He Killed 600 Men.. Then Built the Most Famous Gym on Earth | Edward Connors

Ed Connors said he bought the original Gold’s Gym in 1979 and helped grow the brand from a single struggling gym into more than 700 locations across more than 30 countries. Before the gym business, he trained and worked as an architect; later he became known for mentoring bodybuilders, wrestlers, gym owners and fitness entrepreneurs.

Connors grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, in a family where working from a young age was expected. He delivered newspapers, shoveled snow, raked leaves, worked summers, spent time in architectural offices and took factory jobs while still young.

His father was a surgeon, but Connors said his parents’ Depression-era outlook made them financially cautious rather than indulgent. He contrasted their repeated warnings to be careful with grandparents who encouraged him to believe he could accomplish unusually ambitious things.

His grandfather was a vice president of Union Pacific responsible for operations and, Connors said, roughly 60,000 employees. The grandfather nevertheless told him that the smartest railroad people had recognized the future and moved into the airline industry, an example Connors uses for the importance of seeing change before an established industry declines.

A childhood trip to Disneyland’s 1955 opening helped set Connors on the path toward architecture and Los Angeles. His grandfather had a private railroad car, his grandmother took him west, and Connors remembers sending home a postcard saying he wanted to live in Los Angeles and become an architect.

Connors believes ambitious young people often benefit from moving to places where opportunity, capital and influential people are concentrated. His own move toward Los Angeles became part of his larger argument that environment and chance encounters can materially alter a career.

Connors attended UC Berkeley and identified with the anti-war movement before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1968. He said he regarded Vietnam as fundamentally a civil conflict and entered military service expecting that he would die.

In Vietnam, Connors served in military intelligence and worked on targeting air strikes, particularly B-52 missions. He described three B-52s dropping their loads as capable of devastating an area roughly one by three kilometers.

He said war radically reduced his sense of what a person actually needs to survive. After coming from an architecture-centered world, he concluded that people can function with little more than basic clothing, a sleeping bag and a bag or backpack, and that what he called the “veneer of civilization” is thin.

Connors remained in Vietnam for 21 months, extending beyond a normal 12-month tour. He said the extra nine months reflected both an Army preference for experienced personnel who understood local conditions and a system under which extending in-country service could allow him to leave the military early with about five months otherwise remaining.

He argued that soldiers can become most useful just when a short deployment is ending because they have finally learned local conditions and how to survive. His extended time in Vietnam, he said, gave him knowledge of local customs that newly arrived personnel lacked.

Vietnam was Connors’ first direct exposure to severe poverty outside the developed world, despite having previously traveled in Europe. He said the experience permanently changed the scale by which he judged ordinary problems at home.

Connors said he received multiple Bronze Stars connected to his work targeting air strikes. He described one operation as destroying a North Vietnamese regiment of more than 600 people.

He framed his wartime motivation less around abstract politics than around protecting the soldiers around him. Once deployed, he said, the immediate concern became doing the job correctly so members of the unit survived.

Returning to the United States in 1971 was another major shock for Connors because civilian life appeared almost untouched by the war. He said people seemed largely uninterested in his Vietnam experience, and for years he avoided talking about it.

The film Platoon later made it easier for Connors to discuss Vietnam because he felt it conveyed aspects of the physical environment accurately. He particularly remembered the extreme monsoon rain, mud and constant dampness, saying he essentially never had dry socks or underwear during his 21 months there.

Connors remained in contact with only a small number of the men he served with. He said he is still in touch with two, while many others returned to their own lives and did not want to discuss Vietnam.

After military service, Connors directly contacted an architecture firm whose work he admired and asked for a job; he got it. He said the experience exposed him to major projects, including corporate headquarters, and taught him what high-level architectural design looked like.

Architecture remained central to the way Connors later approached the gym business. He continued noticing building details decades later and treated layout, circulation, atmosphere and customer behavior as design problems rather than merely construction issues.

Connors remembered visiting Gold’s Gym around 1977 and thinking that he would like to own it. He later used that memory, and a similar experience with a Venice beach house he eventually acquired, to illustrate his belief in visualizing desired outcomes while remaining open to opportunities.

He also credits relationships built before the acquisition with helping create later opportunities. Connors recalled helping a bodybuilder he identified as Primkowski get to California and become Mr. World; he viewed that person remembering his assistance as another example of seemingly small encounters having long-term consequences.

