Star Blaylock
by Hans (ftvideo)
The 2005 USA was undoubtedly the highlight of Star Blaylock’s short career in bodybuilding so far. In only her fourth ever show, the 27 year-old from Dallas placed fourth in an extremely tough light-heavyweight class that included a long list of incredible competitors. But to her, the show was just, as she puts it, “a big ol’ mess.”
To start with, she’d found it difficult to focus on dieting. In fact, her prep had gone so badly and she was so doubtful she would make the top five that she didn’t even prepare a night show routine. It was also the first time she’d had to fly to compete at a show (her previous three shows, including Nationals last year, had been in Texas), and everything that could go wrong went wrong. On the way to Vegas, the airline even lost her luggage.
Then, at the weigh-in she came in at 146 – 6 pounds over the cut-off for light-heavyweights. She spent the night stressing over whether she could lose enough water to make weight and over the thought of standing next to 150-pound-plus heavyweights like Heather Policky (“I’m like, ‘Alright, I’ll just have to go up there and hang!’” she remembers). In the end, she not only made weight the next morning, but also made the first comparison in the light-heavyweights. When it came to the evening show and she made top five, she made up a posing routine onstage – and most people in the audience didn’t even notice.
What a lot of fans who saw her onstage probably also did not know is that competing at the USA in Vegas was a fitting culmination of a long, difficult journey for Star that had begun years earlier in Sin City. Star had been in a long-term relationship with the WBC and IBF middleweight world champion boxer "Terrible" Terry Norris, with whom she had a daughter, Diamond, who is now 7. They lived the life in Vegas for seven years until Star finally burned out and left for Dallas in 2002. It was then – just three years ago - that she discovered training and began her rapid transformation from party animal to national-level female bodybuilder.
A couple of years ago when she went back to Vegas for the first time since she left town, her friends could not believe how she looked. “They were like, ‘Star?’” she laughs. “It was hilarious.”
Starlet Antoinette Blaylock was just 17 when she left the small west Texas town of San Angelo, where she was raised (and, coincidentally, where pro bodybuilder Bonny Priest now lives), for the bright lights of Las Vegas. In high school, she had been an outstanding track athlete, and her role models were female track stars like Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Flo-Jo. “I loved that look,” she says.
She quickly got caught up in the glitz and glamor of Sin City. “I worked all day and partied all night,” she says. She had a variety of jobs, from selling jewelry in the shops at Caesar’s Palace to cocktail waitress at the Mandalay Bay, where, during the Olympia weekend, she saw competitive bodybuilders – male and female - close-up for the first time. Seeing the Ms. Olympia competitors walking by was a real eye-opener for her. “I was like,‘Holy crap! They’re humongous!’” she laughs.
But after seven years in Sin City – and the drugs and alcohol that went with it - Star felt she had hit rock bottom and needed to get out. “Vegas had taken its toll and I was far from healthy,” she says. When her brother moved to Dallas, she decided to sell everything and go with him. She joined a gym, where she met Robert Mannix, a trainer and ex-world champion powerlifter and now her fiancé. She briefly considered figure (and trained with Amanda Savell for a while, who, ironically, was competing as a bodybuilder at the time and was much bigger than Star), but switched her focus to bodybuilding as she saw how quickly her body responded.
Star won the middleweight and overall her first show, the 2003 Lone Star Classic, but actually planned to quit right after. At 5-foot-4 and 132 pounds, she was already right at the top of middleweight class and was daunted by the idea of competing as a heavyweight. It was only when she went to watch the 2003 Nationals in Miami and heard that the NPC was going to introduce a light-heavyweight class for female bodybuilders that she decided to continue competing. In 2004 she won the light-heavyweights and overall at the Texas State (“that lit a fire in me,” she says), and went on to Nationals in Dallas – her debut at national level - where she placed 10th in
another incredibly competitive light-heavyweight class (won by Cindy Gonzales).
As Star has grown mentally and physically since her Vegas days, she’s also become more confident as a person and comfortable with who she is. She says going from skinny to big so quickly took some getting used to, and at first she often covered up in public. But once she accepted that not everyone would like how she looked – no matter how she looked – she moved beyond the need for others’ approval. “I know I’m not like everyone else,” she says. “I think that says you are an independent thinker and you’re able to do things that aren’t the norm. The people that don’t like it are always the same – insecure.”
That said, Star doesn’t plan to get much bigger than she already is in order to win bodybuilding shows. “It’s not a race,” she says. “I compete because I love to showcase what I’ve achieved. That’s pretty much it. There’s no real reward. I love to define my muscles, to fine-tune them, to get more density and more muscle maturity. But I don’t want to get massive just to get a trophy.” She also welcomes the renewed emphasis the judges seem to placing on femininity. “It will give more females an opportunity to compete in bodybuilding without hitting a wall.”
Just a month after the USA, Star, who now works as a personal trainer, is already dieting for her next show, the Nationals in Atlanta in November. Yet again, there promises to be an incredible line-up of light-heavyweights, and Star says she is just hoping to make top five again. But one thing’s for sure. For Nationals, she’ll definitely be getting together a routine for the night show, and in fact will have Melvin Anthony helping her with it. “This time,” she says, “I’m going to be prepared.”
