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PrintPillars of Strength
It’s the most head-scratching paradox. Everybody knows Istvan “Steve” Javorek, yet nobody does.
He’s written books and articles and sold DVDs that uncover his weight-training philosophies, yet he’s loath to advertise himself in excess. Admirers from Sri Lanka, Madagascar, New Zealand and more than 80 countries thank Javorek for learning the conditioning programs he crafted on his own. But in Johnson County, he doesn’t mind the quiet and the relative anonymity.
Javorek is the recipient of the Emeritus Coaching Award, which is the pinnacle of his profession in his home country of Romania, and has coached myriad Olympians. And here he is right in front of us, the Professor Emeritus of fitness at Johnson County Community College, where he’s taught since 1987.
“It’s crazy the number of people who don’t know who he is and don’t know what his programs are,” says Mark Phillips, head track coach at Cowley County Community College in Arkansas City, Kan., and a former colleague at JCCC. “When I was at Johnson County, I always felt like that was one of our advantages, that we had him and the things he could do for our kids. It is amazing that he’s known throughout the world, was an Olympic coach, and yet people don’t realize that. And people in the area didn’t realize what that man had done.”
Or how he became that man who helped countless people reach their highest athletic ambitions.
Trading music for muscles
Istvan Javorek was born into a reasonably well-to-do family. But in 1949, when Javorek was six, the ruthless Communist regime took a stranglehold on Romania. His entire family’s property and the life they once knew were wiped out from under them.
Javorek’s grandparents were taken to the gulags and labor camps, far into the Danube River delta area. Their designated project was to help build what is known as the Danube-Black Sea Canal, but that was a convenient cover for torturing the labor workers, many of whom died. When construction suddenly ceased in 1953, everyone was sent home, including his grandparents, after years without contact. But the government’s invasiveness still filtered through wherever it could.
“They didn’t let us go to school after the first seven elementary classes,” Javorek says, “because we were from the ‘bourgeoisie.’ They cannot get educated, because they will be against us, against the Communist society.”
When he effectively became a proletariat kid that changed. Once in school, Javorek excelled at the violin, much to the delight of his mother. But one incident assured him that he wouldn’t be performing any of Vivaldi’s or Bartók’s violin concertos in the music halls of Europe.
Coming home from classes one day, his sister’s friends accosted him on the street. Javorek was not physically imposing in his youth, and these guys were weightlifters, so this was their opening to show some superiority. They goaded him into pressing his violin bow overhead like a faux barbell.
“They were laughing at me. ‘Look at that how strong he is!’” Javorek recalls. “I was very embarrassed and I told my mom, I don’t want to play anymore. I would like to be an athlete.”
From that moment on, Javorek committed himself to getting physically stronger and tougher. He wanted to be that guy who had forced him into pressing the violin bow, to narrow that muscular gap between his own slight 100-pound frame and his 220-pound foe. And as with everything he would do the rest of his life, he worked hard at it. And worked. And worked some more until he proved he could thrive as a weightlifter.
In the three years since he joined the weightlifting club and was known as the scrawny kid in the corner, he bulked up to 145 pounds and made the national team. And then in classic turnabout fashion, he defeated his childhood rival in performance. The two became close friends.
“There’s a proverb in English,” Javorek says, “that everybody has unlimited potential to be the person who they want to be. I wanted to be someone. So I had that amazing burning inside and motivation.”
Chasing a brighter future
Javorek went on to study at the Pedagogical Institute of Physical Education and Sport in Cluj, Romania, a veritable laboratory to learn all the major Olympic sports, in theory and practice. Dedicated as he was in his lifting disciplines, Javorek knew his athletic limits because he confronted spina bifida that would nearly leave him paralyzed on several occasions. For good measure, he would always look over his shoulder and watch the authorities intervene. They would forbid Javorek to go to the West as background checks became more exhaustive, a recurring theme in the years which would follow.
Why risk his back and his health now that he’s equipped himself with so much knowledge not just from school, but from his own experimentation? Much like golf legend Bobby Jones a few decades earlier, Javorek decided to retire young as an athlete, at age 26. His desires shifted to coaching and training not just in weightlifting, but later in track and field.
More than 60 percent of the Romanian national champions came from Javorek’s club. But again, he could not travel west with them. Not until he became a full-fledged member of the Communist Party. One of his lifters, Dragomir Cioroslan, made his first of three consecutive Olympic appearances at Montreal in 1976 and would win bronze at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. But Javorek never witnessed any of his athletes on the Olympic stage.
With these ludicrous restrictions, he’d had enough. He signed up for the Communist Party and was allowed entry with one of his teams to West Germany. He never returned.
Javorek was alone in Germany waiting for what must have seemed interminably for a visa. Eventually the Romanian secret police found his wife, Julia, and held her in their headquarters.
“They were pushing her and slapping her,” Javorek says, “blindfolding her and getting lights in her eyes, taking her down to the third level or fourth level in the basement listening to how people were tortured in other rooms. Psychologically they tried to destroy her completely to divorce me.”
Julia did not relent. Javorek defected to the United States in 1982, and was finally reunited with her and their daughter, Henriette. They had endured threats of all kinds, from dark interrogation rooms to Javorek’s realization he was being watched and followed.
