50 years of C.R. Kennedy football: player in school’s 1st-ever game was once bodyguard for Schwarzenegger

CEDAR RAPIDS - The weather was wet, the field at Kingston Stadium slippery.

Mark Votroubek ran back a punt 66 yards for a touchdown. Those were the only points of the game.

Cedar Rapids Kennedy is celebrating its 50-year history this weekend, and that includes football. Thursday night, the Cougars host Linn-Mar at Kingston, with a ceremony to honor 21 of the school's 82 all-state players who plan to be in attendance.

Four guys who played in Kennedy's first-ever game way back on Sept. 16, 1967 also will be honored: Roger Bir, Gary Louvar, John Thompson and Paul Debban. Bir can still tell you all about that 6-0 win over Cedar Rapids LaSalle, as well as virtually everything else about his two years as a Cougar athlete and student.

'Kennedy was looked upon as the new school, and we were going to be cannon fodder for everybody,” he said. 'But we won our first game, beat LaSalle ... Mark Votroubek was a sophomore, and Vot took a punt and ran it back for the only score.”

Bir, 67, had moved to town with his parents from Idaho and felt like he fit right in at his new school, which literally was a new school. The Cougars went 3-6 in their inaugural season under head coach Dale Tryon and 5-3-1 in 1968, Bir's senior season.

Huge for a football player at the time (6-foot-5 and 255 pounds), the lineman became Kennedy's first scholarship college athlete, playing at Indiana before getting drafted into the Navy and spending combat time in the Vietnam War.

Retired after over 30 years in the military and military reserves, he lives in Virginia Beach, Va.

'I look back at my two years at Kennedy with as fond of memories as anything I could have ever been involved with,” said Bir, a member of Kennedy's Athletics Hall of Fame. 'I made a tremendous amount of friends, I had the complete backing of the school, was the school's first Division I athlete to get a full ride. The only sad thing is that right after I graduated, my parents moved from Cedar Rapids.

'My dad had cancer and was dying, so they moved to the Southwest because it was just better weather. So when I was at Indiana and people went home for Christmas, I couldn't go home. I couldn't go back to Cedar Rapids. That kind of sticks in my mind. I have great memories of Kennedy High School. It was absolutely the best.”

Football and the military are just two things about Bir's life. An avid weight lifter, he spent years as a bodyguard for bodybuilder/actor/politician Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He first met Schwarzenegger after returning from Vietnam in 1973. Stationed in the Navy in Long Beach, Calif., Bir drove to Muscle Beach.

'I'd always had a minor infatuation with body building,” he said. 'I didn't know Arnold, but I knew Steve Reeves, Nate Draper, Dave Draper. So we got back to Long Beach, I hopped on my motorcycle and drove up there. I just walked in and introduced myself to him. He was impressed because, A, he had to look up. I'm 6-5, and Arnold's only 6-1. He just said ‘Here's when we train, people just show up.'”

He trained with Schwarzenegger and others for four months before his ship was relocated to another port. Between stints in the Navy and Air Force, Bir spent a couple of years at a deputy sheriff in Columbus, Ohio, home of the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic bodybuilding competition.

He met Arnold's business partner, Jim Lorimer, who asked him to be part of the competition's security team. That's where it all began.

From 1989 to 2007, Bir was one of Schwarzenegger's six bodyguards. Schwarnegger, then governor of California, even wrote the opening remarks for Bir's military retirement ceremony.

Pretty good for a kid who was part of Cedar Rapids Kennedy's first football team.

'I've met a lot of celebrities, some very nice people,” Bir said. 'I've met some that were more impressed with themselves, though they were few and far between. People always ask me why would Arnold need a bodyguard? Jokingly once, when we were moving he and Maria, we were standing outside, and he said ‘You guys really take this seriously.' I just looked at him and said ‘Well, John Lennon didn't.' He just looked at me and said ‘Good point.'”

'He is an interesting person. When I first met him in 1973, people couldn't pronounce his last name and couldn't understand him because of his thick accent. But he used that to his advantage, and he was self made.”

l Comments: (319) 398-8259; jeff.johnson@thegazette.com