Melvin Henderson placed fourth in a field of 10 in the 1999 Sacramento Bodybuilding Championships, but with a few disadvantages.

First, he hadn't dieted for the competition. In fact, he knew nothing about dieting, something he began to learn about only afterward.

Second, he hadn't studied posing. He really knew very little about it except what he had gathered from watching the other contestants.

Third, he had never worked out with weights that weighed more than 70 pounds.

Fourth, he knew next to nothing about serious bodybuilding training.

Fifth, his posing trunks broke the solid-color regulation in force at all NPC contests, which certainly lost him a few points.

And sixth, but not least, he's an amputee. His right leg was amputated at the hip about a dozen years ago.

Next time around, he intends to take first—and he just might do it.

Melvin may technically be "disabled," but he doesn't consider his functioning seriously impaired. His disability occurred one morning when he was 22 years old. He came walking out of his house in San Francisco at the same time an 11-year-old boy with a chip on his shoulder and an Uzi in his hands emerged from a nearby house. The kid sprayed the neighborhood with bullets. Among the neighbors who were hit, Melvin was the most seriously injured. He entered the hospital that morning with two legs and woke up that afternoon with one. His leg bones had been hit in half a dozen places and were shattered beyond repair.

"I'm stronger than I was before this happened," says Melvin. "Every so often, I see the kid who did this. When he sees me, he starts crying. I tell him not to worry, that I forgive him. I tell him I'm stronger now."

Melvin has a mission. He wants people to know that "disability" is about 50 percent in the mind. No matter what your "disability," he says, you can control the degree to which it controls your life. And he's definitely not allowing it to control his. "Don't open the door for me," he says, echoing one of the pet peeves many "disabled" people often mention. "Let me open it for you."

If a few of these pictures appear more graphic than one would normally see in a print-and-paper bodybuilding magazine, don't chalk this up to bad taste or sensationalism. This is the way Melvin chose to be depicted. "I want people to see me the way I am, to see the way I live." He rejected the idea of hiding or minimizing the fact that he's an amputee.

Melvin can do almost anything the average person can do—and he probably does more. He plays full court basketball, jogs, carries bags of groceries up flights of stairs without the use of crutches, and trains regularly with weights. He starts every day with 1,000 pushups.

Since his entry into bodybuilding just a few months ago, Melvin has already had an offer to star in a video about exercise for the "disabled." He has done some training with Flavio Baccianini, world-renowned masters Mr. Olympia contestant. And he's become an inspiration for many exercisers at the large San Francisco gym where he was hired after appearing in his first bodybuilding competition. Within two months of starting serious training with heavier weights than he'd previously used, and after these photographs were taken, he had gained 15 pounds.

Look for a bright future for this man with a message. There's sure to be one.