On an October afternoon in 1980, Charles Gaines and his friend Hayes Noel stood in the woods behind Gaines's house in New Hampshire, taking turns shooting each other with a gas powered pistol built to mark livestock. It was, by most accounts, the first paintball game ever played. Gaines, the Alabama born novelist whose nonfiction book Pumping Iron introduced the world to bodybuilding and to a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, died on July 21, 2026, at 84.

He was born January 6, 1942, in Jacksonville, Florida, to Charles Latham Gaines and Margaret Shook Gaines, and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, attending Mountain Brook Grammar School, Indian Springs School, and Birmingham University School. He earned a bachelor's degree, cum laude, from Birmingham-Southern College, then a master's in creative writing, also cum laude, from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, according to the American Museum of Fly Fishing, the fly-fishing conservation organization that later honored him with its Heritage Award.

His first novel, Stay Hungry, was published in 1972 and became a finalist for the National Book Award. Set among Birmingham gym culture, it followed a wealthy young heir drawn into the world of competitive bodybuilding, a milieu Gaines already knew firsthand. "I had been a bodybuilder myself in my teens and thought it was an interesting subject that nobody had written about," he told Generation Iron years later, recalling how he pitched his next project to a skeptical publishing world.

That project became Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding, a 1974 nonfiction book co-written with photographer George Butler that treated professional bodybuilders, among them an Austrian competitor named Arnold Schwarzenegger, as serious athletes rather than curiosities. The book is considered the definitive journalistic account of the sport and is credited with bringing bodybuilding into the mainstream and helping launch Schwarzenegger's career, per the American Museum of Fly Fishing. Gaines and Butler adapted it into the 1977 documentary of the same name, which Gaines also narrated. He had already brought Birmingham's gym culture to the screen once before: he co-wrote the screenplay for the 1976 film version of Stay Hungry, directed by Bob Rafelson and filmed in Birmingham, in which Schwarzenegger, Jeff Bridges, and Sally Field starred.

The paintball game began, by Garden & Gun's account of the story, as an argument. On Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 1980, Gaines and Noel, a New York Stock Exchange trader, spent months debating whether survival in the wild depended more on instinct or on learned skill. Gaines found a way to settle it in a farm supply catalogue: the Nel Spot 007, a carbon dioxide pistol designed to mark livestock. After the two tested the guns on each other that October, they brought in a third friend, ski shop owner Bob Gurnsey, to help design a formal contest. On June 27, 1981, twelve players met in an eighty acre wooded lot near Henniker, New Hampshire, armed with the marking pistols, compasses, and topographic maps, to capture four colored flags. A New Hampshire forester named Ritchie White won without firing a shot. The three friends founded the National Survival Game that year to sell equipment and license the format, and paintball grew from that backyard argument into a sport played on fields around the world.

Gaines married Patricia Ellisor in 1963, and the two spent more than sixty years together, living at various points in Georgia, Ireland, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, and Alabama before settling, from 2003 onward, into a yearly rhythm split between Argo, Alabama, and Monastery, Nova Scotia. He is survived by Patricia and their children, Latham, Greta, and Shelby Gaines, five grandchildren, and his sister, Hansell Burke, according to the American Museum of Fly Fishing.

In his later decades, Gaines returned increasingly to the pursuit that had run alongside his whole career: fly fishing. A founding and lifetime board member of Fly Fishing Team USA, he competed in world championship events in New Zealand and Tasmania, fished in more than twenty countries across five continents, and served on the U.S. National Council of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, co-editing two salmon fishing anthologies with his nephew, the writer Monte Burke. "Every time you cast a fly, you're throwing a question into something you can't see," he said, reflecting on what decades on the water had taught him. "I think there's a profound connection between angling and spiritual life." In April 2026, three months before his death, the American Museum of Fly Fishing gave him its Heritage Award at a sold out dinner at the New York Yacht Club, honoring his lifetime contribution to the sport and to fishery conservation.

Across novels, nonfiction, and a memoir, plus decades of magazine writing for Harper's, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and Field & Stream, and two Emmy Awards for television screenwriting, Gaines was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in 2018 and received the Truman Capote Prize for literary nonfiction, presented in Monroeville, Alabama, in 2020.

Stay Hungry remains in print, Pumping Iron is still the book bodybuilders point to as the one that took their sport seriously, and the game Gaines dreamed up in a New Hampshire backyard is still played on fields on every inhabited continent. The salmon fishing anthologies he built with his nephew, the board seats he held for fly fishing and river conservation, and the shelf of fiction and reporting he left behind trace a single, restless curiosity about what people do when they are tested, whether in a gym, an argument turned into a game, or a river.