Joe Gold had founded Gold’s Gym in 1965, but by the time Connors became involved the gym had changed ownership several times. Connors and his partners were therefore acquiring a troubled existing business, not buying directly from Joe Gold.

The Gold’s Gym they acquired was losing money and its owner wanted out. Connors said the owner’s wife, who had been involved in running the gym, had died, while the owner had other entertainment interests and no longer wanted the operational problems or additional investment.

Connors’ acquisition lesson was to determine why a business is failing before deciding whether its low price represents an opportunity. He reduced the essential variables in a gym to location, capital and management: if the location is workable and a buyer can supply better management and sufficient money, a failing operation may be fixable.

Gold’s still lost money during Connors’ first year of ownership. He recalled roughly $250,000 in revenue and a loss of about $15,000, with the loss of magazine advertising contributing materially to the problem.

Fitness magazines were an important customer-acquisition and merchandising channel, making Connors’ relationship with publisher Joe Weider strategically valuable. Connors worked to rebuild that relationship after advertising had been removed.

Gold’s struck a barter-like arrangement with Joe Weider rather than simply buying advertising. The gym allowed Weider to photograph or film Southern California fitness personalities inside Gold’s when competing gyms would not, while Gold’s received valuable magazine exposure.

Connors understood that Weider was not merely publishing exercise information; he was selling a Southern California fitness lifestyle. Gold’s Gym, its members and its atmosphere supplied imagery Weider needed, giving the gym negotiating value beyond cash.

Merchandise became an exceptionally profitable part of the Gold’s business. Connors recalled purchasing screen-printed shirts for about $2.25, selling them to gym operators for $4.50 and having the operators retail them for $9.95.

The Gold’s Gym logo became substantially bigger than the population actually training in Gold’s facilities. Connors said more people wore Gold’s clothing than exercised at its gyms because the merchandise allowed consumers to identify with a health-and-fitness lifestyle.

Connors believes social changes during the 1980s and 1990s helped gyms become important social spaces, not merely places to exercise. He specifically linked concerns about AIDS, herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases with a cultural shift in which gyms increasingly functioned, in his description, as the “new bars.”

Problems with the Santa Monica location pushed Gold’s back toward Venice in 1981. Connors said conflicts involving the landlord and local authorities made the existing site unattractive, while a nearby multi-bay warehouse in Venice offered room to grow.

The gym moved from roughly 4,500 square feet in Santa Monica to about 9,100 square feet in Venice. Over the following nine years it expanded into neighboring warehouse bays until the facility reached approximately 26,000 square feet.

The ability to expand repeatedly within the same Venice building was one of the biggest strokes of luck in Gold’s history, according to Connors. Neighboring tenants who expected the gym to fail instead left, allowing Gold’s to absorb their space without relocating.

The resulting 26,000-square-foot Venice facility became, in Connors’ view, an American gym template for roughly two decades. He argues that the same format could not remain dominant forever, however, because customer segments and economics eventually changed.

By around 2000, Connors saw the gym market dividing into low-cost, middle-market and premium formats rather than converging around one standard large club. He uses brands such as Equinox and Life Time as examples of the premium end and argues that businesses fail when they assume a once-successful format will work indefinitely.

Financing was one of the biggest constraints on early gym expansion because banks regarded gyms as unreliable cash businesses. Many franchisees initially depended heavily on family money.

Electronic funds transfer materially changed gym economics by turning membership fees into predictable recurring payments. Connors said the ability to document and collect recurring dues made the industry's cash flow more credible to lenders and later private-equity buyers.

Connors said Gold’s struggled with banks for years despite its growth. For roughly a decade the company changed banks repeatedly before establishing a productive relationship with City National Bank.

Gold’s also tried factoring its clothing orders to obtain cash before customer payments arrived. Demonstrable merchandise orders could be shown to financing providers as evidence supporting advances.

Connors insisted on monthly meetings with the company’s banker once Gold’s had a productive banking relationship. He saw this as another example of the value of sustained personal contact rather than approaching a financial institution only when money was needed.

He applied the same principle to gym members: human contact influences retention. In his view, a member who goes an entire year without meaningful interaction with gym staff is far less likely to feel attached when renewal time arrives.

Gold’s used two full-time inspectors to monitor standards across the expanding franchise network. Connors personally traveled, examined locations and used his architectural background to review and mark up franchisees’ plans.

