Foxcatcher Page 11

  The same living arrangements didn’t go well when officials with the Amateur Athletic Union, which was nearing its end as the governing body of US wrestling, put me in the same hotel room as Dave and his wife at the 1983 World Championships in Kiev, Russia.

  I’d had to get out when Clinton’s friends crashed our hotel room the morning of the NCAAs a few months earlier, but I didn’t have that option for the long stay in Kiev. I needed to be in my own room or in a room with a wrestler who didn’t have his wife or girlfriend with him. This was the World Championships and we were the United States of America, not some piddling little country that was just happy to be there. I would have paid for my own room for the whole trip if I had had the money.

  I needed a quiet room. I needed a room that I could make completely dark and where I could lie on a bed before each match and conserve energy to prepare for battle. I needed a room where I could get lots of rest between matches.

  I wasn’t given what I needed.

  The eventual World Champion, Taymuraz Dzgoev of the Soviet Union, beat me by two measly points. I had a 2-2 record in Kiev and placed seventh.

  Depressed over losing, I wondered if I would ever have another chance at a world title. I was just beginning freestyle and couldn’t assume I would make another World or Olympic team.

  Dave reached the finals of his weight and was trailing Taram Magomadov 4–0 early. For the first part of the match, I wanted Dave to lose, as though our hotel arrangements were his fault. But during his match, something in me snapped and I did a complete reversal. I knew Dave was better than his Russian opponent, and I jumped out of my chair, ran to the edge of the mat, and screamed at Dave, “Kill him!” Perhaps it was coincidence that this happened, but at that exact moment, the momentum of the match turned in Dave’s favor and he launched a comeback to win 7–4.

  I was happy for Dave but miserable that I had lost. I told Dave afterward that it wasn’t fair for me to be put in his and his wife’s room. I was mad, down, and feeling a little betrayed.

  —

  Even though Horpel hired Dave and me, I never understood Horpel’s take on me. I had a strong impression that he aspired to make me inferior to Dave. After the ’83 Worlds, I sensed Chris looked down on me as “Dave’s less successful little brother.” I didn’t get it. I was a three-time NCAA champ. Dave had won once. But Dave was a World Champion, and Chris apparently put more stock in that because he would introduce Dave to people as a world champ but would say nothing about my college titles.

  One time, our Stanford team went to Washington for a tournament. We were at a Stanford alum’s house playing pool, and I missed an easy shot. Chris made some remark that ended with his calling me a has-been Chris hadn’t won an NCAA championship, so I quickly shot back, “I’d rather be a has-been than a never-been.”

  Perhaps Horpel was trying to motivate me. I don’t know. I just tried not to think about what I perceived as to how he treated me. I didn’t want to let anyone get to me with their actions or words. “Forgive everyone of their sins” was my philosophy. Not for their sake, necessarily, but because I didn’t want to get weighed down with any burdens I didn’t have to carry. Simply competing supplied enough burdens of its own.

  The next year, we went to the US Open in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and Dave and I both won national freestyle titles. I was driving the rental car back to the Oklahoma City airport. Horpel was in the passenger seat, and Dave was in the back.

  “So,” Chris said to me, “how does it feel to win the national championship?”

  I was about to say, “Relieved,” but before I could answer, the question entered my mind, What is Chris expecting me to say?

  Did Chris think I would say I was happy? Heck yeah, I was happy. But if I told Chris that, he might think I wasn’t expecting to win. If I’m not expecting to win, I’m not competing in the tournament. I went to the US Open to win. Dave was my main workout partner in the Stanford room. Pound for pound he was the greatest wrestler in the world, and we were pretty even in the room at that point. It shouldn’t have been a surprise I had won. I wasn’t surprised. Losing would have surprised me, because I fully expected to win. Then it came to me how I should answer Chris’s question.

  How did it feel?

  “Natural.”

  Chris only laughed. The expression on his face indicated he hadn’t expected me to say that, so I guess that was the best answer after all.

  —

  Back in our day, qualifying for the US Olympic team was a more difficult process than in recent years. I would need to wrestle in thirteen matches to make the team. We had to qualify for the qualifying tournament, as odd as that sounds. The US Open counted as a qualifying tournament, and that’s where Dave and I earned the right to compete in the Olympic Qualifying Tournament. We both won there. The award presented to the top six placers in each of the weight classes was a tiny block of wood with the word Participant on it. That was my big prize for winning one of the toughest national tournaments of my life.

  Modest award aside, winning placed Dave and me on top of the ladder for the Olympic Team Trials, which would decide who would represent the United States at the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles. In the ladder system, the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-seeded wrestlers took part in a minitournament to determine who would fill the fourth spot. That person wrestled the third seed best-two-out-of-three for the right to take on the second seed in a best-of-three. As the top seed, I, like Dave, was able to wait for the survivor of those preliminary matches, and then wrestle best-of-three for the spot on the Olympic team.

  In Dave’s class, three-time world champ Lee Kemp advanced to the final. Dave swept him in two matches. That gave Dave wins against Kemp in the US Open and the qualifying tournament, all within a year of each other. I can’t say that I was surprised, because Dave was that good in freestyle, but it was an impressive feat.

