Foxcatcher Read online

  The near fall was another good example of how widely the rules varied. In collegiate wrestling, a near fall was scored when a wrestler turned his opponent onto his back and the opponent’s shoulder blades broke a forty-five-degree angle to the mat for at least two seconds. If you held your opponent in that position for two seconds, you received two near-fall points; if you held him there for five seconds, you received three points. In freestyle, we called that a “turn.” You could score two points for turning your opponent’s shoulder blades beyond a ninety-degree angle. You could even just roll him over completely until he was back on his stomach, and if his shoulder blades met the ninety-degree angle standard, you could receive two points for the turn.

  The number of points awarded for the different scoring moves also changed from style to style, but typically ranged from one to three points.

  Matches consisted of periods. In collegiate wrestling before 1982, the first period lasted two minutes and the second and third lasted three minutes. That changed to a 3-2-2 format. Freestyle matches had three periods of three minutes each until 1981, when matches were shortened to two periods of three minutes each.

  Wrestlers were divided into weight classes, with the wrestlers not allowed to weigh more than their designated weight class. When I competed, the Olympics had ten weight classes in both freestyle and Greco-Roman. Currently, there are seven in each. In college wrestling, there were ten classes, as is still the case.

  One type of competition was a dual meet between two teams, with both putting one wrestler in each weight class. Each match won could count up to six points for a team, with points awarded depending on the type of victory. The team with the most points at the end of the meet won the dual.

  Another format was a tournament featuring multiple teams, as at college national championship meets and high school meets such as a conference or state championship. Tournaments were double elimination, and a wrestler could lose as early in the tournament as his first match and still finish as high as third place.

  Freestyle tournaments followed a round-robin format. In international meets, including the Olympics, wrestlers were divided into two pools, or groups. All the wrestlers in each pool would wrestle against each other, with the wrestler in each pool accumulating the most points (based on type of victories) advancing to the championship match.

  •

  When I decided to switch to wrestling, I was all in. I committed to train as hard as I could, even if it killed me. That’s no exaggeration. I was unhappy with myself because I had been getting high too much and hanging around losers I didn’t respect. To be successful in an area, you have to respect the people who are successful in that area, or you are disrespecting the very thing that you want to become. I was so unhappy that there no longer existed a difference between life and death to me. I sincerely didn’t care anymore. I wanted to start associating with people I respected. Fortunately wrestling provided that.

  My coach was Tim Brown, a heavyweight wrestler and football coach. He was a good coach and a good guy. Ashland’s wrestling program was small, though, with only about ten guys at tryouts. Coach Brown understood the importance of stamina and wrestling, and he ran us like crazy to get us in tip-top shape.

  Best I remember, we had twelve weight classes in high school wrestling when I competed. If necessary, coaches would choose weight classes for their wrestlers if there were weights unfilled, because forfeiting a weight class would give the opposing team six points in a dual match. Only one wrestler from a school could participate at each weight in a meet, so coaches would come up with ways to choose who would compete at weights.

  I started wrestling in the 130-pound weight class. It was then that I experienced one of the worst parts of wrestling: cutting weight.

  Cutting weight is the process of dropping weight, usually rapidly, to meet the weight maximum of a particular class. Cutting involves heavy workouts to make you sweat as much as you can; cutting back on food, or even cutting out food altogether; and, when a wrestler is really having to work hard to make weight, sticking a finger in your throat so you vomit. Done the wrong way—as in those extreme cases—cutting weight is dangerous. But it has been a part of the sport for as far back as I’ve heard it explained.

  When I was competing in wrestling, the predominant philosophy was that cutting lots of weight gave a wrestler an advantage in that he would be bigger than a wrestler who didn’t cut to the same weight. Basically, a wrestler who cut would lose body fat to get down in weight and would have more muscle mass than the other wrestler.