Gold’s deliberately used relatively short five-year franchise agreements as a quality-control mechanism. When new owners later asked why the contracts were shorter than those used by companies such as McDonald’s, Connors explained that renewal gave Gold’s leverage to require worn facilities to be refurbished.

Even carpet life influenced the structure of Gold’s franchise agreements. Connors wanted the ability to tell an operator that renewal depended on replacing deteriorated flooring or otherwise bringing the club back to standard.

Connors says Gold’s improvised an early form of durable rubber gym flooring before a dedicated industry existed. When turf failed under heavy use, they obtained used conveyor-belt material and glued it down because it could withstand the equipment.

Gold’s was an early advocate of co-ed fitness, but individual facilities sometimes failed to adapt their design accordingly. Connors recalled inspecting a club whose owner complained about having few female members, only to find a women’s locker room built around communal gang showers.

Gold’s quickly learned that design decisions inherited from male-only clubs were incompatible with attracting women. The Venice gym added partitions and privacy instead of assuming traditional men's locker-room arrangements could simply be duplicated.

Connors’ architecture background shaped very specific operating decisions inside clubs. He wanted restroom access that did not force visitors through wet locker areas, separated wet and dry traffic where possible and considered theft risk in circulation planning.

He intentionally placed intimidating equipment deeper inside a facility while making familiar cardio equipment visible near the entrance. Someone entering for the first time might be intimidated by a heavy leg-training area but could look at a bicycle and think, “I can do that,” lowering the psychological barrier to joining.

Connors treated customer feedback as a major source of product development. He said approximately 537 people stayed as guests in his homes over roughly 45 years, giving him an unusually broad informal network from which he heard opinions about gyms and fitness culture.

Music was one of the seemingly small details Connors believes created the original Gold’s atmosphere. A shared soundtrack helped generate common energy and interaction, whereas he believes headphones, earbuds and phones increasingly isolate people inside their own personal environments.

He repeatedly returned to small environmental details as a competitive advantage. His examples ranged from gym layouts to restaurants with unnecessarily loud music or chairs that screech because the owner did not spend a few cents on protective feet.

Community was treated as part of the Gold’s product rather than an accidental by-product of exercise. Gold’s held annual conventions in Las Vegas and gave franchisees three free hotel nights so operators could spend meaningful time together.

Connors believed franchisees often learned more from one another during those conventions than from formal seminars. The gatherings gave operators direct access to peers dealing with the same real-world staffing, sales and operating problems.

He strongly favors owning business real estate where practical because property ownership reduces dependence on landlords. His early experience with a difficult Santa Monica landlord reinforced his view that operational success can still be threatened when someone else controls the site.

Connors advised operators not to rush the site-selection and lease-negotiation stage merely because they want to open quickly. The period before signing a lease is when the entrepreneur has maximum leverage and can still walk away.

One real-estate strategy Connors watched for was an older property owner whose heirs might eventually prefer selling the building. Understanding a landlord’s family and long-term intentions could therefore create an eventual ownership opportunity for the tenant.

Connors consciously occupied the businessman role inside a culture dominated by muscular athletes. He usually wore a blue blazer or suit, describing clothing as his own form of “body armor,” while his bodybuilding partners presented the athletic side of the brand.

His partners Pete and Tim complemented his business and design skills with fitness credibility. Connors described Pete as Mr. World and Tim as Mr. Empire State, with Tim particularly interested in training equipment.

The hundreds of people Connors hosted formed a substantial informal mentoring network. Of the roughly 537 house guests he remembers, he said about 102 became professional bodybuilders, more than 70 became gym owners and 23 started supplement businesses.

Connors claimed those supplement companies collectively reached enormous scale, estimating roughly $1 billion in annual sales. He cited figures such as Rich Gaspari, Gerard Dente, Dave Enders and Jay Cutler among people connected with his wider network.

His wrestling connections included the Ultimate Warrior, Sting, Randy Orton and John Cena. Connors’ homes and gyms became places where aspiring athletes could meet people, train and sometimes obtain practical help while pursuing careers.

Connors believes self-belief separated many successful protégés from equally talented people who went nowhere. Looking back at his hundreds of house guests, he said more could have reached the level of people such as John Cena or Jay Cutler if they had believed in themselves as strongly as he believed in them.

