Foxcatcher Page 19

  Winning.

  There were times when I would have given my life to win. Or even for just the opportunity to win.

  “Do or die,” right?

  I had worked too hard for too long with no support. And now that I had found the person who could provide me the support, he demanded everything I valued about myself in return.

  It just wasn’t worth it.

  I could not win for Foxcatcher. I could not give du Pont the credibility and status that would come from his team’s producing an Olympic champion. I couldn’t let him use me one more time.

  The Turk beat me 14–0. I let him win. There were plenty of times during that match when I could have scored, but I didn’t try. I didn’t care. I had quit before that match began. I forfeited the next match, to determine fifth and sixth places, and got on the first available flight home.

  The media reported that I had walked away with a knee injury. My knee was hurt, sure. But in reality, I had walked out in protest. My loss was a protest against USA Wrestling. Against the whole system, really. Throwing that match, and by a score as ugly as 14–0, was my statement: This is what happens when you don’t support us. This is the state of our sport right now.

  Throughout my career, I’d had to figure out a way to defeat everyone in the world—to create that “magic” in every match. Once I had reached the top of the world, I realized the difference between winning a world title and placing second was razor thin. I definitely wasn’t an emotionally fragile wrestler, but there was a sort of fragile nature within me, in that I was vulnerable to having my training routines disrupted. I needed and coveted stability. It was the one thing I needed most to succeed. My dad had provided me with stability. So had Dave. UCLA wasn’t stable, Oklahoma was. Getting fired at Stanford disrupted my stability and led to my moving to Villanova.

  Du Pont and Foxcatcher certainly weren’t stable environments. I could have won two or three more world titles if I had landed in a stable program. I could have competed for at least another five years if USA Wrestling had provided me with a measly ten thousand dollars a year. I could have made that work. I had made that work before.

  But instead, guys like me, with incredible skill and potential and drive and motivation, were having to stoop to rely on a lowlife like John du Pont to survive. Team Foxcatcher had become basically the only place where wrestlers could survive financially while competing, and as long as du Pont was getting the recognition he wanted, and USA Wrestling was getting the money it wanted, then all of us wrestlers weren’t going to get what we deserved: respect and a fair chance in the fight for survival.

  Du Pont kept using my name to gain power and credibility in the wrestling world. If I had won the gold medal, it would have solidified his status in the sport and led people to believe that he was a harmless benefactor. That would have been a lie.

  Du Pont used to say that he was going to remove all the financial obstacles so I could focus only on wrestling. He didn’t include that he would then replace all those financial obstacles with one gigantic, insurmountable obstacle: himself. I couldn’t stomach the thought of du Pont’s being pointed to as a good example, as a good leader. He was far from either. There was a reason he was having to pay people to say all those nice things about him that he so desperately wanted to hear.

  He had threatened to ruin my career that one day in the locker room. He did it, too, the son of a bitch.

  I just couldn’t give him the credibility he wanted more than anything. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t take it anymore.

  And after twenty-seven years of fighting and scrapping for everything I had accomplished and become, the only way I could fight back was to drop my impenetrable defense and fight no more.

  CHAPTER 15

  A New Home, a New Life

  I never competed as a wrestler again. I had won an Olympic gold medal and two World Championships. No other American wrestler could claim that combination. I had won the US Open four times, the NCAA championship three times. Yet I felt I had not fulfilled my potential.

  I wished I were a Russian, because their elite wrestlers were paid to train and compete. They were not forced to fight to survive; they were allowed to flourish. And they certainly didn’t have to rely on the likes of John du Pont.

  Dave, still in Wisconsin, also stepped away from competition, retiring for a year to take on the role of national coach for USA Wrestling. National coach was an unpaid position usually held for only one year so that different coaches could receive the honor of leading the national team. But if Dave had wanted to keep that title for more than a year, I think he had enough clout with USA Wrestling that he could have remained the coach.

  I had planned all along to leave Foxcatcher after the Olympics, but the farm did offer me one thing after I returned from Seoul: a place to hide. I felt depressed knowing that not only was my career complete but I had also come up short of what I should have been able to accomplish. I wanted out of Foxcatcher and as far away from du Pont as I could get, but at the same time I wanted to be someplace where I wouldn’t have to face questions about the ’88 Olympics. I typically withdrew from people anyway after a big loss. After my biggest loss—what I knew was my last loss—I didn’t know how long I would want to hide. I asked my girlfriend to come stay with me at the farm for a while.

  Du Pont had a key to my house and would walk in uninvited. I had no privacy whatsoever. After my girlfriend had been there about a week, John freaked out for some unknown reason and came into my room waving a gun around and pointing it toward us. That terrified my girlfriend, and I jumped in front of her. John didn’t scare me. I never felt threatened by him. He was just a weak man trying to make up for lack of confidence and low self-esteem.

  John left and came back with a videotape.

  “I want to show you something,” he told us as he inserted the tape into the VCR.

