Tony Little Interview

That was the most traumatic, because obviously I had a lifestyle and I had my kids and I had everything and now I had a huge financial problem that’s compounding every day. I didn’t want to be one of the people that went bankrupt and said, 'Oh I went bankrupt.' You know how they say it, millionaires go bankrupt all the time, just create another business. Well it wasn’t about going bankrupt with me, because my name was Tony Little. It was my name; it wasn’t a company. So, I wanted to take care of everybody. But, I settled out and paid the whole debt, which obviously went up past $1.2 million at that time. Within two years I was paid up.

TCC: It seemed like, at least early in the book that you were personally really devastated about where you were going to go in your life after the car accident before Mr. America. Could you talk about that a little bit?

TL: I was fortunate. I worked really hard and I won the Mr. Florida and the Mr. Junior America. I won them all fairly quickly because I’m a dedicated, regimented, disciplined type person. And I was the favorite for the Mr. America by the magazine polls at the time. I was going into it pretty solid until I got hit by a school bus driver. I don’t know what it was, three weeks to four weeks before, five weeks before the bodybuilding contest. Obviously, it was tough. I still had to enter to call it a show. I was against a lot of people and I lost a lot of muscle size. I didn’t think I’d win by any means, but it was nice to place in the top five, even after the car accident.

Then, it became very rough. Because obviously I spent a lot of time trying to get to that pinnacle of what I thought I could be and I lost it all. So, I stayed in a one-bedroom condo by myself for a couple years. I drank, I took painkillers and I gained over 60 pounds of weight. I was depressed. I did the same thing a lot of people did in the beginning, 'Why me? Why me?' I did everything, as much as I could right and why me? Well, finally I realized, I woke up. There’s only one person who's going to change 'Why Me?' [Laughs] And that is me. Thank God I got that revelation.

TCC: Do you ever wish the car accident didn’t happen and you went on to a long and successful career in bodybuilding instead of becoming famous?

TL: No, no. I’m sure that my direction was a much better direction. I was a fan of bodybuilding as far as competitions and things like that as far as physical culture and trying to be healthy and all that other stuff. I was not a fan of the fact that you worked out twice a day, slept all the time and that’s all you did. All I wanted to do at the time was to achieve my Mr. America status and then I would have gone into marketing products just like I did anyway. I’d just maybe do it quicker. I think it gave me a better success story than being a particular athlete or bodybuilder or weight lifter type of thing. When one door closes, another opens. That door was a much better door for me.

TCC: So would you say that your eye was always on the prize of marketing and sales your entire life?

TL: Yeah I think that I’ve always been goal-oriented. My dad obviously was not a great guy, my dad was a very tough guy. He was a guy who was very physical and abusive, not a good person. I grew up with that. Why I became the opposite of him, where I became very goal-oriented, I don’t know, maybe it’s a pat-me-on-the-back syndrome. I need people to acknowledge that I’m working hard or I’m trying to be a good person, because my dad wasn’t. I don’t really know.

I just know that I believe life is very short. If you don’t set goals, if you don’t have directions, you’re like a boat without a rudder, there’s just no way you’re going to hit where you want to hit. I think that I was able to understand very simple concepts like that, where as sometimes it gets more complicated for other people.

TCC: I personally thought that might have been the most interesting chapter in the book, that and your failures, I was reading about all your interesting experiences, and one of the most interesting ones I read was the one about the person you labeled Hank.