Foxcatcher Read online

  I planned to sell everything I owned, drop out of society, drive to Newtown Square, sleep in a car to avoid motel receipts and witnesses, hide in the bushes outside the mansion, and wait for du Pont.

  I would shoot him in the head with an arrow as he walked up the steps. As he lay dying on the steps, I would calmly walk up to him so he would know in his final minute alive that I was the one who had shot him. But I would be careful not to get so close to him that any of his blood would get on me. He would beg for his life as he watched me grab another arrow. He’d apologize profusely. “I’m sorry for everything! Please! Pal! Please! No! Don’t! Ple—”

  Take that!

  Each time he would beg, I would sink another arrow into him until the last one would be planted directly into his throat or an eye.

  If I got caught and questioned later, my alibi would be that I had been on a camping trip. I would drive to Brazil, change my name, and have a kid with a Brazilian woman so that as a parent of a Brazilian, I could avoid deportation.

  —

  Dave and I stayed in constant contact. He had taken a break from competition, and after I had been in Colorado Springs for a few months, he called to tell me he was thinking about leaving his assistant’s job at Wisconsin.

  “John called me and offered me a job coaching at Foxcatcher,” he told me. “I’m thinking I might take it and start competing again.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into. But if that’s what you want to do, make sure any deal you make with John is in writing, especially the details of your job description and where you stand in the chain of command. Or you’ll get screwed.”

  A short while after I talked with Dave, John called and told me Dave had accepted the job and that he hadn’t forgotten the deal I had negotiated with him.

  “I’m going to pay you the same as I pay Dave—no more, no less,” John told me. “And neither one of you will have authority over the other. You’re both coaches for Foxcatcher.”

  John paid me forty thousand dollars per year even though I had left. More important was the health insurance that came from being on the payroll.

  I feared Dave’s move to Foxcatcher would subject him to the same sabotaging of a career that I experienced. But living on the farm wasn’t as bad for Dave as it had been for me, because he had two major advantages I had not had when I had lived there.

  First, he had a family with him to provide support. By that time, Dave and Nancy had also had a daughter, Danielle (named for Dan Chaid), to go with Alexander (named for legendary Soviet wrestler Aleksandr Medved).

  His second advantage was that by that time, numerous other wrestlers were living and training at Foxcatcher. Off my name and accomplishments, du Pont’s team had grown in prestige and created an attraction to his farm that allowed him to add to a wrestling collection that would come to include top wrestlers like Dave, Chaid, Rob Calabrese, Dave Lee, and Valentin Jordanov, and coaches Greg Strobel and Jim Humphrey.

  At least for Dave, the presence of other wrestlers meant there were plenty of other people for du Pont to bug. The only times Dave had to talk to John were when John came to practices, and that wasn’t every day.

  At Foxcatcher, Dave never lacked for workout partners, such as Kevin Jackson (a future Olympic champion) and Royce Alger (winner of two NCAA championships). Other wrestlers were flown in from time to time to train with Dave. He was never short of bodies to beat on.

  •

  I visited Dave at the farm in 1989, and he seemed to be doing pretty well there. He, Nancy, and the kids lived in a two-story house—maybe twenty-five hundred square feet—on the far side of the estate, a full mile removed from the mansion. The entire corner of the eight hundred acres basically was their backyard. There was a forest nearby where he would go hunting. Dave was really into guns and knew how to clean and cut up deer to make steaks and jerky.

  Du Pont’s farm already had the gym that he had used during his pentathlon days, with the Olympic-size pool and the ceramic mural of John competing in the five pentathlons. Next to that gym, du Pont had just built the largest wrestling facility in the country. The Foxcatcher National Training Center covered fourteen thousand square feet at a cost of six hundred thousand dollars. From one end to the other, the facility had three full-size, Sarneige-brand mats—the same type used in the Olympics. There also were coaches’ offices, showers, lockers, a training room, and a video room. I had never seen a wrestling gym so well equipped and maintained.

  At the back end was John’s office, away from the other offices. THE EAGLE’S NEST was engraved in a plaque on his office door. Inside were a desk and a big round bed. All around the base of the bed were sticks to make the bed/nest look as though it had been put together by an eagle. John liked for others to call him “Eagle,” because he constantly referred to himself as “the Golden Eagle of America.”

  —

  While being around Wayne Baughman had helped me return to a good place mentally, being in Colorado Springs didn’t provide the stable environment I desired. After a year there, the academy hadn’t hired me full-time as I had hoped. I was working every day without compensation, my back was starting to go out on me, and I had a long commute to the academy. USA Wrestling wouldn’t hire me to work at its headquarters, either.

  I was lonely, and I moved back to Ashland for a woman.

  I had met Kristy at a bar in Ashland after the 1985 World Championships. All I knew about her before I walked into the bar was that my friends had told me she was a wrestling trainer at Southern Oregon. But based on the physical attributes they described to me, I had to see her. I couldn’t afford to marry her then and went back to my job and training at Stanford without her.

