Topic: News: Lawyer has strong case for winning

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Lawyer has strong case for winning
By  JOE BLUNDO

Paul Travis doesn't want to be called Columbus' strongest lawyer.

So I'll call him Columbus' strongest 61-year-old weightlifting, chess-playing lawyer.

If all goes as planned Saturday in Savannah, Ga., he will win the U.S. Masters Weightlifting championship for his age and weight class.

"I don't even do the lifts he does, and the fact that he's 61 -- it's incredible," said his training partner, Edward Gosselin, 46.

The two train at the Downtown YMCA in a corner that interests few others. Amid the fitness machines, it looks old school: A wooden platform and a weight bar holding the kind of iron disks that Russians used to strain to get above their heads on The Wide World of Sports.

Adding to the industrial-age ambience: Travis and Gosselin hang

23-pound chains on the bar to increase resistance.

Travis is a weightlifter. He's not a powerlifter (the people who do bench presses and squats) or a bodybuilder (the people who use weights to achieve muscle definition). He does the clean-and-jerk (a two-part lift that ends with the bar above the head) and the snatch (a one-part lift).

The sport's heyday has passed. Travis has been in it so long that he can say he was there when Soviet strongman Vasily Alexeev became the first to clean and jerk 500 pounds at a competition in 1970. That he did it in Columbus is a measure of how big the sport was here.

Now it occupies a small niche. It takes flexibility, agility, speed and strength to flip hundreds of pounds to chest level and then raise the load overhead. People with those attributes can win more fame and fortune elsewhere.

"Football, basketball, UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship)," Travis said.

His day job is running his legal practice on the Northwest Side. Like lifting weights, practicing law requires maintaining focus and being quick on your feet, said Bev, his wife and office manager.

She said her husband is also a good chess player.

"All my life I was looking for the intellectual jock, and I found him right there," she said.

Travis is a Toledo-area native who began lifting as part of a training regimen for his high-school track team. By the late '70s, he was good enough to have Olympic aspirations and might have fulfilled them had the United States not boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games.

He has won many weightlifting titles but says his proudest accomplishments are that his son and daughter turned out well (one is a manager at Nationwide; the other a lawyer in Chicago) and that he once played Samuel Reshevsky, a U.S. chess champion, to a tie. ("He got a little careless.")

At his best, Travis lifted a combined 721 pounds in the snatch and clean-and-jerk to win the gold medal at a U.S. Olympic Sports Festival in 1978.

Age and two herniated disks have since cut his totals. But, in Savannah, he has a good chance of claiming the American record for his age group by lifting a combined 405 pounds. He's confident about his prospects but eager to put them in perspective.

"Half the battle at this age is just showing up."