Foxcatcher Page 13
The fact that I had changed my mind in a split second and decided to attack instead of playing it safe made all the difference. At the time, with my misunderstanding of the situation in that match, it seemed like an almost insignificant decision. But it changed my life forever. I would not have become an Olympic gold medalist if not for that one decision. It was the most important decision I’ve ever made, and I made it in the blink of an eye.
Sitting there in my apartment, almost getting lost in the realization of what the bracket was showing me, I began to picture who I was: someone who would try his hardest regardless of the outcome, who would go down doing his best.
I had become a fighter.
CHAPTER 10
Erasing the Asterisk
I didn’t get into wrestling to win medals.
Dan Gable once said, “Gold medals aren’t really made of gold. They’re made of sweat, determination, and a hard-to-find alloy called guts.” Wrestling is not fun. I’ve heard countless wrestlers through the years talk about how much they enjoy the sport. Not me. I never felt that way when I wrestled. My philosophy was that if I was having fun, I wasn’t working hard enough.
For me, the sport provided the way for me to become a great fighter. I wanted to fight and defeat the best wrestlers in the world, and the medals served as proof that I was becoming the person I wanted to be.
The status that comes from earning an Olympic gold medal is unparalleled in wrestling, although the other medalists and I in ’84 had to deal with questions about the merits of our accomplishments. Sometimes the questions appeared to be a deliberate attempt to take some of the shine off our medals.
In wrestling, the United States won its first four Olympic medals ever in Greco-Roman. In freestyle, we won seven of the ten gold medals plus two silvers. The seven golds tied the record for most wrestling gold medalists from one country in a modern Olympics.
When Dan was asked about the boycott’s effect, he claimed that we still would have won at least four weight classes if the Soviets and Bulgarians hadn’t stayed home. No doubt, we had a strong team that year. It’s just that we didn’t have an opportunity to prove how strong. I’ve often been asked how we would have fared against a full field at those Games, and I still struggle to come up with a good answer. I don’t really know how it would have turned out if the Russians and Bulgarians had participated, and we’ll never know.
I do know, though, that the boycotted Olympics resulted in a brighter spotlight than normal shining on the next World Championships because all the top wrestlers would be there.
Before that came the ’85 World Cup in Toledo, Ohio, which had been billed as featuring the best teams from each continent, except that South America was not represented. I beat Chris Rinke 10–0 in advancing to the finals against Vladimir Modosyan, a four-time Tbilisi champion. Modosyan was the toughest opponent I ever wrestled against. And the hairiest. His body was covered with so much hair that I called him “Hairy Guy.”
Modosyan beat me 9–1. Dave won his finals match, but the Soviets defeated us 7–3 for the team championship.
I received a plaque for placing second to Modosyan. Leaving the University of Toledo’s Centennial Hall, I held the plaque in my hand like a discus, spun once, and heaved it into the Ottawa River. I was wrestling with the Sunkist Kids club at the time, and the next week, club president Art Martori called and asked if I wanted a rematch with Modosyan. We met again during a dual in a mostly empty high school gym near Chicago, and I beat him 8–1.
—
The year 1985 was the best of my career. The loss to Modosyan was my only one that year.
I did come close to losing in an unusual situation at the US Open after my luggage got lost by the airline. Bobby Douglas, the Sunkist Kids coach whose book on takedowns I had memorized as a high school wrestler, gave me two options: wait for my gear, which I needed to cut weight in order to compete at 180.5 pounds, or take the twenty bucks he was offering me, go eat, and wrestle up a weight at 198. I didn’t know if my luggage would show up in time, so I opted to wrestle up even though I weighed 187.
My opponent in the finals was Bill Scherr, the runner-up the year before. I led Bill 4–2 with about thirty seconds remaining when I attempted a fireman’s carry. It was a stupid move to try at that point in the match, and he made me pay for my mistake, catching my arm and throwing me on my back to tie the score. Bill would have won on a criteria tiebreaker, so with fifteen seconds on the clock, I hit every move I could think of. As we were going out of bounds with five or six seconds left, I spun behind him for the winning point.
The much-anticipated World Championships, with every nation that boycotted the ’84 Olympics competing, were held October 1985 in Budapest, Hungary. I had been hearing for more than a year how we weren’t real Olympic champions because of the boycott. There was no special designation in the official list of champions to denote the boycott, but there were plenty of critics who had mentally placed asterisks beside some of our names. Mine included.
During the eleven-hour trip overseas, I prayed the plane would crash so I wouldn’t have to deal with the pressure. I prayed that more times than I care to admit on the way to big competitions.
I had doubts about my ability to win in Hungary. I knew I was good enough and had solved the inconsistency that had been a concern leading up to the Olympics, but wrestling was so violent and there was so much pressure. Good wrestlers choked all the time, it seemed, and in my mind I could put together a list of wrestlers who had lost when they shouldn’t have. It was one of those scenarios where, going in, I hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.
Sometimes you do get what you hope for.