“I read once a book about an older priest who was jailed with my grandfather in the gulags,” Javorek says. “He was always very compassionate and smiling and talking and helping others to survive. His wife was also jailed and his kids because of being religious, and religion was prohibited at that time. He was always helping everyone. Someone asked him, ‘Father, how can you be that positive when one of your sons is killed and your wife is in jail and tortured? And you’re also here, and you don’t know about the future and you always smile and are positive?’ And he said, ‘Son, for crying you need more than 56 muscles and a lot of energy and tears. For smiling, you need two or three muscles and you get positive, and not depressed.’”
Complex beginnings
From 1982 to 1987, Coach Javorek served as the assistant strength and conditioning coach at Texas A&M. He formed great friendships with guys like then-head football coach Jackie Sherrill, and primed athletes of the highest pedigree. Among his many Aggie track stars were Floyd Heard, whose 200-meter sprint time of 20.12 seconds was 1986’s fastest; and Randy Barnes, who won the Olympic silver medal in 1988 and gold in 1996 in the shot put.
In 1987, Javorek accepted an offer to teach at JCCC, and by 2009 he was inducted into the school’s Athletics Hall of Fame. Though he retired in 2011, he’ll be back teaching weight-training classes in the spring. Over the years his students have adopted the nickname “Coach Javorkian” for him, but it’s most certainly a term of endearment; some of them have taken his classes several times.
“I tell them from the beginning, you start with an F-minus and if you work hard, you’ll get an F-plus. I try to make it fun,” he says. “For example, no gum-chewing in the classroom. You chew gum, it’s 10 push-ups. No hats in the weight room. If you have a hat, 10 push-ups. You should see how they take off their hats at the door.”
He has a workout program that he’s actually named “Big Fun.” But the athletes he’s worked with will tell you it really should be called “Unspeakable Agony.”
“It’s just grueling. But if you’ve got what it takes to make it through that, you come out on the end as a machine,” says Wayne Simien, who played basketball at Kansas from 2001-2005. “There are times where you want to skip repetitions maybe when no one’s watching. But he really does a great job in helping motivate you, whether it’s through injury or whether you’re pushing through fatigue to really get you to that next level.”
Javorek is considered the founding father of complex exercises with dumbbells and barbells, known as the Javorek Complex 1 and Complex 2. They’re both a real peach. Complex 1 consists of an upright row, high pull snatch, squat push press, bent over row and another high pull snatch, done in repetitions of six sets. Complex 2 is done in threes.
The basis for these complexes and in all his conditioning goes right back to his roots of Olympic-style weightlifting.
“We do these complexes from the start, and oh my goodness. It gets their attention really quick,” says Chiefs strength coach Mike Clark. “They joke around saying you know, that’s cruel and unusual punishment. It’s not really, because with the caliber of athlete we have here now, they adapt to those things very quickly.”
Dreams fulfilled
Just as he wanted to prove he could leave the violin behind and reinvent himself as a boy, just as he wanted to prove he could coach anybody and anywhere in the world, the magnetic Javorek teaches with aplomb and with sheer will to prove to himself and others that his programs work.
To his knowledge, he’s the only coach in the world to groom Olympic medalists in two sports (weightlifting and track) and two countries (Romania and the United States). He won a national title at the National Collegiate Championships his final year as A&M’s weightlifting coach. And when Javorek moved to JCCC, he won two more in his first two years. Phillips saw a conditioning maestro lead his orchestras firsthand for 12 years.
“He’s always had just an incredible enthusiasm and energy about him,” he says. “That was just really infectious. When those kids were dying, when they were getting killed with some of his programs, he always had such a positive energy and influence.”
Friends and colleagues see that sparkle in the small gym he sets up meticulously at Guardian Angels Parish in Westport, where Simien trained with Javorek starting in high school. They see it spending an evening with him at his Leawood home, talking shop. And you hear the exuberance for the country in which he’s lived for the past quarter century.
When Javorek finally made it to America, he drove everywhere with his family. As a geography lover, he knew all the bridges on the Mississippi River, and it amazed him to cross over them in his little 1981 Subaru. When he visited New York, he knew all the streets by heart like he’d lived there forever. All the stories he had heard about America, and now he was making it his own.
“As a child, you can have a lot of dreams,” Javorek says. “It’s a great feeling when you see all of those dreams fulfilled.”
An Olympic-sized Friend
When Steve Javorek went to high school, he had a classmate close to him alphabetically on the attendance sheet named Béla Károlyi. He remains close with Károlyi, the commanding force of nature who coached Romanian and American gymnasts to gold medals, including Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton.
Javorek and Károlyi had similar viewpoints about coaching in that they didn’t necessarily agree exactly with what other coaches were doing.
“The Communists didn’t like that he didn’t respect the rules,” Javorek says. “He was openly talking against the Russians and that was a big problem, because they were telling the judges to watch out, this guy’s talking too much against us. It was a lot of politics. They tried to limit us on everything, on ideas. You have to have the idea of what the ideology says.”
Many times in school they would pair up in sports classes.
“I was boxing with Béla,” Javorek says. “Now Béla was 230 pounds, 6’5”. Once, he got in such a good position that bang! I hit him with my left hook in his liver. He got so much cramps. I hit him too hard. I was scared. I thought ‘oh gosh, I shouldn’t hit my friend!’ And then he hit me in my jaw and knocked me out. I just talked with a friend of mine from Romania, a colleague of mine who was counting. I came up on eight or nine, and I fell back on the ground again. I had a headache and bells in my ears.”
The two Olympic coaches still call each other, but now that Károlyi’s retired, he likes to hunt. So more often than not Javorek speaks on the phone with Károlyi’s wife, Marta, just as visible herself as the National Team Coordinator for USA Gymnastics.
