Foxcatcher Page 15

  I returned to Palo Alto angry, not only over losing at Worlds but also because of how I had lost. Knowing I was about to leave home didn’t brighten my mood any. I hated having to move away from my dad, and Philadelphia was all the way on the other side of the country.

  I was still in shock about being forced out. My parents had both graduated from Stanford. My grandfather taught at Stanford, and my grandmother worked there as a doctor. I had been born at Stanford’s hospital. When I had left Oklahoma for Palo Alto, I felt as if I had finally made it home again. But because Horpel had fired me, I was having to head cross-country to the East Coast. Just like when I’d had to leave Palo Alto to move to Oregon, I felt as if I was being kicked out of my home.

  I wanted to get in one last workout in the Stanford wrestling room, and it had to be with Dave. I think it was the best I ever wrestled him. Dave had to have known how bad I felt about moving away. At the end of our workout, he was using me to drill some headlocks. He stopped and looked directly into my eyes.

  “I haven’t told you that I love you in a long time,” he said. “I do.”

  Then he kissed me on the cheek.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Man and His Program in Disarray

  John du Pont was the richest man I’ve ever met. And the most miserable. There are some things in life you just can’t buy, but John du Pont tried anyway. I would soon learn that he wasn’t just difficult or strange—he was manipulative in a way I’d never experienced before. His money allowed him to have a power over people that was anything but healthy.

  He believed that everyone had a price, and he wanted to see what each person’s price was.

  That was a fact I’d see in action almost immediately.

  I paid about eight hundred dollars per month to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood three miles from the Villanova campus. I had a couch and a lounge chair in the living room and a desk in my bedroom. The coin-operated washer and dryer were in the same building, and all in all, I had a pretty good setup in a clean apartment complex.

  But compared to the chalet that du Pont lived in on the estate, it was like taking up residence in a cramped utility room.

  Shortly after I had moved to Villanova, du Pont called me at my apartment and asked me to come over to the chalet. His home was state-of-the-art, capable of being locked down like a fortress with steel blinds that rolled down over the windows. Those blinds closed so tightly that rooms would go pitch-dark when they were rolled down even in the middle of a bright, sunny day. Stepping down from the foyer into the living room, the first thing that caught my eye was a white fur, like a polar bear’s, draped over the couch. Among the pictures on the living room walls was one of du Pont shaking hands with President Gerald Ford.

  •

  A few people were in the living room when I walked in, including two guys who were some kind of Washington, DC, dignitaries or advisors or fund-raisers. They might even have been John’s “fixers,” who were brought in when John faced legal problems. I didn’t care enough to find out. Another guy was Bob, who John later told me was an event organizer. John liked to host awards ceremonies for himself, complete with awards he paid to have made at a local trophy shop, and it must have been Bob’s job to organize those events. A secretary to John, named Victor, was also there.

  Du Pont was more drunk off his ass than usual, and I could tell by the expression on those men’s faces that John had been running them through the wringer. He had the ability to suck the life out of people.

  The guy from Washington spotted me after I walked in and said, “Oh, thank God you’re here.” I think he was hoping I was there to relieve him of his duties of having to babysit John.

  I walked over to the fireplace along the right wall and turned around to notice almost all of the eyes in the room were on me, like I was supposed to do something. I was standing there trying to figure out what was going on when du Pont said to me across the room, “Thank God you’re here, pal!” Whenever he called me “pal,” I wasn’t sure how to take it because he would say it in a weird, sarcastic, half-friendly, half-accusatory way.

  Du Pont started crawling on his hands and knees across the floor toward me, and when he reached my feet, he grabbed me around the waist as though he wanted to wrestle. Then he began clawing his way up my body. I don’t recall seeing du Pont drunker than he was that night. The other people in the room knew how he was, but they seemed to be in disbelief that this so-called member of American royalty had stooped to this level of behavior. I grabbed him, pushed him off me, and headed directly toward the door as the two guys from Washington begged me to stay longer.

  I thanked God, too, when I had made it outside. Thank God he’s not at Villanova and I won’t have to deal with him very much.

  “Get it in writing.” That’s the lesson I learned from working for du Pont at Villanova.

  The first few weeks, John was true to his word and stayed away, not coming into our offices at all. Chuck Yarnall, the high school coach who had introduced me to du Pont at the Indiana hotel, was our head coach. We didn’t have the Butler Annex to ourselves yet, but that day was coming.

  Or so we were led to believe.

  •

  It wasn’t too long before du Pont started dropping by the office. He was always drunk or on drugs, or both, spitting as he spoke. When he talked to me, I tried to keep enough distance between us so that his spit wouldn’t land on me.

  He once came and plopped down in my office, and said, “I’m really craving blueberries right now.”

  Seriously? I’m trying to get stuff done before practice and he’s interrupting me because he’s craving blueberries?

  “If I had a basket of blueberries right now, I would eat them all up. Yum, yum, yum!”

  What is he doing here?

  “You understand what I’m saying?”

  Even when I understand what he’s saying, I don’t understand what he’s saying.

