Tales of Rad: 5 Manly Men & Their Great Deeds Of Masculinity

Let me tell you about awesome. Awesome is being ambushed by thirty ninjas while you wait for the train and considering it an inconvenience. Awesome is speaking entirely with your fists when the only word they know is murder. Awesome is deciding it's easier to just flying wheelhouse kick a door open, even when it's automatic. And awesome is seemingly a thing of the past.

Action movies have become damp, limp spectacles in the last two decades. With the advent of CGI, stuntmen populations have exploded because it's become cheaper to let them dive around on trampolines in front of a green screen than let the pyrotechnics explode them for real. Plus, JCVD, Arnie and Seagal have mostly withdrawn from the limelight and they did a great job keeping stuntmen numbers in check. I remember a time when action films used to be about killer chefs, kidnapped daughters, sassy journalists and racism. Special thanks to Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon for reminding us all of that.

But real life tales of rad beat fictional every day of the week with a cue ball wrapped in a bar towel. Fleshlights, Youtube comments and moisturisers may have some thinking that the culture of manliness croaked its last when vampires were reduced to glittering commitment issues, but masculinity prevails in the greatest of adversities. We just drink harder to compensate.

These are great men. And these are their deeds.

[WARNING: The following contains many of the manliest tales of manliness. Women. If you feel you must continue, shield all 7,825 parts of your genitals from the page now. These guys ruled so hard, just reading about them will grow you six inches of ball hair. On your chest.] 

Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Knighthoods have a storied history. They started out as a proclamation of your inbreeding but came to be affirmations of a man's feats of daring do: Jousting, hunting or pouring boiling oil down a murder hole onto Frenchmen. But the honorific title has attracted some bad press in the last few years because of accusations that a few toffs just bought them. Which is a lot like bragging to your friends about your foot-long beard and then admitting you paid a Filipino rent boy to shave his own back hair and tape it to your face. Humiliating for all involved but ultimately denigrating the proud tradition of beards more than anything else.

Now, Sir Fiennes didn't buy his knighthood. He received it by virtue of being born to the 2nd Baronet of Banbury, i.e., the regular way. But as soon as the training wheels came off his openings, he busily set about retrospectively earning his manly title.

He left Eton (incidentally the academy we Brits use to train our politicians in bathroom stall handjobs), joined the British Army and was quickly seconded to the SAS. Which you may know from Call of Duty as the academy we Brits use to train young lads with terrible cockney accents how to die most heroically. While there, he specialised in demolitions, adding 'blowing stuff up' to a CV that would already make a female employer limp for days after reading. My research was inconclusive as to whether there was a training module dedicated to pointedly looking in another direction and walking away after detonation so I’m forced to assume that he just didn’t need it.

This was all in his mid-20s, by the way. After leaving the armed forces, he must have decided that angry people with guns weren’t threatening enough so turned his attention to adventuring. He took a hovercraft up the Nile in ’69, led a trip round the polar axis and crossed the Antarctic unsupported in 93 days. Famously, in 2000 he attempted the same expedition solo, when thin ice couldn’t support the weight of both his sled and gigantic balls and collapsed. Digging the sled out by hand rewarded him with a nasty case of frostbite in his left hand, but if his fingertips were going to be such pussies about it, he thought to himself, then they could damn well bugger off. So he cut them off himself with a fretsaw. Weeks later. When there was a qualified surgeon on hand to do it.

It didn’t end there. Sir Fiennes’ biography reads like a couple of dozen biographies of still pretty righteous badasses got mixed up and printed together. In 2003, at the age of 59, his own heart betrayed him. Four months and one double heart bypass later, he ran seven marathons in seven countries over seven consecutive days. Somewhere nearby, a shadowy figure in a floor-length black cloak was cursing while stuck in traffic. Or maybe Death is still just too scared of Sir Ranulph to make his appointments.

Theodore Roosevelt

These days (with a few notable exceptions, tee-hee-hee), politicians tend to be doughy, privileged gasbags and little else. But there was a time when standing for office was something you did only after leading a few glorious charges on enemy lines. And that time was everytime pre-1900. You just weren’t fit to hold any political power in the western world unless you’d run a few Carthaginians through with a pilum or depopulated a small town and salted its fields for your country. Politicians used to kick-ass is my point and the textbook example is Teddy Roosevelt.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt begins young, because the question of how this handsome, if slight, asthamatic young lad:

Became this grizzled, severe frontiersman whose mustache alone looks capable of lethal beatings:

Is an important one.

You can truly tell how radically thinking has changed in the last two centuries when you think that young Teddy was indeed a weak, sickly child (including suffering form the aforementioned asthma) and to overcome this, he decided the best thing to do was take on as many dangerous, outdoor pursuits as he could think of. And this is a time period in America when there were a whole bunch of those.

He dedicated himself to natural science, I'm guessing, in order to preemptively know thine enemy. After graduating Harvard magna cum laude he gave himself up to the emotional threshing machine of politics as a State Assembleyman in the Republican party. Quickly disillusioned by the rampant party politics, he did what any sensible 26-year-old asthmatic with heart problems would do, he became a cowboy of the Badlands of Dakota. I didn't call them 'badlands' for emphasis, that is really what they were called, which should give you some indication of what a stupidly dangerous and therefore awesome decision this was.