  Kristy and I married in 1989, bought a truck and a trailer, put everything we had in it, and took off for Utah because I had read that Park City, Utah, offered the most vertical drop in snow skiing for the money. We skied there for a few weeks and then drove about an hour south into Provo, and the cleanliness of the town grabbed us. We stopped there and the people we came into contact with were friendly. We parked our trailer in a Shopko parking lot, and I disconnected the truck to drive over to the campus of Brigham Young University.

  Pulling up to the campus, I was struck by the mountains standing tall in the background. We sure hadn’t had that kind of view at Oklahoma! The campus was even cleaner than the city. As soon as I stepped onto the campus, Provo was where I wanted to live.

  I asked the first person I saw where the gym was. After he told me, I asked why he had come to BYU.

  “Actually, I came here to wrestle,” he said.

  He was trying to impress me by sounding as if he was a member of BYU’s wrestling team. I introduced myself. I think he was embarrassed knowing that I would be going to the wrestling room, where I later watched him compete in an intramural tournament.

  Walking toward the wrestling room in the Smith Fieldhouse, right between the field house and the Richards Building, I spotted a four-point mule deer.

  This is the greatest campus on earth, I thought.

  I spent eleven years at BYU and never saw another mule deer on campus.

  I came up with the great idea of grabbing a wrestling brochure to see the picture and name of the coach—Alan Albright—and research who some of his best wrestlers were so I could walk up to him as if I’d known him all my life and say, “Hey, Alan. How’s Rick Evans doing this year?”

  The wrestling team was on a road trip, and when they returned I met Alan and asked if I could work out there. Not only did he allow me to work out, but he also gave me a locker and gear, and access to the weight room. Alan and I hit it off right away, and we remain good friends.

  After I had worked out a few times, Alan told me he was considering retiring from college coaching in a few years and said he might be able to help set me up to take over when he left. It w
as like a dream come true thinking about the possibility of securing a Division I wrestling head coach’s position.

  I officially became an assistant coach there in 1991 and was hired as head coach in 1994, when Alan left to coach at a high school south of Provo.

  Utah was also the site of four momentous occasions in my life. Three were the birth of son, Mark David, and daughters, Kelli and Sarah Jessica. The fourth was my conversion into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  I moved to Provo with preconceived notions about Mormons. Coach Albright didn’t tell me I was wrong—he showed the error in my thinking by how he lived.

  I had attended a Nazarene church early in my life and did not have a good experience. From that point on, I had not been a member of any religion and vowed to trash anyone who claimed membership in the one true church. I could not accept that all churches were true, because some of their beliefs conflicted.

  After I had been around BYU for a while, Alan started talking to me about how the Book of Mormon was the cornerstone of the LDS Church. He would make claims about the Book of Mormon being true, and I would challenge him. Alan had an answer to every challenge.

  I would ask questions of Alan and Corey Veach, another BYU assistant. A friend gave me some anti-Mormon literature to read, and Alan had Peter Sorenson, an English professor at the school, point out where the literature was flawed.

  All my questions were being answered, and all the answers I had heard about what was wrong with Mormonism were being refuted. Then Alan informed me that Joseph Smith, founder of the LDS movement, was a wrestler. If that turned out to be true, I told myself, then I would probably be willing to read the Book of Mormon. I researched, and it was true. In my research, I could not find an account of his losing a match to anyone.

  On September 22, 1991, Alan baptized me into the LDS Church.

  —

  In 1993, I was sitting at home in Provo when a guy I didn’t know called and said, “The best jujitsu fighter in the world is in town. Do you want to fight him?”

  I had heard of jujitsu but didn’t know anything about it. I thought the call was part of a joke.

  “What are the rules?” I asked.

  “There are no rules!” he said.

  I scrapped the notion that this was a joke. If there are no rules, I wondered, would we be trying to kill each other? Is this going to be a fight to the death?

  I couldn’t back down from that challenge.

  This was right before the 1993 NCAA championships, and I wouldn’t be able to meet this jujitsu guy until our team returned home.

  “Tell him to be in the BYU wrestling room a week from Thursday,” I told the caller.

  I was nervous for the next week. I was working on a master’s degree but couldn’t concentrate on my assignments. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on, but when the big day arrived, there was a small group of people in the room, some with video cameras.

  My first sight on the mat was Alan wrestling some guy who looked as if he belonged in the movie Kumite, with the front of his head shaved and his hair pulled into a long braid. Alan was on his feet and the guy was on his butt, scooting into Alan and trying to hook Alan’s feet with his.

  If this is all it is, I thought, it’s no big deal.

  When the people saw I had walked in, the action stopped.

  The guy got up, came toward me, and introduced himself as Rickson Gracie.

  “Are you the guy?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m the guy. Are you the guy?”

  “Yeah, I’m the guy,” he said.

  We had established that each of us was “the guy.”

  Rickson was a Brazilian jujitsu expert and had the cauliflower ears of a wrestler. Seeing his ears, I had no doubt he was tough.

  “What I do,” he explained, “is elbow, knee, punch, and kick, but we’re not going to do any of that today. We’re going to grapple and try to get each other in submission holds and chokes until one of us taps out.”

