Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold (6 page)

Coach had me fly with him once to a tournament in San Francisco while the rest of the team drove. I was injured and unable to wrestle, but he still wanted me to go with him. Coach and I went out for dinner, and he spotted an open parking spot right in front of our restaurant. We were in the far left lane and there was another car that was in front of the open spot and was about to back in and park there. Coach floored it and shoved the nose of the rental car into the spot, grabbed his mouthpiece, and told me to finish parking the car.

Coach got out and the other guy also got out of his car. I doubt the poor guy expected what came next. I don’t know what was said between the two, but Coach put in his mouth guard and got right in the guy’s face, started rubbing his ribs, and stuck his chest into the guy. Coach had broken two ribs years earlier, and for some reason, whenever he was acting tough, he’d rub those two ribs while sticking his chest out. The rest of us knew what that meant, but the guy from the other car didn’t.

I finished parking the car, the other guy got in his car and drove off, and Coach came back to join me.

“Go wait in that alley by the restaurant,” he told me, “and if that guy comes back to fight me, we’re doing it in the alley. And
maybe take his wallet.” The last line was a joke. The part about fighting in the alley wasn’t.

Coach cracked me up a lot.

At that San Francisco tournament, the guy who took my place was losing a match and Coach was in his corner screaming at him. Apparently, the two had had some issues the year before. Finally, Coach had seen enough. In the middle of the match, he pulled twenty bucks out of his pocket, grabbed the wrestler, handed him the money, and told him he was off the team. That left me as the only wrestler at my weight.

Coach had placed me at 150 to start the season. I had cut a lot of weight to get there.

Although I’d had to cut weight to make my weight class during high school, I had never had to cut to drop down into a lower class. I had witnessed Dave and others go through that, so I knew it was the worst part of our sport. But not until I actually had to experience it myself did I know just how bad cutting was.

Cutting isn’t just tough on you physically; it also grates on you mentally. It’s like a cloud hanging over your head that won’t go away because you know that with the next meet, you’ll be having to cut. Cutting is one of the biggest reasons that nothing in sports is more physically painful and psychologically demanding than wrestling, especially at college’s top level. I believe there are only three groups of people who have it worse than college wrestlers: the terminally ill, soldiers on the front line, and prisoners on death row.

The smallest wrestlers tended to cut the most. Not percentagewise, but in total pounds. The smaller the wrestler, the more cutting weight became a bigger part of his life. I’ve known
wrestlers through the years who wrestled at 118 pounds but walked around in the off-season at 150. It was unreal.

If you’re a wrestler who has to cut a lot, it can almost ruin the sport for you. Dave hated the way he had to cut at Oklahoma State so much that he left.

There are differing philosophies on cutting weight. Mine before college had been to train as hard as I could and my body would assume its optimal weight. Then I would cut to whatever weight was just below that.

Coach Auble, though, believed in cutting lots of weight and thought that if I wrestled at 150, I would be better. But I was so lean that cutting to 150 meant almost total dehydration, which lowers the body’s ability to consume oxygen and also decreases strength.

After a miserable road trip at 150, we realized it was a mistake and I shot up to 158 the next day. That was the only time I gave control over my weight to a coach. Good wrestlers must eliminate mistakes, and that was one mistake I would never make again. Wrestlers stand alone on the mat, so they have to be their own coach.

Don’t get me wrong about Coach Auble. He was an excellent coach and a role model for me. But my cutting all the way down to 150 didn’t work. I lost eight matches that year, and half of them were at 150.

I ended my freshman season with an 18-8 record. I placed third in the conference tournament to qualify for the NCAA tournament, but I lost my first-round match there and didn’t place.

—

U
CLA didn’t turn out to be a dream place, as it had seemed at the start.

Something happened between Coach Auble and Chris Horpel that caused a noticeable tension between the two, and the team split into two groups when the wrestlers started taking sides. Dave and I felt stuck in the middle because we both liked Coach Auble and were also good friends with Chris.

Coach Auble represented the type of wrestler I wanted to become, and I pretty much wanted to be just like him when I grew up. I have a saying that I’ve followed through the years: It’s not what you know, it’s who you are. I believe a wrestler’s personality, more than anything else, is what makes him win. Whatever it was about Coach Auble that made him win, I wanted those characteristics to rub off on me.

On the other hand, Chris had begun helping me back when I was in high school and was part of the reason I had become successful in wrestling. He continued supporting me at UCLA.

