by Christian Duque
When I first read the news that Hayley had passed away I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t bring myself to the realization that we had lost yet another young bodybuilding star. Although there weren’t a lot of details provided regarding her cause of death, one always assumes. As a writer in this sport I try not to always go to the topic of performance enhancing drugs. After all, she had left the sport years ago and who’s to say that her passing didn’t have anything to do with those powerful substances? I mean it could have been a pre-existing condition, it could have been something related to her diet, or it could have been stress and anxiety. It could have been anything.
The family said that the death was sudden, unexpected, but that she didn’t suffer. That really doesn’t tell us anything. And maybe it’s not our business to know, either. Palumbo was under the impression they would probably do an autopsy, but who knows if they did that. The reality of the matter is that Hayley is no longer with us and we need to show her and her family the respect they deserve by honoring her memory and not asking too many questions. At the same time I am a journalist and as a journalist I have an inquisitive mind. I know that it’s probably not right to ask, but I also know that that’s how I’m wired. I also know that it’s not very common at all for a woman of 37 years of age to pasd suddenly from an unexplained reason.
What I will say though is that when I read the news it shook me to my core because I knew a great deal about her and I really loved her career. Especially because at the time she was most active with RX, I was also active with RX and so I was able to see her progression as a fan.
This was back in the days of Myspace and Facebook. I don’t think social media was really a thing back then as we know it today. TikTok didn’t exist and Instagram was brand new. Also I feel like people didn’t go to their phones quite as much as they do today. The magazines were still around even though they were maybe rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic by that point. But one thing that was very active was the message boards. I mean they were the talk of the town and you had some very savvy bodybuilding fans on there 24/7 talking about all sorts of topics. The boards were very kind to Hayley because of the fact that she was such a young competitor with a great head on her shoulders.
After all she was a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a psychology major. She understood academics and she was also a very scholarly nutritionist in the making. Unlike many competitors that just took handfuls of supplements, McNeff had a real knowledge of the intricacies of diet, nutrition, and supplementation. She also had a knack for training and posing. Many people thought she was a natural. When she took the stage people just stopped what they were doing to look at her pose. And that’s not only a result of her building a great physique, rather, her abilities to showcase that physique, how she transitioned from pose to pose and how she held poses strategically for the photographers and the audience. That’s not just bodybuilding – it was entertainment.
But I think what most people will remember her most for were those Raising The Bar (RTB) videos. She was on several of them and I think that between her romance with Dave Pulcinella, her trials and tribulations as a competitor, and also a look at the actual suffering that competitors have to endure behind the scenes, that really gave us all an idea of what it was like to live a day in the life of Hayley McNeff. In fact, it was at the Universe where one of those RTB series chronicled her arduous road to the stage. And it wasn’t a road traveled over the course of many weeks, but it was the road traveled over the course of minutes and hours before she went on stage. It was some of the most honest instances of reporting I’ve ever seen. It showed a competitor struggling simply with getting out of bed. And it was a story that didn’t sanitize what was going on. They were very transparent about the fact that Hayley may have overdosed on powerful diuretics and was having symptoms that would otherwise have prompted anyone outside of this industry to have called an ambulance. Whereas most people would want to get checked into a hospital, she was adamant about making her way to the stage. That’s why I call it the road to the stage and one of the most honest takes of that road during the final moments that I’ve ever seen. Even with Instagram, Tiktok, even with all of the innovations that we have in terms of social media, I’ve never seen a take quite as blunt as that one. I mean in the video she looks like she’s one step away from death, but she will not give up.
One of the classic lines from that chaotic Universe was “just suck it up.” I mean think about it. There she was on the verge of collapse and she was being told to just suck it up and keep going. It’s one thing to suck it up if you’re running out of gas at the gym for one last rep or maybe you can’t eat anymore but you’ve got to shovel in a few more spoonfuls of chicken breast and rice, but when you can barely stand up and when you’re on the verge of collapsing, and you’re told to suck it up, that’s where bodybuilding takes a turn for the worst because the person telling you to suck it up means it. If you faint, you faint. If you throw up, you throw up, there is no empathy there. You can do the show or you can go to the hospital. There is no in between. There is no hand-holding, there is no coddling. That might happen in basketball or hockey or football, but there’s no room for that in bodybuilding.
And Hayley didn’t give up, but that show might have been what drove her away from the sport. What other sport can you point to where a competitor comes that close to death yet doesn’t give up? Moreover, what sport offers so little but expects so much? I don’t think any football player or basketball player or baseball player would endure that level of suffering to win a game or even to win a national title. They may say so for whatever product they’re peddling on the market but to actually go the distance and back up that talk with action? No way. Bodybuilders are just cut from a different thread. And that’s not always a good thing. The fact that life is so trivial that a competitor that is college-educated and has a tremendously high IQ is sacrificing themselves like that is irrational. But let it be irrational. It is a sign of discipline and commitment and she definitely had all of that. That’s why the bodybuilding industry took notice.
It was because of that hard work that she landed things like RX or the Iron Maiden’s role. Now granted Iron Maidens was bodybuilding’s take on MTV’s The Real World and it probably didn’t do very much for her career, but the fact that she was part of it, alongside the star-studded cast that were featured on the pilot, suggests that Hayley was definitely doing something right.
I don’t know if that Universe is what drove her away or maybe it was her pursuit of graduate studies in psychology that maybe took too much time for her to continue her bodybuilding journey as a competitor. But there’s no question that she loved the sport and she loved everything about it. Kicking it back to RTB, there is one line that has stuck with me for years. I didn’t realize it until now because I had to rewatch several of the videos to write this article but I always thought someone else said it, I just now realized that it was Hayley all along. “The quest for getting huge will never end.” How true is that? How many competitors live by that? How many people go into the gym with that very intention. No matter how much you eat, no matter how much you lift, no matter how many supplements you take, every athlete wants to get bigger. It’s this constant chase. Everybody wants the size and the freakiness. You don’t even have to be a competitor to want it either. You just have to be addicted to the muscle and addicted to the muscle and addicted to the muscle. It’s just something that I can’t explain. Even me, who has never done a bodybuilding show who has never been shredded like the people you see in the magazines, in my head I always want to get bigger. I want bigger lifts and bigger arms. There have been so many documentaries about this and so many articles written. and I think Hayley hit the nail on the head. It’s all about size and more size and more size!!
As I said earlier, who knows why Hayley passed away, at the end of the day she’s no longer with us and that is a very, very sad reality. In hindsight, I wish I would have known more about her and what she did with her life after bodybuilding, but people have a right to a life after the sport. Not everybody sticks around for good. Some people will get married and have families, other people pursue their careers, some people just disappear because they want to disappear, and that’s ok. The one thing I can say, though, is that Hayley made a mark in this sport and her memory will live on.
As always, thank you for reading my article, here, at IronMag. I look forward to reading your feedback in the comments. If you have any fond memories of Hayley, I think it would be great for you to put those in a post and include a link to this article. She was a great competitor and a great bodybuilder. She will be missed and everyone, here, at IronMag sends condolences to her family, friends, and fans.
