"Big Rich" Williams is a 6'3", 410-pound giant of a man with amazing hands. They don't really look any different than yours or mine apart from the fact that he used his to shatter every grip-strength record there was earlier this year. Sure this is a very obscure thing to take note of, but imaging holding a 163-pound anvil by its horn (that's the smooth, tapered part) and walking it around a room. Or imagine tearing the pages of a phonebook in half (and not along the binding side).
Unless your day job is at the anvil plant, grip skills can lie dormant, unobserved and unheralded. And that makes grip the rarest of abilities -- something you are born with that you stumble across via happenstance. A genuine surprise. A gift. Williams discovered his gift in October 2008, after walking into Sorin's gym. "Rich is a wonder," Sorin says. "He came in and lifted the anvil and looked at me like, 'What's so hard about that?'" Sorin's eyes widen. Then he points to another patron. "That guy over there? He can deadlift 800 pounds. But he can't lift the anvil once. It staggers me what Rich can do. He's like a tall tale you'd hear, the man who can lift medicine balls with his fingertips." (ESPN Magazine, April 2011)
Beyond that, the guy's personal story is pretty interesting as detailed by an article in ESPN Magazine and Thomas Prior's visceral images tell the story pretty well.