John Cena stood out to Connors for extreme focus and willingness to subordinate other parts of life to a specific goal. Connors described him as unusually driven and “a machine,” using Cena to make the broader point that talent and luck matter only if the person executes.

Connors said he first encountered Cena while Cena was on spring break in Los Angeles visiting a girlfriend and training in Venice. Seeing Cena's build, Connors thought he visually resembled an enlarged version of actors such as Mark Wahlberg or Matt Damon.

Connors approached Cena in a parking lot and asked whether he had ever considered professional wrestling. Cena responded that wrestling would be his dream but that he could not see a practical way to move to Los Angeles and pursue training.

Connors told Cena he could make the move possible. After graduating, Cena returned to California, stayed in one of Connors’ homes for roughly five months and attended a local wrestling school.

Cena eventually attracted WWE attention and received a contract about 18 months after Connors first met him. Connors allows that he may have mentioned Cena to wrestling contacts, but says WWE scouts ultimately identified the talent themselves.

Connors' relationship with WWE went back to the early 1980s, when Vince McMahon explored buying Gold’s Gym. McMahon was consolidating wrestling operations and noticed that wrestlers across the country already trained at Gold’s locations.

Professional wrestlers provided Gold’s with enormous unpaid brand exposure. Connors described wrestlers entering arenas in Gold’s Gym shirts, appearing before thousands of hometown spectators and sometimes tearing the shirts off before competing.

Connors viewed McMahon’s interest in Gold’s as a form of vertical-integration logic. If WWE was already giving Gold’s huge visibility through its performers, ownership of the fitness brand could theoretically capture the value being created.

Gold’s asked Vince McMahon for approximately $40 million, and McMahon declined. Connors noted the irony that the business later sold for roughly the amount he had originally sought from McMahon.

Connors said Gold’s ultimately sold for $44 million. He identified Brockway Moran as the buyer in 1999.

Connors structured his portion of the sale differently from partner Pete, taking less immediate cash and more value through stock or a note. The immediate cash was enough for him to pay off the mortgage on his Venice beach house.

He received the remainder of his sale proceeds roughly four or five years later. Despite previously imagining buying an extravagant car, he instead purchased a used Mercedes convertible for about $15,000 because he liked the design and had owned similar cars before.

Connors said receiving the sale proceeds was exhilarating but concluded that wealth buys freedom rather than happiness. His financial behavior after the transaction was notably restrained relative to the size of the exit.

His central mentoring rule is to identify what people are good at and reinforce it rather than manage primarily through criticism. He believes leaders can do disproportionate damage with careless negative comments.

That positivity did not mean telling people whatever they wanted to hear. When aspiring bodybuilders asked whether they could become Mr. Olympia, Connors said he would not lie or encourage a goal he genuinely could not see, but he also tried not to crush people unnecessarily.

Connors described himself as a behind-the-scenes “Wizard of Oz” for many protégés. He often facilitated introductions, lodging or opportunities without making himself the visible center of their success.

When Gold’s reached the stage where informal founder knowledge was no longer enough, Connors brought in outside expertise. One adviser had experience with McDonald’s and McKinsey and was asked to analyze what Gold’s could reasonably charge franchisees.

Connors concluded that gym franchisors should not automatically copy fast-food royalty structures. He cited fees around 7% of gross sales as potentially excessive because, in his view, a gym franchisor generally provides less operational infrastructure than a company such as McDonald’s.

Gold’s Gym University opened in 1997 as part of the company’s transition from improvisation to a formal operating system. Connors said the founders initially had no manual because they were inventing the model themselves, but eventually believed withholding accumulated knowledge from franchisees would be irresponsible.

Gold’s moved gradually from licensing toward a fully developed franchise system. Connors said he was involved with an early franchise in 1980, while nationwide franchising did not become a major push until approximately 1996.

State franchise rules affected where and how Gold’s could expand. Connors specifically cited New York as a jurisdiction where distinctions between a simple trademark license and a full franchise created complications.

Connors distinguished a franchise from a license by the addition of an operating system or business plan alongside trademark rights and fees. That greater degree of control also creates a greater obligation, in his view, to help operators succeed.

Gold’s chose franchising partly because Connors regarded gyms as intensely local service businesses. He wanted owners embedded in their communities rather than attempting to run every location remotely from a corporate office.