  Oh, good. No homicide today.

  I was pretty happy with that plan.

  Rickson stood there in front of me, in no stance.

  “Come on,” he said.

  I shot in, took him down, and had him in a cradle for probably twenty minutes. I wondered why the guy seemed so content to let me hold him down.

  I didn’t know any submission holds and made things up as I went. Based on what I had learned from two weeks of training with the US national judo team while I lived in Colorado Springs, I kept my chin down and elbows in. But that’s about all I knew, because submission holds were against wrestling’s rules.

  My grip gave out, and Rickson escaped and tried different chokes and armlocks on me. Then he tried a move called a “triangle,” or a figure-four in wrestling, and I couldn’t get out of it and had to tap out when my air supply got cut off.

  Our wrestlers watching from the bench were laughing at me. If I hadn’t just had my air flow cut off, I would have gone over to the bench and kicked some serious ass.

  “Can we do it again?” I asked Rickson.

  I was on top of him again for another twenty frustrating minutes before tiring and allowing Rickson to reverse me. As a wrestler my natural reaction was to go belly down so I wouldn’t get pinned. He immediately pulled my chin up and did a rear naked choke to tap me out again.

  Rickson told me I was the toughest guy he had ever gone up against and joked that he would retire if I learned jujitsu.

  Though humiliated, I learned a valuable lesson that day. I had never practiced submission holds because they were against NCAA and Olympic rules. The rules of wrestling instead pushed me toward conditioning and staying on top of an opponent, but there was no reason to learn techniques that would make people submit. I didn’t get into wrestling to win matches. I got into wrestling because I believed it was the ultimate martial art. Thanks to Rickson, I had discovered that there were better street-fighting moves out there and I had to learn them.

  It had been five years since my last Olympics, and I had been depressed the entire time. My life needed a change in direction, and jujitsu was the avenue. The takedowns and conditioning of wrestling were superior to any martial art, and combining wrestling with the submissions of jujitsu would create an even better martial art than either of them alone.

  Pedro Sauer was one of Rickson’s students and had the Brazilian jujitsu club in Provo that had brought Rickson to town. Pedro was smart and fluid, his technique flawless. He was the perfect coach for me.

  CHAPTER 16

  Trouble at Foxcatcher

  While I was experiencing life-altering moments in Utah, Dave’s wrestling career was filled with disappointment, injury, and determination.

  Following his setback to Kenny Monday in the 1988 wrestle-off for the Olympic team, Dave took a year off from competition to coach the US national team. Dave came back during the ’89 season, when Kenny was in the prime of his outstanding freestyle career.

  Dave and Kenny had a great rivalry going on the mat, and the two also had immense respect for each other. When Kenny won gold in Seoul, Dave was there to hoist him on his shoulders and take him on a victory lap around the mat.

  Dave’s international popularity was probably never more evident than at the 1991 tournament in Tbilisi. He had won there in ’87, and no American had won the tournament twice.

  Russian wrestling fans adored Dave. Zeke Jones, the current US freestyle national team coach, was coaching the Tbilisi team in ’91, and he told me that Dave’s finals match with a Russian ended in a tie, but the refs awarded the victory to the Russian because of Dave’s passivity, which had been caused by a shoulder injury.

  The fans went nuts, throwing things onto the arena floor and jeering. It took several minutes for officials to get the crowd under control. The refs reconvened, and both wrestlers’ hands were raised in victory. The fans wil
dly cheered the decision even though their own countryman had appeared to have won the championship. Zeke said he felt as if he were in a scene right out of The Twilight Zone. I’ve been told that was the only time two gold medals have been awarded in the same weight class at the tournament.

  Kenny beat Dave again in the ’91 trials for the World Team. After that loss, Dave, tired of cutting weight, decided to move up to 180.5 pounds in his bid to return to the Olympics. Dave struggled with nagging injuries after the switch, and his new weight class was one of the strongest on the US team, with defending world champ Kevin Jackson, Royce Alger, and Melvin Douglas, who was a year away from beginning his run of four consecutive US national championships. All four of those guys probably could have medaled at the upcoming Olympics.

  Dave lost his best-of-three to Douglas after winning the first match. Jackson wound up claiming the spot on the US team and won gold in Barcelona.

  Dave turned thirty-three in the summer of ’92. He wasn’t the type of wrestler who got counted out of too many things during his career, but at that age, the widespread opinion was that Dave had missed out on his last opportunity to compete in the Olympics.

  My brother, however, only grew more determined. He set his sights on the 1996 Games in Atlanta, Georgia. He dropped back down to 163, Kenny Monday retired, and Dave became our country’s top-ranked wrestler. He won the national championship and placed second at Worlds. In ’94, he won the national and World Cup titles and placed second at the Goodwill Games. In ’95, he won his third consecutive national championship and seventh overall. He also won his fifth World Cup title that year.

  Dave’s inspiring comeback had become a good story. At age thirty-six, his performances were giving every indication that he was on his way to winning an Olympic medal twelve years after our double golds at the Los Angeles Games.

  —