I defeated Bulgarian Alexander Nanev, a three-time runner-up in the World Championships, 10–5 in the finals. Earlier, I had beaten a Soviet, Aleksandr Tambovtsev, 1–0. With victories against the best wrestlers from the two best teams not to compete in Los Angeles, my Olympic gold medal shined brighter than ever.
I was one of two Americans to win in Hungary, with Scherr taking the 198 title. Dave was one of two Americans to place second, but his World Championship in ’83 and mine that year made us the only ’84 Olympic gold-medal winners to also be world champs. In addition, Dave and I became the only US brothers to win world and Olympic titles—a feat accomplished only by two other Soviet brother combinations.
Winning the ’85 world title silenced the critics who had been saying I was not good enough to win at an Olympics with the Russians and Bulgarians. It partially silenced the critic within me, too.
—
I was on a real high when Dave and I returned from Hungary to our jobs at Stanford. My first day back in the Stanford wrestling room, the entire team clapped and cheered for me. Finally, Chris Horpel could no longer remind me that my brother was a world champ and I wasn’t.
That first day, Chris called me into his office. He didn’t congratulate me on my new title. He didn’t apologize for treating me as lesser than Dave. He didn’t promote me or give me a raise from my ten-thousand-dollar-a-year salary after two years of working for him.
He fired me.
There went the great day I was enjoying.
I sat there stunned. Confused. Pissed.
Was Chris jealous? Was he trying to prove his authority over me?
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know what to say other than, “Okay, fine.”
“You can work out here,” he told me, “but I can’t pay you.”
I got out of my chair and turned to leave his office. As I reached his door, he added, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to need the keys to the car back.”
Brad Hightower was one of the Stanford wrestlers I had taken under my wing. His dad owned a car dealership and wanted to express his appreciation by giving me a badly needed Toyota Tercel. In order to write the car off, though, he had to donate it to a charity and officially designated the car as a
gift to the Stanford wrestling program. The car wasn’t legally mine, but it was given for me to use.
Chris gave the car to Dave’s wife. She wasn’t a Stanford employee, but he gave the keys to Dave to give to Nancy. That created a weird dynamic because Dave, Nancy, and I were renting rooms in our dad’s home. We were all under the same roof, and I had to look out the windows every day and see Dave’s wife getting in and out of “my” car.
That sucked.
The only reason Horpel gave me for firing me was that he couldn’t afford me. I wasn’t a yes-man. Dave wasn’t, either, but he had the ability, which I never developed, to express himself while staying within the lines. Maybe that was a factor. I don’t know. But after I was let go, Horpel gave my salary to Dave, doubling his pay to twenty thousand dollars per year. So much for the affordability reason.
Dave got my money, and his wife got my car.
I felt betrayed by my own brother. I never asked him about it, but he had to have known I was going to get fired. That’s not the kind of thing that happens without someone in Dave’s position being made aware of the plans. Dave must have consented to my being fired, even if reluctantly. But for a decision that major, how could he have kept it from his brother?
Our situations were different. Dave had a wife and son, Alexander, by that point. He needed more money than I did, and I was pretty desperate for money. USA Wrestling sure wasn’t helping us.
My firing cut one of the cords between Dave and me. It stung badly. I thought he and Horpel were against me. I felt isolated and alone. I got real serious and became sensitive and oppositional to everyone around me. Anyone who had an opinion to share with me didn’t need to waste his time, because I didn’t care.
Dave and I continued to practice against each other in the room, and I got cutthroat with him. I was ready to fight him every time we stepped onto the mat. I targeted his crotch. That’s the opponent’s center of gravity and a man’s most vulnerable area. Once I started attacking his crotch, I began taking Dave down at will. Horpel seemed surprised at how easily I was taking Dave down. Going after Dave’s crotch made me a better wrestler because in attacking the crotch I realized how I was getting my hips directly under his center of gravity instead of off to one side. That gave me an awareness regarding my center of gravity that I put to use against everyone I wrestled after that.
Despite everything that happened with my firing, I still loved Dave. He still was my brother, and nothing was going to come between us. I couldn’t forget all he had done in helping me develop into the man I had become. But my getting fired, and assuming Dave at least knew what was happening, changed me. I became more independent from Dave. I quit looking to him to be my leader.
•
To replace my lost income, I took time off from training to put together a bunch of wrestling clinics. I had a directory of high school wrestling coaches, and I would pick out a particular area and call coaches in that area to book clinics. Luckily, I was one of only two reigning World Champions in the United States. Wrestlers may not have received much publicity outside of Olympic years, but inside our sport, my name meant something. I could tell as soon as I identified myself if a coach would invite me to put on a clinic based on how he reacted to my name.
I needed a car, though, to drive to my clinics and contacted Brad Hightower’s father. He sold me a light blue 1982 Camaro Berlinetta (with a cruise control that didn’t work well) for seven thousand dollars. That wiped out my savings. My “Victory Tour”—that’s what I called my clinics—and my Berlinetta took me to different parts of the country.