  I thought it was a stupid philosophy, especially for someone with a lean body type, which I had from gymnastics. I weighed 136. Six pounds may not sound like too much of a difference, but because I was lean, I was cutting water weight and my body was eating my muscles. When calories aren’t coming in from outside the body, energy must be found from what is stored in the body. Carbs are burned during aerobic (with oxygen) actions, and proteins are burned with anaerobic (without oxygen) actions. Because I didn’t have much body fat, the only way for me to lose weight was to burn energy from muscle protein and by dehydrating water weight through sweating. As a result, my ability to perform was significantly hampered.

  Wade Yates, one of my best friends, was a district runner-up the previous season for Ashland in my weight. Coach Brown created a rule that if two wrestlers were in the same weight, they would wrestle challenge matches each week for that weight’s spot on the varsity. Wade and I wrestled eleven times in ten weeks, and I won ten times. I had to lift my level of intensity so high when I wrestled Wade each week that I suffered a drop-off for the ensuing competitions.

  I think I got pinned in my first four matches and didn’t have a clue why I was getting destroyed.

  Dave’s reputation was that he became so good because of his vast knowledge of techniques. I was new to wrestling and didn’t know any moves, so I set out to learn as many as I could. Dave and I had a friend named Jim Goguen who wrestled at Southern Oregon College (now Southern Oregon University) in Ashland.

  I went over to the campus, and Jim introduced me to the concept of gaining hand control from the bottom to escape an opponent riding you on top. I call it the “hand-control standup.”

  Here’s how it works: You’re down on the mat, and your opponent has his arms around you. You grab his fingers so that he can’t grab his own hand to get a locked grip around you or grab your hands so that he has what’s known as hand control. Then you put your feet out in front of you, arch your back so that you can get your hips away from his hips, and then cut free from your opponent with a quick turn. That’s an effective way of escaping your opponent.

  The hand-control standup worked well because of one indisputable fact: The back of your head is harder than your opponent’s face. If the other guy’s face was behind my head, Jim told me, I should smash his face with my head. No opponent would want to hang on if he was being smashed in the face.

  After Jim taught me that move, almost no one could hold me down. I employed that move all throughout high school and college and into national and international competitions. At the college level, scoring includes one point for riding time. Riding time comes when a wrestler is in control of an opponent on the mat, and the wrestler being controlled is unable to escape or score a reversal. At the end of the match, if a wrestler has one minute more of riding time than his opponent, one riding time point is added to his score. After my second year in college, no opponent scored a riding time point against me.

  The hand-control concept was just as effective from on top. If I could control an opponent’s hands, I could ride him pretty well. The funny thing is that the hand-control concept was so simple. I couldn’t understand why more wrestlers—shoot, all wrestlers—weren’t doing it. I never shared the secret of the hand-control standup with anyone.

  Thanks to what Jim taught me, I improved at escapes. I was training as hard as I could, too. Bu
t still, the wins weren’t coming. I made the mistake of believing that if I learned techniques like Dave, I’d be winning like him, too. The big difference didn’t come, though, until I realized that I would need to add explosive power to the techniques to make them work.

  After losing those first four matches, my record climbed to 4-6 by about halfway through the season. That’s when Coach Brown decided to replace me with Wade to make our team better, even though I was still winning our weekly challenge matches.

  I didn’t like the fact that Coach had created the challenge system and then didn’t follow it. He had established the rules we were playing by, but then he threw out the rules so he could have Wade wrestle in tournaments instead of me.

  On top of that, we were forfeiting matches in the upper weights we couldn’t fill because of our lack of heavier wrestlers. Our team was lousy, so I didn’t understand the “make the team better” reason. And I didn’t care about the team anyway. Sure, they added up points for team totals at tournaments, but as far as I was concerned, wrestling was an individual sport. It was me against my opponent. That’s all I cared about.

  Instead of talking to Coach Brown, I went straight to the principal, who instructed Coach to put me back on varsity. Because of that, the situation was partly my fault, too. I should have talked to Coach Brown first. I could have talked to him about it, because he was a good coach. He made a judgment call I didn’t agree with, and there was nothing more to it than that.