With Dave unable to wrestle in tournaments, all he could do that season was the daily workouts. The first time he and I worked out together came during the middle of the season. Dave was superaggressive with me. I thought he was trying to destroy my confidence.

Confidence is either built up or torn down every day. I was feeling a lot of pressure competing as a freshman, and cutting weight had been an extra burden for me. I thought Dave was trying to take advantage of where I was mentally to build his confidence on my back.

When I got pissed at how Dave was wrestling me and started stalling my ass off, Dave got annoyed and yelled at Chris to tell me to quit stalling.

“That’s too bad, Dave,” Chris shot back. “Deal with it.”

In my mind, I was like,
Yessssss!!!
because Chris was supporting me and not making me do what Dave wanted.

So I, and Dave, never really took a side in the coaches’ dispute.

The turmoil destabilized the team. We finished third in conference and Fred Bohna won the school’s first wrestling national championship. But that West Coast dynasty never developed. Coach Auble left UCLA after that season and didn’t return to coaching for several years. Chris Horpel left to become head coach at Stanford, his alma mater. Dave and I decided to get out, too, leaving after one year, with Dave never getting to take the mat as a Bruin.

UCLA wound up dropping wrestling as an intercollegiate sport a year later, citing a lack of practice space and the cost to remedy the problem. I think the decision had its roots in all the problems during our year there.

T
he summer after our season at UCLA, Dave and I tried out for the Junior World Team, which trained at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Neither of us had a car, and the only way we could get there was to hitchhike. Over the first hundred miles, we picked up about ten different rides. Then a woman pulled over to the side of the road and when we told her where we were headed, she said she could take us the rest of the way.

After training camp in Colorado Springs, we traveled to Brockport, New York, for the Junior World Team Trials. Dave and I weighed in for the trials at 165 pounds—the first time I had weighed as much as he did.

The team’s head coach, Bill Weick, was a high school coaching legend in Chicago who been head coach of various US international teams and had been on the coaching staff of the 1972 Olympic team. Coach Weick later coached three Olympic teams in the 1980s, including teams for which Dave and I competed. He became one of my favorite coaches and corner men.

Coach knew that Dave could win Junior Worlds at 163, so he told me to try out at the next weight class up, 180.5. I agreed before learning that would mean I’d have to beat Ed Banach to make the team. Ed was a sensational wrestler who had redshirted his freshman year at the powerhouse that was the University of Iowa. In fact,
Ed’s older brother, Steve, and his twin brother, Lou, also signed with Iowa. Their coach was Dan Gable, probably still the most-recognized name in all of wrestling. As a wrestler in high school and college, Dan had a 181-1 record, and he won gold at the 1972 Olympics. By the time he had retired from coaching at Iowa in 1997, Dan’s teams had won fifteen national championships and he had coached 152 All-Americans. If Dan signed you to wrestle at Iowa, you were very good.

Finding out I would have to beat Ed drained me psychologically. My body started feeling tired. I think when a person knows he will have to go through an intense experience, his body starts conserving energy by getting tired. I knew I would have to conserve as much energy as I could. For the week or week and a half leading up to the trials, the only time I got out of bed was to eat and practice.

Ed and I wrestled best two-out-of-three matches to make the team. I got up on him 7–0 in the first match and he came back to beat me 12–11. Then he beat me pretty bad in the second match.

Dave easily won at 163, but Coach Weick wanted to see what Dave could do at the next weight up and switched Dave and me. Dave beat Banach handily, and I won at 163, so both of us made the Junior Worlds team. But it bugged me that my brother had beaten Ed and I hadn’t. I looked at the two of us, and there was no comparison in our builds. Physically, I should have been the one beating Ed, but Dave beat him and I couldn’t figure out why.

•

The night before the team was to leave for Mongolia for the Junior Worlds, a group of us went to a bar. I met the most beautiful girl in the world there. Or at least as beautiful as Dave’s girlfriend,
Veronica, who had sought Dave out after Dave had defeated her boyfriend, a former World Cup champion, in a local tournament. But the girl in the bar had an ugly friend with her who wouldn’t leave us alone. Dave stepped in and took her off away from us. That’s what I call taking one for the team!

The girl I was with took me to her apartment so we could make out. I couldn’t believe my luck in meeting this girl, but we left for Mongolia and I never saw her again. However, the fact that I had been able to make out with a girl that was as beautiful as Dave’s girlfriend was a real confidence builder for me. Dave had a disarming confidence around girls, especially after the success of his high school wrestling career. It hadn’t been easy for me to talk to girls growing up, but that began to change during my first year of doing the college scene.