He gave different advice to businesses whose core value depended on a highly standardized product. Connors said he advised people associated with businesses such as P.F. Chang’s and Jane Fonda's ventures that ownership rather than broad franchising could make more sense where consistent product control was essential.

Connors repeatedly credited luck alongside work, capital and management. The Venice warehouse was his clearest example: without a building that allowed Gold’s to expand in place as demand grew, he believes competitors could have overtaken the company.

Adaptability was equally important because the Gold’s of 1979 looked very different from later fitness clubs. When Connors and partners Pete and Tim bought the gym, he said there was not a single exercise bike inside because cardio was not yet treated as a major gym category.

Seeing people cycling on Venice Beach gave Connors the idea to bring bicycles indoors. Early stationary bikes were placed where users could watch activity on the gym floor because riding in place was otherwise monotonous.

As large televisions became available, Gold’s created a dedicated room where members could ride while watching a screen. Connors jokingly called the concept “bikes in front of the TV”; a similar idea was later commercialized under the name “cardio theater.”

Gold’s also introduced aerobics despite fierce opposition from traditional bodybuilding culture. Connors said he received death threats from people outraged that the “Mecca” of bodybuilding would accommodate aerobics and a larger female membership.

Bringing women fully into Gold’s was a deliberate strategic decision, not a minor accommodation. The Santa Monica operation already had female bodybuilders but, according to Connors, had facilities so male-oriented that it did not even provide an adequate women's restroom.

At the time, some competing health clubs segregated men and women by day of the week and closed on Sundays. Connors considered that model obsolete and required Gold’s locations to operate seven days a week and serve men and women together.

The push toward co-ed gyms encountered serious social resistance in some markets. Connors said crosses were burned outside some Southern facilities and opponents claimed mixed-gender gyms would lead to assaults; he said Gold’s did not experience the feared pattern of incidents or lawsuits.

At age 80, Connors attributed much of his continued energy to simple health habits rather than elaborate longevity programs. He said he normally eats two meals a day, aims for about 12,000 steps, swims or exercises when possible and prioritizes roughly eight hours of sleep.

He regards inadequate sleep as one of the most common health mistakes he sees and favors power naps when possible. That belief has influenced a newer fitness concept he has considered.

Connors has explored putting compact fitness facilities inside shared-office environments. His concept combines exercise with showers, virtual training and places to take short naps, allowing someone working a long day to exercise, clean up or recover without leaving the building.

Connors said he showed the shared-office gym concept to Tony Robbins, who suggested some customers might join simply for access to a shower or a power nap. Connors took that as evidence that fitness facilities should solve broader practical problems rather than merely provide exercise equipment.

His assessment of starting a gym changed after the COVID era. Before COVID, he said he often discouraged people from entering the industry; more recently he sees an opening for smaller, highly personal facilities as large big-box clubs struggle with changed customer behavior.

He specifically favors smaller personal-training-oriented gyms rather than automatically building massive clubs. He described facilities of roughly 10,000 square feet or less and said he has seen operators charge as much as about $780 a month for high-touch service.

Former gyms that closed can be especially attractive locations because expensive plumbing, showers and locker-room infrastructure may already exist. Connors considers those build-out costs one of the biggest barriers to opening a new facility from scratch.

Connors continues to attend church but expressed dissatisfaction with aspects of how the Catholic Church has handled unspecified issues. He also said he has used therapy for much of his life.

He thinks people benefit from regularly setting aside time for both spiritual reflection and honest personal review, regardless of whether they are traditionally religious. His rough model is an hour with one's creator or in meditation and another period talking through the week with someone capable of helping them examine it.

Asked for one principle to give younger people after 80 years of life, Connors answered: “Be sociable and take risks.” That advice fits the pattern of his own story, in which relationships, chance encounters and willingness to pursue uncertain opportunities repeatedly mattered.

Connors said he wants to be remembered for improving people’s quality of life and helping them live longer. He places that goal above being remembered primarily for the Gold’s Gym transaction or his financial success.

During the COVID period, Connors used the disruption to write a memoir. He said the process was enjoyable rather than burdensome and made him wish he had maintained a diary throughout his life.

Connors considers learning to type in high school unexpectedly valuable because it later made writing and repeatedly revising a book much easier. He had gone outside his private school to take typing classes because the school itself did not teach the subject.

Writing the memoir also allowed Connors to reconnect with many former house guests and people he had mentored. John Cena wrote the foreword, and Connors personally designed the book’s cover.