The clinics brought in twenty-four thousand dollars in three months. It would have taken me more than two years to make that much at Stanford. But putting on clinics was hard. The travel became a grind. More important, the 1986 US Open and World trials were coming up, and I needed a stable training environment to begin preparing for those.
I started looking for coaching jobs, and Marlin Grahn offered me a position at Portland State University. Marlin had defeated me at the 1979 Far West Open, while I was at UCLA, and we became friends for life. Marlin said he could pay me fifteen thousand dollars. But there weren’t many good workout partners there, and I turned down his offer.
Chris Horpel did wonderful things for me. His help while I was in high school was instrumental in my becoming a successful wrestler. But his firing me at Stanford felt like a betrayal. He has made attempts to discuss it since, but I haven’t wanted to talk to him about it. He knows what he did, and I don’t see any need to relive it.
There hasn’t been anyone in my life who has helped me and hurt me as much as Chris did.
—
I won the 1986 US Open, defeating Mike Sheets 8–6 with four gut wrenches in the finals. Sheets had won at 180.5 the previous year when I wrestled up a weight. After the tournament, my frustration over having to compete while living in near poverty boiled over. I found Gary Kurdelmeier, USA Wrestling’s executive director, and got in his face.
“You need to change the meaning of the word amateur so we can make money and keep our amateur status like other sports,” I told him. We would watch athletes in other sports receive media attention and secure endorsement deals because their sports promoted and marketed them. Their sports not only allowed them to make money off their success and retain their amateur status to compete in the Olympics, but they also put them in position to do so. Those other sports seemed to genuinely care about their athletes.
“No one can stop you,” I told Kurdelmeier. “You are a monopoly in the US.”
Kurdelmeier disagreed, and I was close to doing something that would have gotten me in trouble when my former OU teammate Dan Chaid grabbed me and dragged me away.
I was sick of it. Some athletes decided to cash in after they won an Olympic gold medal. That’s not a criticism. They could choose their path, and more power to them. For my part, I wanted to keep competing.
They gave some wrestlers small stipends that didn’t come remotely close to covering financial needs. They were more like a small amount for administrators to give up in exchange for being able to say they were helping us financially. With as little as they were sending us, they could not claim they were doing all they could to help us financially.
I couldn’t tell you what kind of money USA Wrestling brought in, but I do know that they were hosting hundreds of tournaments each year and made a lot of money off entry fees. And before you could enter a tournament, you had to purchase a twenty-five-dollar membership card. But little of what USA Wrestling made went to the wrestlers. I remember that in 1983, when I placed seventh at the World Championships, US wrestlers who placed in the top seven received $1,500. Dave won the World Championship that year, and I think he received $5,000. I don’t know if the money came from an Olympic development fund, from USA Wrestling, or from the United States Olympic Committee through USA Wrestling. My $1,500 didn’t make much of a dent in my living expenses. Whatever USA Wrestling brought in, it seemed like barely any of it went to the wrestlers and it certainly didn’t help my financial situation.
We had to train year-round to be competitive on the international stage, while teams like the Russians were fully financially supported by their government. We were competing against, essentially, “professional amateurs.” Yet there were not many decent-paying jobs that could give us the flexible schedule we needed. It was either make a living or keep competing. Doing both was not an option.
That’s why so many of us took low-paying jobs as assistant coaches in colleges. Others took volunteer coaching positions so they could at least train and then found some other way to get by. It felt like when we did manage to win, despite USA Wrestling’s lack of support, the administrators showed up to take credit for whatever they could and then they went back to their comfortable lives while we went back to our low-paying jobs and small apartments.
After Nationals, I returned to Palo Alto to be
gin training for the ’86 Worlds. That’s when I met a guy who wanted to be my manager. He invited me to visit with him, and he had the largest office in the largest building in Palo Alto. I told him how I was trying to promote myself and make more money so I could continue competing.
“That’s what I do,” he told me. “You ought to let me do it for you.”
He said he was worth millions and would promote me for 50 percent of everything he made for me.
I figured it was worth a shot. I needed money, and although 50 percent was a big cut, I was willing to give up half of whatever someone else could bring in for me because I didn’t think I could bring in anything for myself. I didn’t have time to try to market and promote myself while training. I had to keep winning to be marketable, but I couldn’t make myself marketable and continue winning. I needed someone to manage me, and I didn’t have anybody who could. Plus, if the guy didn’t make any money for me, I figured, half of zero was zero.
The guy turned out to be a crook. He didn’t bring in one penny for me, but he wanted money from me anyway. When I told him I was done with him, he said I owed him 50 percent of what I had made from my clinics, even though he had done absolutely no work related to them. When I told him what I thought of his demand, he threatened to sue me. I had to pay for a lawyer so I wouldn’t have to give that bum anything. Hiring a lawyer didn’t help my finances any.
I was wrestling great, at a real high point in my career with Olympic and World championships in successive years. But being fired had not only left me feeling insulted, it had also thrown me into financial desperation. I lost my health insurance when I lost my job. I was used to wrestling without insurance, but I had never liked it. Without income, I was one freak injury in a violent sport from being wiped out financially.