  At least on the surface.

  But when I look back, I think the reason I went to the principal first is that, mentally, I had already checked out of Ashland. I never was happy in Oregon, I wanted out of there, and I was willing to stir up trouble if that’s what it took to make it happen.

  I started skipping classes. I got into a fight in PE and broke my hand when I punched the kid in the back of the head. The only lesson I learned from that incident was to never again punch someone in the back of the head; it’s too hard back there. With my hand in a cast, I flunked typing class. Then I cut off the cast because I got tired of wearing it. The hand didn’t heal correctly.

  I couldn’t wait to flee Oregon, but I couldn’t go back to Palo Alto until my probation period expired. Waiting out the remainder of my probation seemed to slow time significantly. I felt as if I had been ripped off in being arrested and put on probation anyway. Then there were the problems on the wrestling team, my broken hand, and wanting to get out of the same house as my mom’s boyfriend.

  Dave came for another visit after wrestling season, this one tied to recruiting. It seemed as if every college with a wrestling program was recruiting Dave, and that made me jealous of him. I had always been a better natural athlete than him and had won the gymnastics championship in California. I would look at Dave and think about how uncoordinated he had been and wonder how he had become so good at wrestling in such a short time. Dave’s success confused me, but it also opened my eyes to the potential I could have as a wrestler. If nothing else, I knew that if I gave my full attention to wrestling, I would have a top-notch workout partner in my brother.

  During the week Dave spent with us, Ron Finley, the coach at the University of Oregon, and Bob Rheim from Southern Oregon came to talk with him. While Mark and I were talking to the coaches, he called me a pothead. I couldn’t beiieve he said that right in front of them.

  —

  Dave’s senior season at Palo Alto High is the best any US high school wrestler has ever produced.

  In November, he missed a few matches of his high school team to compete in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the prestigious Great Plains freestyle tournament. Despite being a high school wrestler, Dave advanced to the finals against Chuck Yagla. Dave was just a high school senior and he was going up against Yagla, who had completed his collegiate wrestling career at the University of Iowa a year earlier. Yagla had won the 1975 and ’76 NCAA Championships and was named the meet’s Outstanding Wrestler his senior year.

  Dave was down a few points to Yagla when the two were chest to chest, arms around each other. Dave caught the two-time NCAA champ in a step-around body lock, taking a long step with his left leg and wrapping it around Chuck’s right leg to trap it. Dave then drove Chuck straight to his back, keeping Chuck’s right leg trapped with his left leg, and pinned him for the victory.

  Winning at Great Plains qualified Dave for the Tbilisi tournament in Soviet Georgia, considered the best in the world because all the Soviet wrestlers took part and they formed the most dominant team in world and Olympic competitions. Dave placed second there, higher than any other American.

  Dave had finished fourth at state his sophomore and junior years, but competing in Tbilisi kept him out of the high school tournaments that would have qualified him for the California state championship meet. Coach Hart petitioned the state coaches association to allow Dave to compete anyway, but in one class higher at 170 pounds. The coaches agreed, knowing Dave would win state. And he did, easily, with his closest score 12–1 in the finals.

  After state, Dave took part in the Greco-Roman National Championships. In Greco-Roman, wrestlers are not allowed to use their legs to attack and cannot attack an opponent’s legs. Dave won that tournament and the Gorriaran Award given to the wrestler who totals the most falls in the least amount of time.

  College recruiters were lining up to make their best sales pitches to Dave.

  Dave revolutionized wrestling because of his emphasis on technique. Before, most coaches had emphasized pure conditioning. At that time, freestyle matches were nine minutes long and college matches lasted eight minutes. In a nine-minute match, conditioning tended to be the only thing that mattered, because wrestlers with great technique but lousy conditioning could get wiped out by superconditioned wrestlers.

  Dave changed that because he was well conditioned and possessed super technique. That’s why as a high school senior he was able to beat some of the world’s best wrestlers with a body that looked as if it belonged to, as one friend of ours liked to say, a chemistry professor. Dave’s body was deceiving, though; he actually had incredible core strength.

