Hispanic Heritage: Powerlifting entrepreneur with a past gives back big time in NYC
HAMILTON HEIGHTS, Manhattan (PIX11) -- Resilience, strength, and endurance are all qualities celebrated during Hispanic Heritage Month. A Latino New Yorker who's set records in powerlifting embodies those attributes not only in his athletic career, but also in his life as an entrepreneur and work site manager.
The many successes in his life, however, have been hard-won. After surviving gun violence, a coma, and time behind bars, he's added being a benefactor to vital neighborhood causes to the list of accomplishments.
José Rodriguez, the man known in powerlifting and social circles as "The Dominican Hulk," said that he's built his life and reputation much in the same way he's built up to his record-setting weightlifting.
In an interview at his training gym, Untamed Studios, in the Morris Park section of the Bronx, Rodriguez talked about his maximum lifts.
"595 [pounds] on the bench, 675 on the deadlift, and 505 on the squats," he said, between reps on various machines in the workout space.
It's the same place from which the man who holds 28 New York State powerlifting wins, 19 gold medals, and 13 state records runs Team Hulk, the fitness boot camp he founded.
As he pointed out, though, it hasn't always been like this.
"I can share my testimony, and help other people out with my testimony," he said, "with myself as an example."
His story began in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Harlem.
PIX11 News met him in the uptown neighborhood before following him to his gym in the Bronx.
"Back in the day, [the] 80s and 90s," he said about Hamilton Heights, "it was all about drugs. I ended up getting robbed, and by me getting robbed, I ended up being shot."
Rodriguez was in a coma for nearly a year.
"I didn't have a choice but to say, 'God, if you give me a second chance, I will never do that again,'" he said.
He got his second chance and became a construction site foreman at sites across the region. His latest site posting, though, is at a location that's literally around the corner from where he grew up.
"I said, 'No way,'" Rodriguez, 53, said about realizing how very close he'd be working to where tragedy had once struck, and from which he'd arisen. "'This can't be happening,'" he'd told himself.
He developed his powerlifting career across two decades, but did have a setback. Ironically, the man who'd been a victim of gun violence was criminally convicted after a friend asked him to resell a gun that the friend had had.
"I ended up doing three-and-a-half years," he said. In the decade since, he's organized a variety of charity events, including a yearly school supplies giveaway, an annual holiday toy giveaway, basketball tournaments and other activities for hundreds of families in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan, at his own expense.
He now has a 3-year-old child of his own, whom Rodriguez says is his greatest gift.
The Dominican Hulk said that he's been given so much that he has to give more, as an example to others.
"Just because you have a felony, or you have this, you have that," he said, "you can't [stop]. You've got to go with your heart. Go with it."