don’t think we would have won the World Series without him in 1980,” Carpenter said. “He had no idea the value he provided.”
‘He was our protector’
Hoefling’s career with the Phillies came to a quiet end in the early 1990s, after he was injured in an elevator accident. He continued to loom large, though, in the minds of former players, many of whom reflected on his lessons long after their playing careers ended.
“Gus was not just a teacher and a conditioning coach,” said Christenson, who remained close to Hoefling. “He was our friend. He was our protector.”
Left-handed pitcher Shane Rawley said he was “kind of floundering” when the New York Yankees traded him at age 28 to the Phillies in 1984.
“Gus became a major person in my life at that time,” he said. “I’d never been around someone like him.”
In 1987, Rawley led National League pitchers in starts, with 36.
Away from the game, Hoefling continued to enjoy sharing his training secrets, said his wife, Maggie. Sometimes that meant interrupting a restaurant dinner to discuss a waiter’s elbow pain, or inviting strangers into the garage of their Largo, Fla., home to exercise.
“If someone wanted to learn,” she said, “he’d go to the moon and back. He loved helping people.”
Former Phillies pitcher Larry Christenson said Gus Hoefling had "lethal hands," but used his abilities to motivate the team's players.
Copyright © The Phillies/Paul Roedig
Hoefling was slowed only by cancer — Stage IV squamous cell carcinoma of the left tonsil, which doctors discovered in 2018.
He believed the disease had been caused by a chewing tobacco addiction he developed in the 1970s, when the tobacco industry routinely provided their products to the Phillies and other teams, in an attempt to lure younger consumers into emulating their sports heroes, who played with puffed-out cheeks.
Hoefling endured grueling radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and unsuccessfully sued a pair of tobacco companies. Yet he remained capable, well into his 80s, of replicating the swift kung fu moves that had once enraptured members of the Phillies and Eagles.
“He was a phoenix that would rise from the ashes, no matter what,” Maggie Hofeling said. “He had such an aura — this forcefulness and positivity that he carried through his entire life.”
Like Hoefling’s former students, she hopes that that his pioneering work can now be celebrated, before memories of that magical era in the city’s sports history begin to fade.
Hoefling’s words still burn brightly in the mind of Roman Gabriel, who continues to repeat an instruction that he received long ago.
At night, Hoefling once told Gabriel, lie down in a dark room, and consider how fortunate you are to be alive, to play a game you love, to have people in your life who care for you.
“I miss him,” Gabriel said. “God, I miss him.”
Even after battling head and neck cancer in his 80s, Gus Hoefling remained capable of replicating kung fu moves that once enraptured a generation of Phillies and Eagles.
David Maialetti / Staff photographer
David Gambacorta
David Gambacorta
I work on the investigations team, and narrative-driven projects.