  —

  My probation ended in the middle of my junior year, and I moved back to Palo Alto, although too late to try out for the wrestling team. I reached out to another one of Dave’s wrestling friends, Chris Horpel, who had recently graduated from Stanford after earning All-American honors. Chris was seven years older than I was. At first, we had almost an older brother–younger brother relationship. I tried to make Chris like me by getting him to laugh at my Steve Martin imitations. After a while, he got pretty good at imitating Steve, too. Steve Martin was the best, and Chris and I cracked each other up with his comedy.

  Chris coached me and wrestled against me the remainder of my junior year and during the summer. He also arranged for me to train with some of Stanford’s wrestlers, and that would give me a huge advantage over other competitors my age. Unable to compete on the school team, I wrestled in amateur freestyle tournaments almost every weekend. Most of the time, I lost my first two matches and was eliminated. But I hit a growth spurt during that period and at the end of the summer won a pretty big tournament at West Valley College while wrestling at 145 pounds. Winning the tournament was great, but still my only motivation in wrestling was to become the greatest fighter in the world.

  Coach Hart, Dave’s coach, knew I would be wrestling for him the next school year at Palo Alto High, and he kept close tabs on my progress. He also worked out with me, and I took him down ten times.

  Dave dutifully kept a wrestling notebook full of notes and observations. I copied Dave my junior year because I thought—and still think—that the way to become good at just about anything is to find someone who is good at it and copy what he does. So, like Dave, I decided to turn wrestling into an academic pursuit.

  I organized my notebook into categories of tie-ups, or positions I would find myself in before or after shots.
Grabbing an opponent’s wrist, for instance, is a tie-up. But grabbing a wrist and using it to execute an arm drag to a single leg would make the single leg the tie-up. I’ve noticed that most wrestlers tend to divide attacks into three steps: set-up, penetration, and finish.

  Set-up, usually executed with the hands and arms, is setting up the opponent for an attack by getting him off-balance and creating an opening to attack. Penetration, often referred to as “the shot,” is the attack itself. The finish is the final move of the sequence designed to score points or, ideally, lead to a pin.

  On a basic move like the arm drag, for example, my set-up would be allowing my opponent to grab my right wrist with his left hand. Then I would lower my wrist to move his arm into the position I wanted. Next, I would grab the back of his triceps with my left hand and throw his arm directly sideways, which would break his grip. I would throw so hard that his arm would almost be horizontal to the ground, twisting his upper body away from me.

  There wasn’t much to the penetration. After I got my opponent’s arm horizontal, I would drop my hips and shoot. That was my penetration step. For the finish, after throwing his arm horizontal, I would keep both arms out wide, like a net, to catch anything I could (usually both legs, but sometimes just one). As I took the penetration step, I would wrap my stepping leg all the way around the back of my opponent’s left leg/foot, trapping it and tripping him as I drove my left shoulder into his stomach/groin area. Trapping his leg would result in either my tackling him or my forcing him to fall backward to the mat.

  In my notebook, I eliminated the penetration, because that was a given, and turned the three-step process into two steps.

  If a technique didn’t have a name, I created one for it.

  Each page was dedicated to one tie-up. Examples of tie-ups are single leg, double leg, high-crotch, over-under, double overhook, double underhook, front headlock, and, for one with a funny name, the whizzer. I wrote the name of the tie-up at the top of a page and listed underneath all the different ways to finish from that tie-up. Upper-body finishes included throws, kick-ups, and trips. I discovered the seven basic categories of finishing all leg attacks: lift, trip, spin behind, switch to another move, crack the opponent down to his hip, run the pipe, and go out the back door. On the back of the page, I listed counters to each tie-up. Then I had separate pages for reversals, pinning combinations, and escapes. Inside the front cover, I listed hints to relieve pressure, stay focused, and perceive reality. All of that was designed, in my sixteen-year-old mind, to improve as quickly as possible.