Ex-Phillies want the team to honor legendary strength coach, kung fu master Gus Hoefling

He operated in the shadows of Veterans Stadium, unseen by spectators.

Beginning in 1976, in a small, carpeted room just beyond the Philadelphia Phillies’ clubhouse, Gus Hoefling led a generation of players through daily workout routines that he’d concocted, a punishing blend of resistance exercises, stretching, and Northern Shaolin kung fu.

He was, by many accounts, major-league baseball’s first dedicated strength and conditioning coach, decades before it became customary for players to employ their own training entourages.

Hoefling was also a walking urban legend, a man whose mysterious backstory and unconventional methods transfixed otherwise hard-to-impress professional athletes.

“He came here with rumors of having been in competitive fights with Bruce Lee,” Mike Schmidt, the team’s Hall of Fame third baseman, wrote in an email, likening Hoefling’s training room to a “sweat dungeon.”

“Gus had lethal hands,” said former pitcher Larry Christenson, “and could break bamboo chopsticks with his throat.”

Hoefling, who coached 17 years with the Phillies, and four years with the Philadelphia Eagles, died July 4 in Tennessee, following a lengthy battle with head and neck cancer, said his wife, Maggie Hoefling. He was 88, and had requested to be cremated.

His death sent a ripple of heartbreak through a circle of former players who considered themselves his disciples, a group that included Schmidt, Christenson, Steve Carlton, Bob Boone, and Larry Bowa.

Each credited Hoefling with sharpening his mind as much as body. He urged the players to shed negative thoughts that gathered, like so many storm clouds, during difficult periods, and to instead believe that they could succeed.

That initial, core group of Phillies who worked with Hoefling went on to win the franchise’s first World Series championship, in 1980.

» READ MORE: For years, Gus Hoefling was a guru who showed Philly’s greatest athletes how to win. Now he’s fighting Big Tobacco — and fighting for his life.

During a 2020 interview with The Inquirer, Hoefling summed up his philosophy in simple terms: “Anybody can quit. I want to win,” he said. “Turn negative knowledge into positive.”

Hoefling’s former pupils want the Phillies to publicly commemorate his legacy in some fashion, perhaps during the team’s alumni weekend festivities, which are scheduled to be held at Citizens Bank Park in August. (The Phillies did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s time to acknowledge him,” Schmidt said. “Actually, way past time.”

It was the specter of an infamous day in U.S. history, and, later, a chance meeting with a down-on-his-luck quarterback that set Hoefling on a circuitous path to Philadelphia.

Hoefling grew up in Iowa, and was in third grade when Japanese fighter planes launched a surprise attack on a U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

A schoolteacher suggested that Iowa, the country’s bread basket, might be attacked, too, Hoefling previously told The Inquirer. He responded by sending some pocket change and a Wheaties box top to a radio show, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, and received a book on judo.

The judo book’s lessons ignited a lifelong passion for martial arts.

Years later, in Southern California, Hoefling studied tomari-te, a form of martial arts unique to Okinawa, and began teaching. One student was a doctor who introduced Hoefling in 1970 to Roman Gabriel, the Los Angeles Rams’ 6-foot-5 quarterback.

Elbow and leg injuries had derailed Gabriel’s career.

“[The Rams] thought I couldn’t take the pain,” Gabriel said during a recent interview, “which was bull—”

Hoefling began to train Gabriel, who had relied only on lifting weights and running to stay in shape. “He would throw punches at me and not let me block,” Gabriel recalled. “He’d say, ‘You gotta learn to move, move, move!’”

The Eagles traded for Gabriel in 1973, and Hoefling followed the quarterback to Philadelphia.

Guided by Hoefling, Gabriel shed 25 pounds, increased his flexibility, and turned inward.

“Gus was a great philosopher,” Gabriel said. “The most important wisdom he gave me was, ‘If you don’t know who you are, you won’t get respect from people.’”

During his first season with the Eagles, Gabriel threw for 3,219 yards and 23 touchdowns, and was named the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year.

Hoefling won an admirer in the Phillies’ then-owner, Ruly Carpenter, who hired Hoefling after his tenure with the Eagles ended in 1976.

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 fart 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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”