  He was always asking, “You understand what I’m saying?” That must have been his way of forcing people to acknowledge him.

  Within a couple of months, du Pont was there every day. Always on something. Always wasting my time with his endless talking, interfering with what I needed to do with Chuck to get our program up and running the way we wanted.

  As John sat in my office and talked about nothing, I’d be thinking, Why did you bring me here? I thought you wanted me to coach, and now I can’t because of the amount of my time you waste.

  He didn’t need an assistant wrestling coach to listen to him talk; he needed to be spending his time with a psychiatrist.

  There was no structure to the job, and as far as I could tell, John answered to no one on campus. The money he had donated plus the rest he had pledged for the athletic facilities seemed to keep Villanova’s president quiet. I never saw anything that indicated the athletic director was doing anything more than looking the other way.

  Du Pont may have been listed as a generic “Coach,” but it was John’s program. Chuck was the most powerless head coach in NCAA Division I, regardless of sport.

  John did whatever he wanted, and I answered to him and only him.

  The idea that Villanova would provide the stability I needed quickly evaporated. In fact, that place became the epitome of instability.

  When John was in the office, whatever he wanted me to do was my job description for the day. Instead of actually doing work, he would delegate authority, usually to the person who got stuck listening to his alcohol- and drug-induced chatter.

  You understand what I’m saying?

  Chuck might be in charge one day and me the next. Deciding who was in charge for that day, or for that hour, was John’s way of displaying his power.

  A local television station came out to do a story on Villanova’s new wrestling team and focused on John’s role. There was one scene of Jo
hn swimming in the swimming complex named for him. He got out of the pool, soaking wet, and the camera followed him into the John E. du Pont Pavilion, where right in the middle of men’s basketball practice, he walked up to Coach Massimino, grabbed a basketball out of the coach’s hands, and started talking into the camera as water dripped off him onto the court. John was showing everyone how much access he had at Villanova and how he could do whatever he wanted.

  —

  We didn’t have much of a team to begin with. It’s difficult enough to start a program with all-new wrestlers anyway. But John and Chuck couldn’t attract good wrestlers. We basically started off with a nothing team. John and Chuck had resorted to walking around campus looking for guys wearing high school wrestling T-shirts. If he had wrestled in high school, he could have a spot on the team.

  After a few weeks Chuck said to me, “John said to tell you that you’re in charge of recruiting from now on.”

  That pissed me off because I was just getting into the part of the year when I would ramp up my training for the 1987 World Championships, and now I was having the extremely time-consuming and difficult role of recruiting dumped on me.

  I sold my wrestling credentials to recruits. Du Pont certainly didn’t have the look or personality to talk them into coming without flaunting his money, but I had my Olympic gold medal and World Championship to tout. It didn’t take long to learn the recruits were looking for coaches they could count on. But I didn’t have any authority. I figured out that if I didn’t say I was planning to stay at Villanova for five years, the recruits would scratch us off their list of possible schools. Five more years? Forget it. If not for the upcoming ’87 Worlds, I would already have quit.

  By the spring, we still didn’t have the Butler Annex to ourselves. Wrestling requires a wrestling room. You can’t have a legitimate Division I program without your own room.

  We had to roll out the mats every day before practice and then roll them up after practice. It took us half an hour to roll them out and tape them down, then another half hour to put the mats away. At first, I was involved in that process every day. That was cutting into the coaching work I needed to be doing, so we hired some of our wrestlers as a mat crew and paid them to take care of the mats.

  It takes a while for mats to flatten out when you’re having to roll them out every day, so we had to deal with ripples in our mats. We would be preparing our guys for the next dual and one of them would trip over a ripple. That was so small-time.

  I kept asking du Pont when we were going to have our own room.

  “Soon,” he’d say, and that was as specific as he would get.

  After about three months of that crap, we started taking our wrestlers to John’s estate to work out. He had converted his indoor pistol range into a wrestling room. However, shooting ranges need to have a really low ceiling so bullets don’t ricochet. We didn’t have to roll the mats up and down at the farm, but wrestlers couldn’t lift anyone high over their heads or they would hit the ceiling. We actually changed our wrestling style to emphasize more low-level shots because of those ceilings.

  We had to tell potential recruits that the wrestling room would be there the year they were coming. I didn’t know if that would prove true, but “soon” doesn’t excite recruits.

  John did find a way to impress recruits, though. It required obliterating NCAA rules, but he did it. Recruits were flown in on private jets and his helicopter, and they were put up in an expensive hotel with unlimited room service. Meals consisted of lobster, cracked crab, and champagne. John’s philosophy was to screw the NCAA’s rules limiting how much money could be spent on each recruit’s visit. The kids were high school recruits, and they didn’t know all the rules that we were supposed to be following. They were getting a good deal, and I think they went along with du Pont’s ways because they didn’t know any better.

  The athletic officials at Villanova, however, did know the rules. I don’t think they ever really wanted a wrestling program, but they were willing to tolerate our presence because du Pont had pledged so much money for the basketball arena and swimming complex. I think they were embarrassed that du Pont was part of the athletic program, but to my knowledge, they did not complain about or look into our recruiting practices.

