[This is from a few years back, but certainly no less impressive, I mean WOW, just look at that thing! Special thanks to our good friend Pat “The Human Vise” Povilaitis for sending this our way. ~ JW]

“About a year ago, I began getting into tearing phonebooks in a big way. During a visit to Iron Sport Gym (In Glenolden, PA) around that time [Iron Sport Gym Owner] Steve Pulcinella showed me a phone book that he kept in the lobby of his gym which he believed was impossible for a human being to tear. It was easily the thickest phonebook I had ever seen (in terms of pages) and it was also in the small format, slightly less than 8″ wide x slightly less than 10” long, making it an incredibly difficult tear.

Tough? Yeah. Impossible, Hmmm, I filed that one in the back of my mind. It just so happens that the day before Christmas I took a trip down to The Iron Sport Gym with some good friends of mine.

After basically destroying myself for about two and a half hours bending, tearing, lifting etc, all of us were hanging out at the front counter shootin’ the breeze. I suddenly remembered about that monster phonebook and asked Steve if he still had it around. With a smile on his face, he opened the cabinet and pulled it out. As he slammed it down on the front desk he said “it just can’t be done, no human can tear this.”

Although I was definitely feeling the last few hours of training, I was confident I could do some damage. Before I took a crack at it, I told Steve that I would make the tear nice and neat in case he wanted to keep it as a souvenir and so there would be no question that this was a legitimate tear.

I told Steve to let me have a shot…

The look on everyone’s faces was priceless when I handed Steve the two pieces of the now-torn-in-half book.

Steve said it was one of the most impressive things he had ever seen and he had seen plenty of amazing feats as a gym owner and World’s Strongest Man Contestant. He really doubted it could be done by a “normal” human being — and he was right about that.

This feat was especially gratifying because I really didn’t feel like I had any strength left after training, and I did it in the lobby of Iron Sport, in front of a good crowd of people who know a thing or two about strength.”

Pat Povilaitis
The Human Vise