Foxcatcher Page 16

  The school’s athletic director, Ted Aceto, said in a released statement, “Du Pont is and always has been our head wrestling coach. Chuck Yarnall’s title had been co–head coach. John du Pont will continue as our head wrestling coach.”

  It appeared that something fishy was going on behind the scenes, as that was all breaking news to me.

  —

  I felt trapped at Villanova for two reasons: I needed the money, and the 1987 World Championships were just a few months away and I couldn’t disrupt my training. I wouldn’t have been able to find workout partners as I had there.

  But beyond then, I saw little to be optimistic about.

  I couldn’t count on USA Wrestling for support and would have to be a college coach to keep training and competing. But wrestling jobs were growing increasingly scarce. Title IX was signed into law in 1972 to end sex discrimination in education. In athletics, that meant leveling the playing field for men and women so that both genders would have equal opportunities.

  I assume the hope behind Title IX was to increase the number of opportunities for women up to the level men enjoyed. However, the way it played out more often than not was that the funding and opportunities for men decreased. In some cases, greatly decreased. Wrestling, with much higher participation among men than women at all levels of the sport, was one of the hardest-hit sports at the collegiate level.

  Wrestling programs across the country were being swept out to help meet the requirements of Title IX. Fewer programs meant fewer jobs. Fewer jobs meant more coaches holding on to the jobs they were fortunate enough to hold. I was a twenty-six-year-old assistant coach, and there were too many older, experienced, former head coaches looking for jobs.

  When I had come to tight spots in my life, I would look to joining the military as an option. I considered that again. The military had a special wrestling team, and if you were a good enough wrestler, you could fulfill your duties by representing the military in wrestling competitions. But the military had never become a plan A because of my memories growing up, watching Vietnam vets come home. They were wounded and disabled, yet our own American citizens were calling them “baby killers” and the government seemed to be neglecting them.

  The thought came to me that I could leave Villanova, pick a school I liked, move to be near that school, and then go on welfare. Based on the way I had been raised, that wasn’t an option I would seriously consider.

  I was stuck, and with all pretense removed in the wave of Chuck’s departure, John was free to be the official and undisputed head coach of Villanova wrestling.

  But he couldn’t run the program. I couldn’t, either, because he was constantly in my office, drunk, telling those stupid, pointless stories. I think it was more important to John that I humored him than that I tried to make the program successful.

  We traveled together for the last few matches of the season. He would have delirium tremens, and I would sit there and look at that miserable wretch I was with and think, I can’t wait for this season to end. This is my last year at Villanova.

  John had to have sensed my frustration. How could he not have? Toward the end of my first year, he asked if I wanted to bring in a workout partner. I knew the perfect guy: Dan Chaid. Dan had been a high school wrestler in California whom Dave and I had gotten to know and help train. Dan was an eighth-grader my junior year and was in the stands when Dave won the state championship as a senior. Dan wound up winning two state championships of his own.

  Dan followed us to Oklahoma to wrestle, where he was a four-time All-American and won the 1985 NCAAs at 190 pounds. He had worked one year as an assistant at Arizona State when John hired him and provided him housing. Dan was made an assistant coach whose job description basically consisted of two things: coming to practices and training with me.

  —

  In going to Villanova, I had been made a part of du Pont’s Team Foxcatcher. Du Pont had established his team, named for his father’s Foxcatcher Farm stable of Thoroughbred racehorses, to financially support athletes in swimming, modern pentathlon, and triathlon. He decided to add wrestling, and I was the second wrestler to join behind Rob Calabrese. Everything about the name Foxcatcher and being a part of the team had felt wrong in my gut.

  After I came aboard, John quickly began adding to his team more world-class wrestlers who had been struggling to get by on shoestring budgets.