  My opponent in the finals was Don Shuler. That was a rematch also, as I had beaten Don in the finals of the Open and the qualifier. I won the first match 7–2. Then Don beat me by the same score. In the third, and deciding, match, I won 4–2, earning a spot on the US Olympic team with my brother.

  In May, three months before the Olympics, Soviet Union officials announced a boycott of the Games in Los Angeles. Thirteen other Eastern Bloc countries joined the boycott over the next several days. The Soviets cited concerns over inadequate security for its athletes in the United States.

  Everybody in the world knew the Soviets’ real reason was retaliation for President Jimmy Carter’s decision to have the United States lead a sixty-two-nation boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

  Wrestling figured to be one of the sports most affected, because the Russians and Bulgarians, who also chose not to come to Los Angeles, perennially fielded powerful wrestling teams.

  Our sport is one of those that some sports fans pay attention to only every four years when the Olympics roll around. Because of the boycott, public sentiment was that the US team should clean up in freestyle. But what most didn’t realize was that while the boycott certainly diminished the level of competition in general, that wasn’t the case across the board.

  My and Dave’s weights, plus Barry Davis’s at 125.5, still had worthy fields. Barry’s class included two-time World Champion Hideaki Tomiyama of Japan. The only weight that I thought was more stacked than Barry’s was Dave’s at 163. He would have to contend with Martin Knosp, the 1981 world champ from West Germany. Dave’s weight was as legit as in any other Olympics. My class, 180.5, included the reigning European champion, Reşit Karabacak of Turkey. The European Championship included the countries that boycotted the Olympics. I had my weight ranked as third toughest.

  The depth might not have been that of a typical Olympics, but those three weights were still stout at the top. Despite the disparity in level of competition between the ten weight classe
s, expectations of American victories were the same across the classifications.

  As far as I was concerned, the drop-off in talent for my weight because of the boycott was minimal, but the pressure to win had been ratcheted up three or four notches. There certainly were no guarantees with Karabacak in my class, but losing in the ’84 Olympics would have been more humiliating than losing in any other Olympics.

  A problem at the Olympic training camp complicated matters for me. I had asked my girlfriend, Terry, to join me there. Things were going well at first, and having her there had a calming effect on me. Terry was, to be blunt about it, hot. Really hot. She was so stunningly gorgeous that the other guys would go gaga over her. Apparently, some of the wrestlers’ wives didn’t like Terry being there and complained to the administrators of USA Wrestling, which had become the governing body of US wrestling. The wives contended that only wives, not fiancées and girlfriends, should be permitted at training camp.

  The administrators assembled an informal meeting with the wrestlers, wives, and coaches about whether Terry should be permitted to stay. Dan Gable, our head coach, started the meeting by telling me, “There have been complaints that you and Terry are not married.”

  Who cares? I thought.

  “We have determined that if you and Terry aren’t married,” Dan continued, “she has to leave.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “We’re married.”

  “That’s it then,” Gable replied.

  Meeting adjourned, Terry stayed.

  Between the growing expectations of the boycott and the distractions over Terry at a time when I needed to be nearing my peak in training, I felt as if the forces of the universe were conspiring against me.

  CHAPTER 9

  Golden Moment

  The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles was a return engagement, marking the first time the Summer Games had been held in the United States since Los Angeles had hosted the 1932 Olympics. Los Angeles had beat out New York City in winning the right to serve as the host city in the country’s bid to bring the Olympics back to the United States. The two cities had served as bookends, though, for the Olympic torch relay, which would begin in New York City and last 82 days, trekking 9,000 miles through 33 different states before culminating in Los Angeles for the Opening Ceremony, where President Ronald Reagan would officially open the Games in his home state.

  The boycott, of course, dominated much of the pre-Olympics talk. With the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc of countries not participating, the US team was expected to run away from the remaining competition in the medals standings.

  Americans anticipated the Olympic debut of superstar sprinter and long jumper Carl Lewis. Diver Greg Louganis would finally receive his opportunity to follow up on his silver-medal performance in the 1976 Games in Montreal. Louganis had appeared primed to win a gold medal, if not two, at the 1980 Games before the US boycott. As far as international athletes, there was a lot of curiosity about West German swimmer Michael Gross, who, from images of his freakishly long arms coming out of the water, had picked up the nickname “the Albatross.” And then there was the US men’s basketball team that had won gold in all but two prior Olympics—in 1972 because of a controversial loss to the Soviets, and in 1980 when they were denied the opportunity because of the boycott. That was before the Dream Team days, when college athletes were still entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining dominance in the game invented in our country. Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, and Chris Mullin were on the ’84 team, and all three would be part of the first Dream Team eight years later.

  At a time when government spending for hosting Olympics was being scrutinized worldwide, the LA Games, under the leadership of Peter Ueberroth, was the first to be privately funded. Organizers bucked the trend of host nations building new venues for Olympics and then finding themselves stuck with trying to figure out what to do with the huge facilities after the Games ended. Although Los Angeles was the host city, venues already in place throughout Southern California were employed to host competitions.