The day before we left for the Junior World Team Trials in Brockport, I had learned how much I had progressed. Pat and I went to the swimming pool at the top of the hill above the dorms. With my gymnastics background, I was able to show off some tricks from the three-meter diving board. Then I joined Pat to sunbathe for a little while. After I had gotten comfortable and started soaking in the rays, all the talking around the pool ceased.

I looked up to see that an incredibly gorgeous girl had entered the pool area. She had superthick, straight brown hair all the way down to her lower back, a beautiful face, gigantic breasts, and a perfectly round, rock-hard rear. Everybody stopped to watch her make her way around the pool. She walked toward Pat and me and laid her towel down just a few yards from us. After she stretched out on her towel, the poolside conversations and activities resumed.

“I dare you to go over and talk to her,” Pat said to me.

Why don’t you?
I thought to myself.

“Okay,” I said, to Pat and myself.

I walked over to where she was sunbathing and either I tuned out everything around me or all the conversations halted again.

“Excuse me,” I said, getting her attention. “My friend dared me to come over here and talk to you. Could you just go along with me, let me sit here for a minute, and act like you like me?”

“Sure,” she said, and visibly invited me to sit next to her so my friend could see.

She gave me more than a minute—we talked for a few hours. She gave me her phone number and asked me to call her. Dave and I left the next day and I never saw her again.

I had already felt like I was beginning to turn a corner in my ability to talk with girls. I’d had some cute girlfriends my freshman year, but nothing like Veronica or the girls I met at the pool and in Brockport.

•

The first thing I noticed upon our arrival in Mongolia was the huge military presence. Everywhere we turned, there was some combination of military trucks, soldiers, portraits of Vladimir Lenin, and the communist hammer and sickle symbol.

Wrestling was huge in Mongolia. Genghis Khan’s army used wrestling, horseback riding, and archery to conquer territories in creating the largest empire in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Through all the centuries since, those three skills had remained valued in Mongolia.

Our team visited an outdoor arena to watch an ancient traditional Mongolian wrestling exhibition at the Naadam festival. The
entire field was covered with wrestlers, and they performed a strange dance around a “referee” holding a pole. As the wrestlers circled the pole, they slowly flapped their arms like birds.

Before each match, the two wrestlers would face each other, then slap the insides and outsides of their thighs.

There were no weight classes or time limits for matches. A match ended when one wrestler took down his opponent or forced him to touch his knees, hands, or other body part to the ground. The winners remained in the tournament until the final two wrestlers squared off for the championship.

It was interesting to see what wrestling might have been like centuries earlier. I’m not sure I liked the idea of not having weight classes, though. It had been tough enough going up one class to wrestle Banach at the trials!

The heavyweight on our team angered me. Back then, there was no weight limit on heavyweights. Our big boy didn’t train as much as the rest of us, and when he did practice, he didn’t try as hard as I thought he should. He was big and fat and using his weight to win instead of any skill. He didn’t seem very mature, but then again all of us were under twenty.

But what really pissed me off about this guy was that he would eat and drink in front of the rest of us as we cut weight. The drinking part really annoyed me. When you’re cutting and can’t afford to drink even an ounce of water, it’s cruel for another wrestler to walk near you with a cup in his hand.

He and Dave were the only ones on the team not starving themselves to make weight, and he had packed a suitcase full of food and counted every item every day to make sure one of us hadn’t taken anything.

Near the end of our training camp back in the States, we had taken a psychological test, and the results showed that I was ready, motivated, and in top mental shape. I wasn’t that way in Mongolia, though. I think Coach Weick overtrained us. He ran us like crazy. I felt like I was training for a marathon instead of a wrestling tournament. We ran around a soccer field on steaming hot days more times than I care to remember. I couldn’t have gained weight if I had force-fed myself.

—

B
y the time the tournament in Mongolia started, I was so physically and mentally drained that I would have preferred to hop back on the plane and go home instead of wrestle.

Still, I won my first match 17–0 against a Korean opponent. It was such a mismatch that it didn’t matter whether I wanted to be there or not. I barely won my next match, then lost the next two and didn’t place.

I was typically starving after tournaments and would go on a hunt for chocolate. The Mongolian chocolate was pretty good, at least when I was able to avoid the occasional worm.

