Strongwoman Jones Brings a Lot to Table : Arm-Wrestling World Champion Also an Actress, Track Assistant

NORTH HOLLYWOOD —  You are about to go mano a mano with women’s world champion arm-wrestler Dot Jones. You plant your right elbow on the table and her bear-size paw envelopes your dainty digits.

“Ready?” she asks.

Ker-r-r-pow!!!

You lose. It took only a millisecond.

At 6-foot-4 and 233 pounds, Jones is an imposing figure.

She is strong--bench presses almost 300 pounds--and muscular. During her daily workouts at a North Hollywood gym, she radiates vein-bulging intensity.

Jones is an assistant track coach at Harvard-Westlake High and also works as an actress.

She is a tough-looking woman. Her curly blond hair flies wildly. She grunts during sets of curls and easily handles large, heavy plates of weights.

But ask about her world arm-wrestling championships and the 30-year-old giggles.

She finds it amusing that she has won 11 consecutive world heavyweight arm-wrestling titles, but she is dead serious about the sport.

She trains hard and travels the globe to compete. It’s just that she often thinks the whole thing is like a weird dream.

“It really is funny,” Jones said. “It was a freak accident. I was 19 years old and I was at a festival with a friend and she said I should enter the arm-wrestling competition. So I thought, ‘What the heck.’ I did it because I liked the trophy. But I didn’t know what I was doing.”

She easily won the competition and pocketed $250. The following month she entered her second event, the World Championships in San Francisco, and swept the title and the $750 first prize.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is hilarious!’ I just couldn’t believe I was doing that,” Jones said.

Opponents might not share her glee. Since her auspicious debut, she has dominated the sport and owns a remarkable 500-1 record.

She blames her only loss on a torn triceps muscle suffered during her other athletic career. She’s also a shotputter.

Jones was the country’s top junior college shotputter at Modesto College in 1983 and was an All-American and school record-holder at Fresno State.

She still holds the national junior college mark of 51 feet 1/4 inch.

After completing her college career, she placed 11th at the 1988 Olympic trials and seventh at the ’92 trials. She still ranks 16th on the all-time U.S. list with a personal best of 56-6 1/4.

“That was fun, but you can’t control what your opponent does,” Jones said. “What I really love about arm-wrestling is that it’s a contact sport. I like the fact that it’s physical.”

Jones’ longest match lasted 12 seconds. “She can beat them as fast as she wants to go down,” said Lori Cole, a 10-time lightweight world champion from Encino.

“She’s beyond strong. There is no word for it. She beat me in her first tournament when she was 19 and I couldn’t believe it. At the time I had already won a couple of titles and I was experienced.”

Jones is expected to win another title when she defends her crown in the World Championships in San Francisco on Friday. At stake is $2,500. There are no weight divisions for the women at the World Championships, so Cole probably will face Jones at some point.

“It’s going to be extremely tough,” Cole said. “I really enjoy arm-wrestling Dot because she’s very fair and she’s one of my favorite people, but she’s virtually unbeatable.”

Jones grew up in Hillmar, a small, Northern California farming community with a population of about 2,000. She played basketball and volleyball in high school and competed in track and field.

She grew more than five inches between eighth and ninth grade and started weight training in an effort to strengthen her gangly frame.

Jones said she was offered a basketball scholarship to attend Nebraska but gave up the sport to concentrate on the shotput.

A severe knee injury, however, forced her to quit the sport after the ’92 Olympic trials. Coaching is the next best thing.

“Everyone she worked with got a lot better because she is an outstanding coach,” Harvard-Westlake Coach Jonas Koolsbergen( said. “She brought enthusiasm to the program. Kids really responded to her.”

Jones majored in criminology at Fresno State and spent four years as a juvenile probation counselor in Fresno before coming to Southern California. She moved here in 1991 after being picked as a main character in a syndicated television pilot called Knights and Warriors.

The show is similar to American Gladiators, in which strength is required. Jones played a vindictive character called Lady Battleaxe.

“I was just mean,” Jones said, laughing. “There was a tug of war and I had to chase knights around on skates. It was a blast.”

Acting and coaching keep her busy, but not enough to quit arm-wrestling. She plans to compete as long as her right arm functions. “I want to do it till I die,” she said.