  Dave joined du Pont’s club after the 1986 Worlds and while he was coaching at Wisconsin. Du Pont paid Dave to be a Foxcatcher wrestler and assistant coach to go along with the salary Dave was drawing from Wisconsin. Knowing that Dave had no intention of leaving Wisconsin, I didn’t see any need to warn him about joining Foxcatcher. At that point, John was paying Dave what amounted to a second salary. But wanting to prevent a repeat of the mess at Stanford, I negotiated a deal with John by which he would never pay one of us an amount different from the other’s or give one of us a lesser title than the other’s. That turned out to be a shrewd move on my part.

  Without telling the Foxcatcher wrestlers, du Pont scheduled a dual meet against the Bulgarian national team. I think he scheduled the meet to screw with me, because I would have to wrestle again against Alexander Nanev, whom I could count on running into in the bracket of just about every World Championships. I believed I held an edge over Nanev and wrestling him with another Worlds coming up could benefit only him. Videotape was becoming more popular at the time, and I didn’t want to have a match with him on tape that he could study to try to close the gap between us.

  John insisted that I wrestle Nanev, and I repeatedly told him I didn’t want to. I didn’t wrestle in dual meets after college except the one opportunity I had to get revenge on Vladimir Modosyan in Chicago. But Dave agreed to participate in the Bulgarian dual, and that trapped me into having to wrestle, too.

  I don’t talk about competitions or opponents beforehand. Once that dual was in place, though, du Pont wouldn’t shut up about it. Every other sentence out of his mouth was, “The Bulgarians are coming!” It bothered me, and he knew it. I tried to avoid John even more than usual, spending as much time alone in my apartment as I could.

  The day of the dual, Calabrese and I crashed our cars into each other’s on the way to the gym. We were messing around driving in circles to get our minds off the dual. I was preoccupied with the rage I felt over John’s trapping me into wrestling against Nanev, and we had a fender bender. Rob got mad at me, and that incident about finished me off mentally for the dual.

  I lost to Nanev 1–0 in a next-to-nothing match. I didn’t try to win. I didn’t care to show him anything in a stupid dual that amounted to no more than an exhibition, especially with Worlds coming up.

  The match most fans wanted to see was Valentin Jordanov, who had won two of his six World Championships at that point, against Ed Giese at 114.5 pounds. By the time Giese’s career had wrapped up, he had placed twelve times at Nationals in freestyle and Greco-Roman, and had been a five-time finalist for the US World Team. Jordanov defeated Giese.

  That dual marked the start of a friendship between Dave and Jordanov.

  Du Pont kept badgering me to let him sit in my corner during my competitions, but I kept telling him no. I let Chris Horpel sit in my corner at big tournaments after he fired me, with no choice but to forgive him as I’d had to forgive everyone so I wouldn’t have to carry that extra burden. Chris was a good coach, and it helped me to have him there. But du Pont—forget about it. He had nothing to contribute. He just wanted to be seen in my corner and then take credit later for anything I won.

  John hired a camera crew to shoot video of him at the 1987 World Championships in Clermont-Ferrand, France. John was having a documentary made about himself called Quest for the Best, which later aired on the Discovery Channel. Everywhere John went at Worlds, his camera guys followed him.

  Later, after we had returned to the States, John flew some of us with him to
South Carolina, where he fired the starting gun for a triathlon. His film crew was trailing him there, too. They wanted video of me talking about what a great leader John was. I tried to put them off, but they kept coming back to me. They must have really wanted that sound bite, because they were persistent in asking. I found a way to meet both of our desires. I got drunk and then told them du Pont was great, blah, blah, blah. I was so drunk that they couldn’t use the footage in the final product.

  In one of my early matches in France, I went up against West German Reiner Trik, who had placed fourth at the ’84 Olympics. I had the lead, and he shot on my legs. I grabbed a double wristlock, the same move with which I had broken the Turk’s arm in the Olympics. I didn’t hurt Trik, but the refs must not have liked my making that move, because with about ten seconds left in the match, they cautioned me for stalling.

