Did you just call arm wrestling a kids’ game? Now you’re making Minnesota’s pro arm wrestlers mad.

MAPLE LAKE, MINN. — Jeff Dabe stood in a door jamb at the Maple Lake Bar & Grill’s packed events center, stretching: His fingers, his forearms, his shoulders. Some fellow arm wrestlers sipped Coors Light. Others chugged from gallon jugs of water. Everyone wanted a selfie with Dabe.

Here, at a spring supermatch featuring dozens of mano a mano showdowns, Dabe was a celebrity. Dabe, winner of one arm wrestling world title and so many national titles that he’s lost count, is perhaps the greatest Minnesota arm wrestler of all time. At this weekend’s Minnesota State Armwrestling Championship in Maple Lake, Dabe will try for another state title. Most fellow arm wrestlers are decades his junior. Dabe, a grandfather of 10, became eligible to receive Social Security retirement benefits when he turned 62 last month.

“I’m like the old guy in the neighborhood that everyone wants to knock off the hill,” Dabe said.

An arm wrestling event is filled with biceps, camouflage and neck tattoos. Competition is fierce but friendly. Competitors massage each other’s wrists and forearms between matches to help with blood flow. It’s a familial machismo; the wife of a competitor cradled their newborn baby as her husband prepped for a match. While there will be six men’s weight classes at this weekend’s state championship, there also will be one open weight class for women.

A couple hundred spectators looked on as two competitors took the stage. They coated their hands with chalk and stood across the armwrestling table from each other, three feet apart, per World Armwrestling Federation regulations. The wrestling elbow rested on a soft pad near the closest table’s edge, and the off hand gripped a steel hand peg mid-table.

A referee ensured arms were properly stacked and wrists straight, checking that knuckles on participants’ thumbs were visible. He squared them up.

Then: “Readyyyy ... GO!”

To win, an arm wrestler must force an opponent’s wrist down to a rubber band strung across the table.

“I think it’s the Mad Max of sports,” said Nate Brumett, a 23-year-old barber from Maple Grove. “Visually, it looks like a strength sport. But it plays like chess. A lot of people here are blue-collar workers and tattoo artists, but a lot are just nerds who come out of their basement for this.”

He pointed to the ongoing match. When the ref said go, the first moment was all strength — the “Texas Quick Draw,” as Brummet called it. Survive that onslaught, though, and it became about leverage, wit and technique.

Ahem: Technique? With arm wrestling?

Well, yeah. These aren’t meatheads. They know physics is at play. New angles mean different pressure points.

“I thought I was strong,” Meng Lee, 35, of St. Paul, recalled of his first match in high school. “I was arm wrestling this little guy, 140 pounds or so. I got destroyed, because this guy had technique.”

There are regional techniques: California arm wrestlers tend to use a top roll, rolling wrists over the top of their opponents’; arm wrestlers from the South are more about pressing and pushing. Dabe is partial to the hook, an inside technique where he curls his wrist inward and pulls his opponents’ hand towards him.

Experienced arm wrestlers use wrists and hands to break down an opponent during a match, which last anywhere between a couple of seconds and a couple minutes.

“You’re holding on, trying to incorporate as many large muscles as you can: legs, obliques, pecs, everything,” said Jason Remer of Ramsey, who has three national titles.

Subtlety comes in the variation: Fake a top roll, switch to a hook.

And with mind games.

“You whisper to them at the table,” Brumett said. “If you can convince someone they’re weak, then they pull weaker.”

Some call this a golden age for arm wrestling.

The world’s top heavyweights can make a good living, $25,000 or even $50,000 a match.

The world’s best arm wrestler is Levan Saginashvili, a 36-year-old known as the “Georgian Hulk” who is reminiscent of “The Mountain” from “Game of Thrones.” His top competitor is Devon Larratt, a 50-year-old Canadian Special Forces veteran who deployed seven times to Afghanistan. Both have YouTube pages with more than a million subscribers.

Jon Thompson, a 41-year-old substitute teacher from Aitkin who’ll face Dabe Saturday at the state championship, has traveled the world for arm wrestling events. He competed in a supermatch in Las Vegas before this spring’s WrestleMania. He’s done it professionally for five or six years, though the winnings aren’t much, and somewhat beside the point.

Training is serious. Thompson has an arm wrestling table rigged with a cable system to work on small muscles most people don’t develop.

“Everyone has forearm beef or a bicep, but the pronator muscle, most people don’t have much definition there,” Thompson said.

Dabe is a retired heavy equipment operator. He lives on a hobby farm near Stacy just off Interstate 35 north of the Twin Cities, where he tends to a koi pond and raises miniature horses.

He grew up in St. Paul as a wrestler — er, a full-body wrestler, not an arm wrestler. During Dabe’s senior year, his coach brought the team to an arm wrestling event.

“I ended up beating all the kids and all the adults, and I got hooked,” Dabe said.

One natural advantage Dabe has is that he was born with hands and arms much bigger than the typical human: the world’s biggest hands, he claims. He spent six weeks at a Shriners Hospital in middle school as doctors tested him for elephantism and gigantism. The closest Dabe has come to a proper diagnosis is Klippel-Trénaunay syndrome, a rare genetic condition affecting development of blood vessels, soft tissues and bones.

The condition can help in arm wrestling, though top arm wrestlers figure things out after a few pulls.

“My style is grip and rip,” Dabe said. “I’ve always been more on power. Get a good hold and just pull. Back in the ‘80s, that was arm wrestling, just who’s stronger. Now it’s changed up more with technique. You see lot of smaller guys beat bigger guys because of technique.”

There are certainly injuries, some gruesome. At a Minnesota event earlier this year, a competitor tore his pectoral muscle. The worst injury Dabe has seen was a spiral fracture of a humerus bone, the large bone between the shoulder and the elbow. The less said about this injury, the better.

Dabe is a tough dude, 5-foot-8 and 260 pounds with impossibly long arms roped with muscle. He loves telling war stories: When his elbow popped during a match in the ‘80s, Dabe competed the next week anyway, his arm black and blue to the shoulder. Or when he tweaked a shoulder trimming a horse’s hoof: “He kicked, and I didn’t let go.”

He’s also a genial, giving man who hosts regular practices at his rural spread. The last time he won a world title for his age group was 2023. He knows his time in the sport is limited. He’s thrilled to help a next generation.

“I can’t quite hang with the top elite pros right now,” Dabe said. “I can still beat a lot of guys once, but I don’t have enough when you’re doing a best of five or seven. So I enjoy the easy life, the peace and the quiet. But I can’t wait to see what the next generation brings.”