Mike Matarazzo was an American IFBB Pro who competed through the 1990s, and one of the few bodybuilders of that era remembered as much for how he carried himself on stage as for where he finished on it. He turned professional by winning the heavyweight class at the 1991 USA Championships, made seven Mr. Olympia appearances, and never won a professional show. He died of a heart attack in 2014.
Known for
His calves, and the nickname that came with the rest of him. “The Boston Mass” had lower legs thick enough to carry his reputation on their own, and he put them down to years of boxing rather than to anything he did in a gym. His best Olympia finish was ninth, in 1998.
Early career
He came through the NPC and won the heavyweight class at the 1991 USA Championships, the result that made him a professional. He was on the Olympia stage the same year.
What followed was eleven seasons in the middle of a deep open division. He took fifteenth at the 1992 Arnold Classic and sixth there in 1993, was runner-up at the Pittsburgh Pro that year, and spent 1996 and 1997 touring the European Grand Prix circuit without finishing higher than ninth at any of them. The results that stand up best came at home: second at the Canada Pro Cup and second at the Toronto Pro in 1997, then third at both the Night of Champions and the Toronto Pro in 1998.
Training
He credited the calves to the ring. Matarazzo boxed before he competed, and put the development down to the hours spent up on his toes waiting on an opponent rather than to calf raises. It is the sort of claim that is easy to doubt and hard to argue with when you look at photographs of him from behind.
Championship record
Championship appearances
Counted from the same results table below: an appearance is one contest entered (in the years the Olympia also judged weight classes, one appearance can carry two placings), an Olympia title is the overall win in that division, and Top 3 counts first, second and third together. The last row is every professional contest on record for Mike Matarazzo.
Mr. Olympia
7Appearances
0Titles
0Top 3
Arnold Classic
3Appearances
0Titles
0Top 3
Professional results
Every professional contest result on record for Mike Matarazzo, 32 in all. The table opens on the first 15 and expands in place from there. Nothing sits on a separate page. Won by names the winner of the division Mike Matarazzo competed in, and shows a dash where that winner cannot be pinned to one person in the database.
Showing 15 of 32 professional results.
Where these results come from. Each contest in the table was recorded from a named source, and for Mike Matarazzo that source is MuscleMemory. Open any contest above and that page names its own source and links to it where the source is still reachable. That archive no longer answers at the addresses we hold, so it is credited by name here and not offered as a link.
Every professional season
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
Olympia
1st place
2nd place
3rd place
Other
- Pro Debut
- 1991
- Last Contest
- 2001
Mike Matarazzo at the Olympia, year by year
| Year | Placement | Division |
|---|---|---|
| 1993 | 18 | Men’s Open Bodybuilding |
| 1996 | 13 | Men’s Open Bodybuilding |
| 1997 | 13 | Men’s Open Bodybuilding |
| 1998 | 9 | Men’s Open Bodybuilding |
| 1999 | 11 | Men’s Open Bodybuilding |
| 2001 | 21 | Men’s Open Bodybuilding |
Data updated
Physique benchmark
How Mike Matarazzo measures up
Fat-free mass index turns the height and weight on this profile into one number for how much muscle a frame carries, so a shorter competitor is not flattered by a bodyweight comparison. The normalised figure adjusts it again to a standard height, which is the version worth ranking. Both assume the 6% body fat a competitor steps on stage at, because that is the only condition the recorded weight was taken in.
35.2FFMI
35.4Normalised FFMI
41stOf 316 measured men
The closest Olympia champion on that measure is Dorian Yates, at 35.6.
What this rank is not. This database holds a height and a weight for just 463 athletes, and they are overwhelmingly the ones somebody bothered to measure: 74 of them hold an Olympia title. Almost every competitor on record carries no measurement at all. The pool also mixes every division and era together, from the lightweight women’s classes to the open heavyweights, so it ranks size and nothing else. It says where Mike Matarazzo sits among the athletes we hold measurements for, not among competitors.
Amateur and other shows not counted above
1 result from amateur shows and other contests this archive does not class as professional. Every total on this page covers the professional career only, so these are listed here but never counted, and they have no contest page.
Show the list
More Men’s Open Bodybuilding athletes
Athletes from United States
Death
Matarazzo died on 16 August 2014. The cause was a heart attack, and he had lived with health and heart problems for years before it.
He was also unusually direct about why. He went on record saying that steroids had caused those problems and that he regretted what he had done to his body. Of the twenty-one bodybuilders in Fitness Volt’s account of heart-attack deaths in the sport, he is the only one who said so.
Legacy
The record says he never won a professional contest. It also says he was top five at the Night of Champions four times, runner-up three times in two seasons, and on the Olympia stage seven times across eleven years. He was a fixture rather than a champion, which is a harder thing to be for a decade.
He is still cited for two things: the calves, and what he was willing to say out loud about what the sport had cost him.
In 13 meetings, Ronnie Coleman finished ahead of Mike Matarazzo 13 times to 0.
Opponents are ranked by how often they shared a stage and how big the stage was, not by reputation. A meeting is one contest where both competed in the same division and both were placed.
Sources
Contest record from the Fitness Volt bodybuilding database. Nickname, boxing background and on-stage reputation from Top 12 Athletes with the Biggest Calves in the World. Cause of death, his health history and his own account of its cause from 21 Bodybuilders Who Died of Heart Attack.
One conflict worth naming: that article gives his age at death as 47, while the birth and death dates on record here give 48. The dates are what this page reports.
Win rate here is first-place finishes as a share of all 32 professional contest results. It is published only where a career holds at least five, because below that a single placing moves the figure by twenty points or more.