  That loss put me in a spot where the only way I could advance to the finals would be to pin, caution out, or shut out the defending World Champion, Vladimir Modosyan of the Soviet Union.

  I went outside the arena to just get away, and one of John’s cameramen came out and handed me a beer. I had never consumed alcohol during a tournament, but I drank that beer. I didn’t think it would matter, because if Modosyan simply scored a point against me, I wouldn’t wrestle for the championship.

  Bruce Baumgartner walked up to me.

  “You can do it,” he said.

  “No, I can’t,” I told him.

  “Oh, yeah,” Bruce said. “I forgot about the power of negative reinforcement.”

  The first period against Modosyan was scoreless. In the second period, I took him down with about a minute left for a 1–0 lead. That was the only point of the match. I couldn’t believe that I had shut out Modosyan.

  I advanced to face Nanev for the second time in a Worlds finals match and beat him 2–1 to win my second World Championship. Lee Kemp had won three World Championships from 1978 to 1982, and with my two world titles and my Olympic gold, I tied Lee for the most wrestling world titles won by an American. We even received an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for our feats.

  After winning Worlds, I had to take the required drug test. The testers told me I could drink beer, water, or soda if that would help me produce a urine sample. I asked for beer. Then Ri Jae-sik, the 105-pound champion from North Korea, came into the room to take his drug test. He asked for a beer, too. We kept drinking beers and got hammered.

  Neither had any idea what the other was saying in our native languages, but that didn’t stop us from laughing our asses off. When the testers asked if we were ready to pee into the cup, we both said no so we could drink more beer. I had to pee badly, but I wasn’t going to cut off the supply of free beer. Finally, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I filled up three cups with pee running over onto my hand, and I spilled my first cup on one of the testers. Good thing I had filled those other two cups.

  •

  Immediately after we returned from my becoming the first American wrestler to win the Olympics and two World Championships, John wanted to make a Team Foxcatcher poster with me, Foxcatcher’s first World Champion, as the poster boy. John wanted to send a poster to every college program in the country as evidence that his team was on the wrestling-world map and had to be contended with. I took part in a photo shoot with me acting as if I had just won the title, wearing Team Foxcatcher’s red-and-white singlet with yellow trim, oil on my body to make me appear sweaty, head down, index fingers raised, with a large American flag behind me.

  Emblazoned right beneath my red wrestling shoes, on one of the white stripes of the flag, in all caps, were the words TEAM FOXCATCHER. I’d bet that was John’s favorite part of the poster. I had a mixed reaction when I first saw the poster. It was quite a compliment to have such a huge poster made of me, and I liked the way I looked. On the other hand, I loathed seeing TEAM FOXCATCHER under me and on my singlet. I resented being portrayed as giving credit to the team, and thus John, for my accomplishment, because that was exactly what John was trying to buy.

  Du Pont was taking credit for my success while at the same time trying to ruin my career.

  CHAPTER 13

  At All Costs

  John du Pont was a collector. When he was younger, he had collected seashells, birds, and bird eggs and stored them upstairs in the mansion. It wasn’t just any collection—he had traveled to the Philippines, Samoa, the Fiji islands, and Australia, among other places, accumulating hundreds of thousands of seashells and more than forty thousand specimens of birds.

  He took me once to view his collection at the Delaware Museum of Natural History, which he had paid to build. When du Pont’s father died in 1965, John received his family inheritance, reported to be in the range of $50 million to $80 million. With that money, he was able to fulfill his long-held plans to build the museum, which opened in 1972, to display his collection.

  I experienced a strange mix of emotions being there with John.

  On one hand I felt sick because the building was filled with dead animals he had collected, stuffed, labeled, and stored. On the other hand, I felt bad for him because that collection obviously had been a huge part of his life. That museum was one of John’s most sacred places, and although I thought his primary reason for taking me there was to impress me, I did appreciate John’s revealing a part of himself that he hadn’t showed me before.