After making a living hunting and skinning things with far too many teeth and taste for frontiersman flesh than is generally considered safe, he became a deputy sheriff, during which time he became fast friends with Sheriff Seth Bullock and as any viewer of Deadwood would know, living to tell the tale of any encounter with a character played by Timothy Olyphant is a notable achievement.

After returning to NY, Roosevelt began his rise to the presidency. Once there, he won a Nobel prize for negotiating a ceasefire to the Russo-Japanese war and then another Nobel prize, this time in Badassery during his campaign for third term, when he was shot during a speech and instead of running, screaming for medical attention, just stood there and finished speaking. Leaking profusely through the very recent hole.

His slogan was "speak softly and carry a big stick", which seems at odds with his personal practice of carrying a pistol wherever he went and a black belt knowledge of jujitsu. But then again, you don't know what he could do with that big stick. 

Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin is the only politician from the last fifty years who can really command any respect with perhaps one exception. If you're the kind of misogynistic little dick-spurt that measures his self-worth in vaginas invaded, that is. This is due to the fact that to do any good as a politician nowadays, it is your prerogative to be mild of temper and policy in order to seem as inoffensive as possible to as large a demographic as possible and this is something that Putin understands as well.

Though Vlad exhibits all the traits of a man's man: he appreciates the thrill of high-powered engines between his legs; pitting his wits and reflexes against nature's deadliest hunters and motherfucking judo, not to mention the many, many photo threads of him holding firearms like he knows something about them the rest of us don't, he has a soft touch too. This clip here, features his tripartite performance at a charity event where he plays piano and sings a cute duet with a child. And it isn't just me that's wide open for Putin. Female students of the Moscow State University send him tasteful nude calendars and looking at stuff like this, it's easy to see why. The guy is lousy with musky, masculine radness. 

This is starting to take a direction I'm not sure I intended.

Jackie Chan

Jackie Chan hasn't even heard of your dishonorable, western concept of 'fuck', so couldn't give one even if he tried. He has so little regard for his own safety that the vultures following him around established their own pension scheme and life insurers attack him on sight, even when they don't have kung fu training.

He reaches a pinnacle of masculinity not just because he performs his own stunts, but more because those stunts seem specifically designed to overload the studio's health and safety cyborgs' logic cores. He's dangled from objects in a way that managed to insinuate gravity has a tiny dick and sustained more helicopter-related injuries than zero, making him only slightly less improbable than a sex genie. And he's accumulated these impossible achievements as part of a 40-year plus career covering more than 150 films. That is a hell of a long time to avoid very real drug cartel kicks and rotary saw blades. 

But it's Jackie Chan's professional relationship with high places that cements him as mankind's leading fear hormone mistake. In Project A, he let go of a clock tower to freefall three stories through two flimsy awnings. Three times. Because he wasn't happy with the mild concussion he got the first and second attempts. And of course, there's the famous skyscraper slide from Who Am I? which of course you already knew about seeing as how you're a good person and all. 

Jackie wrote and directed the whole thing and you can tell. Even the plot doesn't have any sense of self-preservation. It culminated in a sequence atop the roof of the Willemswerf, a famous skyscraper in Rotterdam. Jackie Chan's character, simultaneously named Jackie Chan and WhoAmI? In an effort to confuse critics applied to every single thing about this film, attempts to escape with a vital disc that I can't remember the importance of. Something about aliens, arms dealers and African tribesman. You fucking wish I was kidding.

Long story short, he slides down the side of the building. Without even a crash mat. And jumps up to jog and somersault a few feet along the way. Seriously. It took a man with the value for his own mortality as a spelunking espresso in my mouth two weeks to work up the courage to do this thing. No fancy camera tricks. No CGI. This scene is exactly what it looks like. One man daring dozens of stories of sheeted glass to shed the tiny Asian scampering over them and shrug him off to his doom. Which just goes to show, sheer balls beats sheer inclines, every time.

Brian Fucking Blessed

Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a golden age of the strange. But also of the beard. Facial hair has made its ascension once again. And no-one, be they greasy hipster trash or light beer sodden, ZZ Top mountain man, rocks the man fuzz like the arbiter of all that is gentlemanly, Brian Blessed.

That magnificent tangle is the crucible, from which the powers of masculinity are drawn. This man is more than man. He is legend. He is the oldest living person to make it to the magnetic north pole on foot. He climbed Everest not once, not twice but three times, never making the summit as he had to go back to save his friend's life, as well as Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro. He is the only known human to have impersonated Pavarotti and not looked absolutely ridiculous. He owns a black belt in judo and is a championship boxer, but it isn't like he really needs either as he could just roar any opponent to death. And anyone who could command the hawkmen in that outfit, is deserving of all the respect you have to give.

This is, quite simply, the most awesome man to ever hold a Y chromosome.