When Dave wrestled a Bulgarian after I was done, I didn’t want to go back to the arena, so I stayed at the hotel and watched the match on television. TV must have been fairly new to the country, because there were only a few black-and-white TVs in the hotel, and the only thing showing on them was wrestling. For Dave’s match, they weren’t showing the score on the screen, so I scored the match in my head. At the end, I had Dave winning 11–3. But the ref raised the Bulgarian’s hand instead. The Bulgarian won 12–11. I couldn’t believe it! Dave also wrestled against the
eventual tournament champion, a Russian. It was a close match, but the refs cheated badly and Dave lost.

After the last match, I sat against a wall with Dave, and he was so distraught over losing that he started punching himself in the face. Dave had always been extremely hard on himself when he lost.

That’s another thing I learned from Dave—take your losses hard.

I had observed something similar from Korean wrestlers at the end of my freshman year at UCLA when Dave and I had been asked to compete against a Korean cultural exchange team at a high school in Los Angeles.

I wrestled first and got pinned by the same headlock that had caused me problems since I first started the sport. I asked the Korean coach for a rematch and defeated the same opponent 20–1. Our team went on to win the dual.

I walked through the door of the locker room and heard screaming and banging. The Koreans’ captain was beating the crap out of his teammates with a kendo sword and ordering them to bash their heads against the lockers. Some were bleeding, and I think all of them were crying and yelling as though they had dishonored themselves by losing.

Standing there watching and feeling their wrestlers’ deep sense of honor and pride, I immediately gained respect for the Koreans.

That’s what they should be doing,
I thought.
That’s what I would be doing.

At UCLA, I had determined that I would never again take losing in stride. I wanted to make losing the worst experience possible. I’d hit myself, bang my head against a wall, cry, scream, rip
clothes apart, destroy nearby innocent objects, or whatever else I felt like doing. I figured that if I made losing the worst experience ever, I would never make that same mistake again. Good wrestlers must eliminate mistakes.

Then I would enter a period of almost depression that could last for a couple of weeks. I would become deeply introspective and try to determine why I lost so I could identify the mistake(s) I needed to eliminate. Then I would redouble my commitment and effort.

Losing flat-out sucked, and I made the time after a loss suck, too.

I learned far more from my losses than from my victories, because losses exposed mistakes I never wanted to make again.

Once eliminated from the Mongolia tournament, I started hanging out with the Korean wrestlers. They were friendly guys, and our teams would often go to the mess tent for meals together. I noticed early on several Korean wrestlers holding each other’s hands. After I got to know the Koreans, some of them would run up to me, grab my hand, and hold it. I tried making hand motions and speaking in broken English to inform them that American men didn’t do that. My message never got through, though, and they’d just smile, say something in Korean, shake their heads, and continue holding my hand.

One time I was sitting on a bench and the entire team came over. Those who could squeeze onto the bench near me took a seat. The two guys on either side of me had their arms around me. Their 105-pounder, who wound up winning his class, plopped down in my lap. I just accepted it as part of their culture. Or least I
hoped
it was part of their culture.

It saddened me to leave the Koreans at the end of our trip. I’m
not sure why I got along so well with them, but they were fun to hang around despite the language barrier and were good people. I gave some of my jeans and US team gear to them, mostly to the one I had defeated 17–0 in my first match. He cried when we said good-bye to each other.

Our journey home began by taking the train from Mongolia northwest to Novosibirsk, Siberia, in Russia. I had gotten an ear infection from a cauliflower ear and my glands swelled up. We had no antibiotics with us, but I was able to trade a pair of jeans to the Russians in exchange for a couple of bottles of vodka to kill the pain.

•

Junior Worlds was my first international tournament, and even though I hadn’t placed or wrestled particularly well, it was an amazing experience.

When we arrived back at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Dave and I hadn’t showered for four days. Once we’d started traveling home, there was no place to clean up. Our only clothes were our unlaundered workout gear. Needless to say, our gear was dirty and smelly. On top of all that, I was sick. The two of us drew some strange looks walking through the terminal.

Dave turned to me and said, “If you’re going to do this kind of stuff for a living, you’ve got to embrace adversity.”

—

D
ave and I had been trying to figure out what school we could leave UCLA for, and during our trip to the Junior Worlds, Dave told me we were going to the University of Oklahoma. I had no idea that’s where he had wanted to go.