  John had a bad habit of offering full scholarships to every recruit we brought in. NCAA rules allowed for a total of 9.9 scholarships per year in wrestling. A typical team would have thirty players on the complete roster, and very few, if any, would be on a full ride. As Coach Abel had demonstrated at Oklahoma, filling a roster with 9.9 scholarships required creativity.

  Each recruit’s finances had to be taken into consideration. Each one’s ability had to be evaluated to determine which recruits were most important to add to the program. The ones who filled the biggest needs and offered the most to the program received the larger shares of scholarships. At least that’s the way it worked at real programs.

  When John got involved in recruiting—which was pretty much all the time—he would tell a kid he had a full ride if he wanted it. I had no idea how he planned on paying for those scholarships. Not financially, but on paper where it wouldn’t look as if NCAA rules were being violated.

  The first year, there was one kid who was one of the first he gave a scholarship to. I’m sorry to say this, but the kid didn’t deserve a scholarship. Nothing personal, he just wasn’t a Division I–level wrestler. He was receiving free tuition, and I wouldn’t have offered him even free books to be on our team.

  We talked about how we needed his scholarship money to give to others who could help the team. Du Pont told me to get rid of the guy. He had given the kid the scholarship and told me to yank his free tuition away from him!

  I didn’t know how to do that. We had a meeting to talk about it, and du Pont told me to write down the reasons to remove him from the scholarship. I made a list about half a page long and handed it to John. He signed his name at the bottom without even reading it.

  I felt bad for the kid. I was the one who had pointed out that his being on scholarship was hurting us. Fortunately, the university stepped in and kept him on a nonathletic scholarship.

  That situation should have never occurred, and it happened because the program was poorly run.

  When I took over recruiting, I tried to build a team and John kept ruining it. I had to find ways to discourage him from getting involved in recruiting. Of course, I couldn’t just tell him to butt out, because it was his program and he had free run of the place.

  —

  Chuck Yarnall didn’t last a year. The university announced that Chuck had resigned in February 1987, with no reason given. He actually had been fired. By me. Because du Pont told me to do it.

  Yes, an assistant coach fired the head coach. That’s the way things worked in du Pont’s program.

  My involvement in Chuck’s dismissal is one of the biggest regrets of my life. Chuck was a really good guy. I liked him a lot.

  Du Pont was in the hospital recovering from a surgery and wanted me to come see him.

  First, he called Mark Spitz on the phone while I was there. Mark won nine Olympic gold medals in swimming and had trained with the Santa Clara club. John had gotten to know him during that period when he was concentrating on swimming.

  Judging from what I could hear on John’s side of the conversation, it sounded like a phone call that Spitz wasn’t too thrilled about receiving. Du Pont gave me the phone at one point to have me talk to Spitz. Mark said practically nothing to me, as if he was wondering why John had handed the phone to me.

  I think the primary purpose of the call was for du Pont to show off to me.

  After the call, John wanted to talk wrestling.

  “Do you want to be the head coach at Villanova?” John asked.

  I told him I didn’t, and I’m pretty sure he knew that before he asked. There’s no way I would have taken Chuck
’s job after watching John’s meddlesome ways. Plus, Chuck was the head coach.

  “I don’t think Chuck can be the coach,” John said.

  Honestly, as someone who liked Chuck, I have to say that du Pont should not have hired him as head coach. He was a high school coach. Chuck, who was thirty, would have made an excellent administrator, but he didn’t have the credentials to be a Division I coach.

  I’ve always speculated that was why du Pont hired him as Villanova’s first coach. He wanted someone in the top job whom he could control. John wanted to be the head coach, but he didn’t want to have to do all the head coach’s work. John didn’t want to have to be there every day scheduling practices and working the mats and doing all the tedious work required to run a program. He had no interest in learning the NCAA rules regarding recruiting. I couldn’t have pointed to one part of a typical Division I coach’s job description that du Pont could have carried out. I mean, he couldn’t even grasp the simple concept of dividing and offering scholarships. But he wanted to be treated like the head coach and, probably more important, to feel that he was the head coach. In a media interview the previous fall, John had referred to himself as the head coach.

  From his hospital bed, du Pont told me that he would be leaving town soon and that when he returned, he wanted Chuck gone and that I was the one to fire him.

  I should have told John I wouldn’t do it. I should have left with Chuck.

  I can’t remember how I told Chuck he was fired. I’m glad I can’t remember because it pains me enough more than two decades later to know that I did fire him. I wish I could erase that awful moment from my life. I should have made John do his own dirty work. I don’t even think he would have had the guts to do it. He was so weak that he would latch on to strong personalities and hide behind them, using them to get done what he wanted done.

  The university’s handling of Chuck’s departure was telling. A school spokesman told reporters that the wrestling coaches understood all along that although Yarnall held the title of head coach, du Pont would function as the team’s head coach. What a bunch of bull. I never had that understanding, or I wouldn’t have gone to Villanova in the first place.