  The video was of a surveillance van that could shoot a laser onto a window and hear people in the house via the window’s vibrations. My girlfriend and I just sat there and watched. It was weird, as though he was trying to tell me that not only was there no privacy, safety, or autonomy on the farm, but there also was none anywhere we could go. But again, I blew it off as another empty threat from a weak man.

  I decided right then that I needed to accelerate my plans to leave before the end of the year.

  One time I went into the main office and one of his family members, whom I believed to be a sister, was there. I was talking to her when John entered the room. He was trying to be extra nice to her. I think he offered her something to eat. She flashed him a “drop dead” look and snapped, “Don’t try anything on me, John. I am not corruptible!”

  I think she might have been sending a message to me about John being a corrupt manipulator.

  John tried to portray himself as a philanthropist, but in truth, what he gave to others were actually purchases for himself. Whenever he gave away money, it was always in exchange for fame or recognition. He was egotistical and charged by an unearned sense of entitlement.

  He had the pavilion and swim center named for him at Villanova, although he never paid the full amount he had pledged. A donation to nearby Crozer-Chester Medical Center resulted in the John E. du Pont Trauma Center with his name out front in big, easy-to-see letters. The public knew about those gifts.

  Yet I remember one time when a woman privately called John and asked if she could bring orphans to the farm to play in the swimming pool. John declined, saying, “We’re not bringing the have-nots out here to see what the haves have.”

  The atmosphere on the farm changed for the rest of my time there, and things just kept getting worse and worse. When the Team Foxcatcher poster of me had been made, he asked me to sign one for his kitchen wall. I had written something on it that I thought gave him more credit than he deserved. I decided to take the poster out of the frame and replaced it with a poster with no
writing on it. Du Pont told me he had known about my switch but didn’t say anything about it because he understood why. Then he took the poster off the wall, placed it on the kitchen table, and asked me to sign it, “To my mentor and coach.”

  I refused. That could not have been further from the truth. I had a long list of unkind names I would have written on that poster—and they would have been true—before I would have lied and called him my mentor and coach.

  About that same time, we had a conversation in which John told me a story that I haven’t heard anywhere else.

  We were in the kitchen and John offered to make me a sandwich.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m going to make a sandwich,” he told me.

  As he moved about the kitchen putting the sandwich together, he kept repeating that he was going to make me a sandwich as though it was a big deal.

  I started eating the sandwich, and John said, “You know, Mark, when I was younger, I was riding a horse, and that horse threw me onto a fence and I straddled the fence. My testicles became infected and they had to cut my balls off. The ones I have are plastic, and I have to take testosterone shots every day. Some days I forget.”

  I looked closely into John’s eyes as he told the story. In a rarity with him, there was no deception or ulterior motive present. I could tell it was painful for him to share that story, and in a way I felt honored that he was sharing it with me.

  I believed the story because it made things I had noticed about John suddenly make sense. He had androgynous characteristics. He could act feminine. His hair was thick. He had emotional issues and a lack of confidence. Maybe that was why he drank so much. I imagined that would be tough to live with. That was the one time I felt genuine pity for John.

  Back then, and much more so after Dave was killed, there was speculation that John was gay. I had my suspicions, but I never observed at Villanova or in my time living on the farm anything that would cause me to say he was a homosexual. I never knew of any relationships he had with guys.

  There weren’t many women around John, either. There was one girlfriend of his that I recall, and she walked around like she wanted to use John’s money to become a movie star. She liked the fact that John was into wrestling and had all these well-built men around. But other than that, I never noted John to be particularly friendly toward women.

  He did tell me once that he had been married and divorced.

  In 1983, he was married, briefly, to an occupational therapist. She was not from wealth like John. Their wedding was du Pont in every way, with five hundred guests, uniformed trumpeters, and fireworks. The marriage lasted only a few months.

  Although she had signed a prenuptial agreement, she filed a lawsuit against him. The lawsuit was settled without terms being disclosed, but one of the interesting bits of information to come out of the case was the fact that du Pont’s worth was estimated at $46.2 million. That sounded like a lot until 1987, when Forbes magazine listed du Pont as being worth $200 million.

  Years later, his ex-wife would reveal odd and abusive behavior she witnessed while married to du Pont, including his excessive drinking, throwing her into a fireplace, trying to shove her out of a car, and threatening to kill her with a knife. On one occasion, she claimed, du Pont held a gun to her head, called her a Russian spy, and said that Russian spies got shot.

  —

  When I knew it was time to leave, I called Dave and asked if he could come to Pennsylvania to help me finish packing and load what I had placed in storage. Later that day, I was standing on the porch and John walked up to me.

  “Dave’s coming,” I told him.

  John got inexplicably pissed.

  “Now you’re going to team up against me, two against one?” he yelled at me.

  “No, I just want to see Dave.”

  “Okay, big boy,” he said. “Now it’s just you against me.”

  I relished that possibility.

  “You want some of me?” I asked. “Try it and I’ll bust your head open.”

  John got scared and left. Then he came back to say, “You just taught me a lesson. Thanks.” He immediately turned back around and walked off again.

