By Adam Frisk

With a thunderous smack of a hand hitting a pad, two giants shake hands signaling the end of another round of a weekly meeting of the Haliburton arm wrestling club.

Throughout the summer, a group of about 10 individuals meet once a week at Head Lake, where they practice discipline, technique and comradery.

“We want to draw attention to this sport and to the club,” Brad Barry said in an Aug. 21 interview. “We want people to come and join the club, we want people to train with us and hit tournaments.”

The club meets at the public docks on Thursday evenings, setting up standing tables complete with elbow pads for each competitor, pin pads and hand pegs.

Barry, a competitive arm wrestler himself, said tournaments can draw up to 400 people, providing an intense and electric atmosphere.

Club member and 30-year arm wrestling veteran, Solomon Dicks, said he got into the sport after a rough encounter during his time in Alberta.

“This girl came up to me and said “You like to arm wrestle but you don’t want to fight? Come with me,’” Dicks explained. “She got me into my first group of arm wrestlers.

“It’s all ethics. Everything. There is no fighting. If you walk up to a table and disrespect somebody, you’re gone. It will not be tolerated,” Dicks explained.

The club began as a small group of guys getting together at Dicks’ place to bang out a couple of rounds but as the club became larger, they began rotating venues and decided to take the sport to Head Lake in an effort to draw in more interest.

“Somehow or another, everybody likes to arm wrestle,” he explained. “You go to a bar, have a couple of beers with somebody and at some point someone will say ‘Let’s arm wrestle.’

“But we do it a little bit different, we have rules. We made rules so nobody gets hurt,” Dicks said.

The main rule for the club is that “everybody’s got to go to work tomorrow,” meaning no one gets injured while wrestling.

“I’ve purposely lost matches because I would see somebody in a dangerous position,” Dicks said. “It doesn’t mean that much to me to beat you, but if I do, you’re not going to go to work tomorrow, so I let it go, 100 per cent.”

As for the club itself, with no official name just yet, the group is looking to grow (and to come up with a name) and is welcoming all levels of experience. So if you’re interested in going “over the top,” stop by the public docks in Haliburton Village at 6:30 p.m. on Thursdays to see if the club is of interest to you.