IFBB Pros’ Exclusive Contracts? Not Here at MuscleSport Magazine

By Joe Pietaro
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Updated: December 26, 2014

Picture this scenario: Eli Manning is in the New Your Giants’ locker room and the throngs of reporters begin to surround him by his stall. Recorders are pushed towards the star quarterback’s face and the questions begin being called out for him. All of a sudden, Manning holds his hand up and says, “Sorry, guys. I can only speak to the New York Post beat writer.”

Sounds ridiculous, right? But that hypothetical situation is exactly what happens in bodybuilding and – in this writer’s opinion – one of the reasons why the sport struggles to make a dent when poker and even spelling bees are televised on sports networks and the Iron Game is left behind.

Now that we have Lee Priest and Victor Richards in the fold, that doesn’t mean that they are exclusive to us. Quite the contrary, we would be proud of them and even promote any coverage by another media outlet – bodybuilding or not – that they were involved in.

When we first launched the online version of MuscleSport Magazine (Fall 2009), IFBB legend Kevin Levrone was one of our staff writers. A few years later, he went on to work for Muscular Development and was a natural fit there. The same goes for Layne Norton, who was also a part of our early issues only to move on to MD.

Now you may turn around and say that our company does not have the same budget as MD or FLEX and you would be entirely right. We do not have the cash flow to sign an athlete to an exclusive contract but that does not change our belief that doing so only hurts the fans and thus the overall growth of the sport.

If we want to write an article on a particular IFBB pro or even have him or her pen a column for us, that doesn’t inhibit that person from doing an interview or writing for another company – even a competitor.

It’s about time this exclusive contract bullshit comes to an end in bodybuilding and we have made the first move in hopefully getting that done.

It makes no sense in football and the same goes for bodybuilding. Collecting athletes like baseball cards just to keep them from another publication is detrimental in more ways than one.