  I was more saddened than impressed. That trip to the museum was a window into John’s soul, and it didn’t seem filled with philanthropy, kindness, and generosity. Instead, his soul seemed dark, small, and cramped.

  There had been many things in my life I had not had the money to buy, but I had learned that you didn’t need currency to find confidence, happiness, loyalty, brotherhood . . . and love. Du Pont had none of those. He had the money to buy just about any material possession he could have wanted, but despite his best efforts, he had failed to obtain the things he yearned for the most. And he had made himself morally bankrupt in trying.

  That all the animals in his museum were dead and stuffed made perfect sense to me. He didn’t have to feed them, he didn’t have to maintain them. All he had to do was collect them. He killed them, owned them, controlled them, and hung them on walls for other people to admire.

  Now, I realized, he was collecting wrestlers. We were his newest trophies. We had become his objects to control with his ancestors’ money, and we were more fun to play with than his seashells and birds because we were collectables that he could manipulate. If you didn’t want to be displayed on his wall, he threatened to ruin you.

  •

  I discovered during the ’87 Worlds that the conditions for me at Villanova were about to sink even lower. I heard that du Pont had offered Andre Metzger, my and Dave’s teammate at Oklahoma, a coaching job and that Andre had accepted.

  Andre placed third at Worlds at 149.5 pounds. He had permitted John to sit in his corner during his matches, and John’s camera crew was there to record every second of it.

  I felt as if Dave, Andre, and I were brothers at OU. We’d had our picture on the front page of the newspaper the year all three of us won NCAA championships. But when du Pont hired Andre, that proved to be the beginning of the end for me at Villanova.

  John had already suspiciously rejected my recommendation for a hire. He wanted a coach for the middleweights, and I told him about Bill Nugent, the Outstanding Wrestler at the 1985 US Open at 149.5 pounds. Bill was coaching a clinic in Pennsylvania, and I suggested he come to Villanova to meet John.

  I introduced Bill to John as “the best middleweight in the nation last year.”

  Normally, I would bring a recruit over to John’s house and he would offer the kid the world. Not only did he not offer Bill anything, but when Bill left, du Pont told me, “Never make a recommendation to me again.” Looking back, I suspect John didn’t like the fact that Bill and I were friends, because I later came
to the realization that John wanted someone in place whom he could use against me.

  After Worlds, I asked John for a five-thousand-dollar raise. He turned me down. With Andre also on staff, I sensed John had worked himself into a position where he didn’t have to have me around anymore. “Now I’ve got two foxes in the henhouse,” John boasted to me.

  I had been the coach with all the wrestling skins, but Andre sported a solid résumé. Ever the manipulator, John could use Andre as leverage against me. He could run me out of there with a moment’s notice and still have a big-name assistant to attract recruits and give him credibility in the wrestling community.

  Du Pont did wind up giving me a raise going into my second year, but when he wanted to give one to me, instead of when I had asked for it. In other words, on his terms.

  He bumped my salary up to thirty thousand dollars, although he changed how he paid me. The first year, he paid my full salary up front. The second year, he paid the coaches in thirds. I assumed he thought that as long as we had money still coming instead of having already received the full amount, he could better keep control over us.

  Actually, John didn’t pay me directly. I had a contract that paid me one dollar per year so I could receive insurance coverage through the university. The rest of the money from John was routed through a trust fund at USA Wrestling. My accountant checked with USA Wrestling and was told the money would be considered a scholarship and, thus, tax exempt. USA Wrestling later dropped the trust fund program, though, and said that what they had told my accountant was incorrect. I ended up having to pay more than six thousand dollars in back taxes and penalties to the IRS.

  Our second season was the first for which we had been able to put in a full recruiting effort. We were able to attract some good talent. Most of the recruits had been state champions in high school. But the program was in such disarray that we weren’t going to win no matter who we signed.