  Instead of building one Olympic Village to serve as the home of all the athletes, three villages were established on university campuses: the University of Southern California and UCLA in Los Angeles, and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, up the Pacific Coast.

  The wrestlers were assigned to stay at USC. I remember noting a lot of pastel colors, for some reason, when we arrived. But other than that, I ignored much of what USC looked like for the Olympics, not to mention what was going around me. I was there to go to war, and that was it.

  We had to get in line and walk through a metal detector to receive our credentials. The young lady who handed me my credentials had a media guide she was asking athletes to sign next to their picture. She opened to the page with my weight class. Chris Rinke, the Canadian ranked third, one spot behind me, had signed his photo.

  “I see Rinke signed,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” she said, “and he said he’s going to win it. He was dead serious.”

  My face instantly warmed as blood sprinted to it. I could already tell these next two weeks weren’t going to be fun. Up until that point, I had competed in only three international events: the 1982 World Cup, 1983 World Championships, and 1983 Pan Am Games. I had won the World Cup, but Rinke had beaten me at the Pan Ams the only time I had faced him.

  The five-day freestyle Olympic tournament wouldn’t begin until the Games’ tenth of fifteen days of competition. The Greco-Roman portion started two days after the Opening Ceremony, which I couldn’t even enjoy because of what waited ahead of me. I wished we could have traded places on the schedule with the Greco-Romans so I could have gotten the competing part out of the way and enjoyed life in the Olympic Village.

  Greco-Roman was finished by the first full weekend. The United States had never medaled in Greco-Roman at the Olympics, but that year our guys won two gold medals (Jeff Blatnick and Steve Fraser), a silver, and a bronze. There was a lot of partying that Friday at the Olympic Village, with the wrestlers dancing around and all happy. I wanted to join in their celebration, but I wouldn’t allow myself to because of the psychological damage it could cause if I showed too much happiness before competing.

  Plus, their unprecedented success put more pressure on us in freestyle.

  I spent most of my time leading up to our event training, eating, and sleeping to conserve energy. Free video games were set up in the Olympic Village for the athletes. You’d think those would be a source of fun, but they weren’t for me.

  I was playing a video boxing game when Stan Dziedzic, our team manager and a former Olympic bronze medalist and national team coach, started watching over my shoulder. My next opponent came up on the screen—Reşit Karabacak, “the Turk,” who was ranked first in my weight class.

  “Hey, Mark, there’s the Turk,” Stan joked.

  I didn’t laugh. In fact, I didn’t react at all. Nothing was funny, nor would anything be funny, until I finished competing. I didn’t talk about opponents or potential opponents ahead of matches, and I wasn’t going to talk with Stan about Karabacak.

  This is none of his business, I thought. This is my life. This is something that’s going to go down in history. Forever. Here he is making light of it, and this is serious business for me. If I lose to anybody, including the Turk, I won’t get to call myself an Olympic champion.

  I ignored Stan, and he walked away. When I finished my game, I left and went back to my room.

  Two days before our event, Dan Gable moved our team from the Olympic Village to a Motel 6 less than a mile from the wrestling venue, the Anaheim Convention Center. That way we wouldn’t have to wait for buses, would have easy access to the scales, and could be in control of how and when we wanted to work out and cut weight.

  The next day, my dear mom came to our hotel and asked if I wanted to go to Disneyland and get something to eat. One day from starting what had already t
aken on the feel of the most intense competition of my life and she thought I would actually consider going out to eat and having fun? Mom!

  Weigh-ins took place two hours before the competition, and that was also when the draw for the tournament’s two eight-man pools occurred. After each wrestler weighed, he reached into a bucket and pulled out a plastic egg. Inside the egg was his number for the tournament. I drew number 6, which meant I would wrestle against number 8 in the first round. The Turk drew number 8!

  I was stunned. The first- and second-ranked wrestlers were going to meet in the first round. In two hours, I would be making my Olympic debut in what basically was the gold-medal match.

  I was scared to death. I went back to my room and told my girlfriend about the draw.

  “You look terrible,” Terry told me.

  Give Terry points for being honest. I just wished she hadn’t been honest in that situation.

  I stood in front of the mirror and looked like I always did after cutting to make weight. Wrestlers call that look “sucked,” with hollow cheeks and eyes. I mumbled something to Terry like, “You just haven’t seen me after weigh-ins lately.”

  I prayed I wouldn’t feel as terrible in two hours as Terry said I looked. I plopped down on the corner of my bed and stared at the wall, sweating like a pig.

  Good thing I didn’t have to catch a team bus to the convention center. The way my luck was going, the bus probably would have run me over.

  —

  Facing the number one wrestler in the world in my weight in the first match, I knew I would have to perform my best immediately. In the first move of the match, the Turk underhooked my arm and followed with a limp arm to a single leg. I answered by grabbing him in a double wristlock. I had performed that move probably a thousand times with a guy’s head on the inside trapped against my body. But I had watched a Cuban wrestler at the Pan Ams make that move with his opponent’s head on the outside. I had only done the move that way a few times and only in practices. But this was the match of the tournament, right out of the gate.