50 sets of Yates

Samir Bannout, "The Lebanese Lion," was a man who was no small threat to any bodybuilder's hopes of winning the Mr. Olympia title in the late 1970s and early 1980s (he would win the title himself in 1983). At the 1980 Mr. Olympia contest, Bannout was one of the competitors vying for the title against Mentzer. According to journalist Jack Neary who was present, Mentzer went out of his way to help Bannout recover from a serious diuretic miscalculation that could have proven to terminate far more than Bannout's chances at this contest. Neary, in his contest report for Muscle & Fitness recalled:

Mentzer sat in his makeshift sauna the morning of the Olympia. It was then that a very excited Samir called that room. It seems, in his own bizarre way of shedding subcutaneous water, Samir took a Lasix tablet, a very strong, and sometimes unpredictable, diuretic that not only promotes a veritable Niagara of urine, but dangerously steals the body of its minerals, particularly potassium. And that's bad news for the heart. That was exactly the news Samir was frantically telling Mentzer. His heart was in the throes of an arrhythmic tap dance. On Mentzer's advice, we were dispatched immediately to Samir's room with a handful of potassium tablets. A scared but grateful Samir answered the door. Within minutes his crisis had passed.

Why would Mentzer do this? He could have told Bannout, "Hey, that's your problem; call a doctor and leave me alone!" As Arnold indicated, when a competitor comes to you for advice it's not that hard to give him the wrong advice, and as this was the most important contest of Mentzer's life, he would be justified - under this philosophy - to betray Bannout's confidence and give him destructive advice. In fact, it represented a golden opportunity for Mentzer to put down the competition and, according to the Arnoldian ethos, Mentzer could have achieved a victory of sorts; an extra safety measure, by insuring that Bannout would not be a threat to him in this contest. Such a suggestion would, of course, be abhorrent to anyone who thinks rationally, as it would offend their sense of life (the subject of another article entirely, but, in essence, a "sense of life" is the attraction or repulsion on an almost intuitive or, more accurately, a pre-conceptual, level of an individual to an act or experience); if Mentzer had chosen to do such a thing it would have smacked of cowardice and revealed a less-than-praiseworthy character