  I don’t know what the lesson was, but he left me there on the porch upset that I had made such a huge mistake in coming to be a part of Team Foxcatcher in the first place

  Dave arrived the next day. John and his attorney immediately asked Dave to come over to see them at the main house, and they didn’t want me to accompany him. I was angry that John and his attorney had gotten hold of Dave before I could talk with him.

  Dave looked a little bothered after the meeting at the mansion. He told me he didn’t want me to break my ties with John because he was still on John’s payroll. According to the deal I had made with John, he would pay Dave and me the same amount as long as one of us was competing for his team. Dave then suggested I should sign a poster or something for John before I left. I didn’t want to, but I did for Dave’s sake. I don’t remember what I wrote on it.

  That night in the chalet, Dave wanted to talk but John wanted everyone to go to sleep. The next morning, my wallet was missing. After I canceled all my credit cards, John handed me my wallet and said his secretary, Victor, had found it on the floor of a room I had already thoroughly checked. I think John hid it to delay my departure or to see what I was going to do before I left.

  Dave left to return to Wisconsin, and I loaded up the last bit of my stuff. Du Pont had his head of security watch me leave to make sure I didn’t steal anything. It was December 1988, and after a year of living on the farm, I wanted out of Pennsylvania and away from John du Pont. For good.

  I had lost everything to that demon, including the happiness I had worked so diligently to regain after losing it as a kid. I got in my car and peeled out, leaving a long skid mark over the front of the lawn outside his mansion.

  —

  I had no plans for where to go from Foxcatcher. As I drove west, the idea of being near Wayne Baughman drew me to Colorado Springs, Colorado. I didn’t know him well at the time, but I knew all about him. Every good wrestler knew about Wayne.

  He was head wrestling coach at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The city also was home to USA Wrestling, Athletes in Action, the US Olympic Training Center, and the National Judo Institute. Colorado Springs seemed like the place for me.

  Wayne was wrestling at Oklahoma the year I was born. He won one NCAA championship and earned All-American honors three times. As an amateur wrestler, he won sixteen national championships and never placed lower than third in twenty-five national tournament appearances. He also competed in three Olympics and eight World Championships.

  He had taken over the Air Force program less than a year earlier. He was also an epic runner, logging five miles every morning, and he competed in a few one-hundred-mile races.

  Wayne had recently written a book titled Wrestling On and Off the Mat, similar to the name of du Pont’s book. But comparing his book to du Pont’s was like comparing Wayne to John as a person: much better and completely different. Wayne was the epitome of masculinity and strength.

  Respect was the first word I would think of when asked about Wayne. Pretty much the entire wrestling community felt that way about Wayne, lifting him up as a model of integrity.

  I volunteered to be an assistant to Wayne at the academy and bought a small house from him. He’ll never know how much his allowing me to hang around helped me slowly work my way back mentally to where I was before leaving Palo Alto for Villanova. The normalcy I found in Colorado Springs opened my eyes to just how manipulative du Pont had been. I felt as though I had escaped from a cult.

  One day I was sitting at home watching the Discovery Channel when that documentary came on that John had paid to have made about himself. They showed du Pont doing all these coaching things, like teaching kids simple moves and bl
owing whistles at practice. At the very end, they showed me standing on the awards stand at the 1987 World Championships, bent over to have my gold medal placed around my neck. As soon I stood up straight, The John du Pont Story appeared superimposed on the screen over me as if he were the reason I had won. The words were so large I couldn’t even see my face. Seeing that made me sick to my stomach.

  The takeover is finally complete, I thought. He destroyed my career and has climbed up to the top of USA Wrestling.

  But he couldn’t stay there for long. I think everyone in wrestling knew that du Pont didn’t belong in the sport. He had nothing to offer but money, but his donations bought him time to climb the political ladders of USA Wrestling and FILA. Even though he received Man of the Year awards from USA Wrestling and Amateur Wrestling News, most of the wrestlers had strong disdain for du Pont. If he hadn’t slowly begun to lose interest in the sport, they would have pushed him out. Even John could not have stayed in a sport in which everyone hated him. The odd thing was that being in the wrestling community was the closest I think he ever felt to being accepted.

  My contempt for du Pont ran so deep within me that partly because of that documentary, I thought about killing him in 1989. Growing up, I had been taught the path to success consisted of working hard, making sacrifices, suffering, being honest, and not taking shortcuts. Watching John rise in power in wrestling convinced me those were all lies. People in wrestling stuck their hands out in exchange for giving John what he wanted. His greatest ability was being able to meet every one of their prices. I couldn’t have felt lower than when I saw his name appear over my image on the documentary he had paid to have made and aired. That served as the final reminder that he had taken advantage of all my pain and suffering to gain prestige and power, and then ruined my career. I wanted revenge.

  I bought a miniature crossbow and placed a plastic milk jug on a stick and imagined the jug was du Pont’s head. I practiced enough to where I was good at hitting the jug from fifty feet, which I knew was the distance from a group of bushes at his mansion to a person walking up the steps from the driveway.