Foxcatcher Page 4

  I studied my wrestling notebook far more than any of my school textbooks, and I reread my notebook until I memorized every note on every page. I took mental snapshots of the pages, and when I got into a tie-up during a match, that particular page would flash into my mind and I could “see” a menu of moves to choose from. I would decide how to finish before I shot so there would be no hesitation.

  My notebook was pretty full by the time I went to Joe Seay’s Bakersfield Express camp the summer before my senior year. I roomed with Jeff Newman, who would also be a senior at Paly, as our school was commonly called. When Jeff saw me making notes in my book and I explained what I was doing, we got into a fun debate about the effectiveness of making such a book. Jeff was a good wrestler, and we would become training partners and good friends, but I knew the book worked for my big brother and that was the only point I needed to consider.

  At the camp I developed the idea of “chain” wrestling, or transitioning from one move to another and then another and then another in an infinite chain of moves. I jotted down a lot of chains in my notebook until I concluded there was no limit to the chains and I stopped writing down moves. From that point, I focused on which moves and chains were the most effective and, ultimately, they became my most-guarded secrets. In fact, my most effective attack was so secretive that I didn’t even realize how much I employed it until watching myself on video.

  A couple of more traditional books greatly influenced me. One was a book on takedowns that was written by Bobby Douglas, an African American who broke racial barriers in wrestling, finished with a career record of 303-17, and was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

  The second was You Are the World by Indian teacher J. Krishnamurti. I had read inspiring stories of Zen masters accomplishing incredible physical and mental feats, including one who had spent a day in meditation, sipping tea and relaxing, then got up and shot an arrow into a dark corridor and nailed the center of the target. As I checked out You Are the World, it looked as if it contained Zen philosophy. I flipped to a chapter about overcoming fear and began reading. I was so intrigued by the chapter that I read that book and then others by Krishnamurti.

  At first, it was difficult to understand Krishnamurti. He didn’t write books that offered, for instance, six easy steps to overcoming fear. He would ask questions but not provide answers. His books didn’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t think. Instead, he wrote in a way that seemed as if he were walking alongside me, teaching me how to live without him and not to depend on him.

  Before reading Krishnamurti, I had never heard phrases like “dying to the past every moment”; “observing what is, not what should be, including my thoughts without judgment, and seeing what happens”; and “living totally in the present.”

  From Krishnamurti’s writings, I learned to observe my thoughts and the world without judging. I learned to see my mind with complete attention and see what happens. I learned that the divisions and conflicts that existed in my mind between what is and what should be were the same sources of conflict and division that existed in the world. And I learned that the only thing that mattered to me was what was happening at that moment. I learned to live totally in the present and die to the past.

  Realizing that in love there was no separation between the observer and the observed, I began to love everything, including my opponents. I no longer held grudges. That freed me from encumbrances that had previously been obstacles to my success. With the pains of my past no longer in my present, I had the energy I needed to move on and continue improving in every way I could.

  Learning to live totally in the present and die to the past helped me get through training, because when I caught myself thinking that my body could take no more pain than it was already experiencing, I would tell myself that all the pain I had experienced up to that moment was in my past, and my past was dead and gone.

  Life began anew every second, and that philosophy combined with wrestling brought me out of my darkness and made me happy again.

  —

  Before my senior year, I needed workout gear and asked Dad to buy me a sweatshirt. By coincidence, as far as I knew, he bought me a green sweatshirt. Our school colors were green and white. I wore that sweatshirt every day, and pulling it down over my head was like flipping a switch that transformed me into the person I was trying to become: confident and at ease with myself.

  I pushed myself in my workouts to my absolute limits, training harder than anyone else and working myself into better shape than anyone else. I worked out twice a day. Some days, I worked out three or four times. Every day, more and more, I could see myself becoming the fighter I wanted to be.

  I gained thirty pounds in one year and weighed a lean, mean 157 pounds when my senior year started. In California, one pound was added every month of the season until the state championships. My class started at 154 pounds and ended at 159. I figured that if I worked out hard and then dropped to the next lowest weight, that should be my ideal weight. I’d usually have to cut only a pound or two to wrestle at 154.

  For a short period, Stanford had a club wrestling team that worked out at Gunn High School, Paly’s crosstown rival. Through my connection with Chris Horpel, I was able to work out with the Stanford club after my practice at Paly. Bob McNeil, one of the Stanford wrestlers, was a master of the side roll, and that move I learned from him would become my go-to move.

  Jeff Newman and I trained together every day, and he wrestled a weight higher than me, at 165. Jeff won every tournament and was undefeated, including a victory against Joe Guillory, the defending Central Coast Section champion at my weight.

  Meanwhile, I didn’t win any of our three regular-season tournaments. I lost to the eventual tournament champion in my first match at the first tournament. Coach Hart held me out of the second tournament because of a broken toe. At the third meet, I placed third.

  I was faring well against Jeff in practice, so I knew I could beat Joe Guillory and the others he was beating. But mentally, I was struggling. The pressure of competing seemed to get to me. It didn’t help that I was the Dave Schultz’s little brother and that I had gone 4-6 the previous year at 130 pounds.

  I don’t know what changed, but something sure did. Dramatically. I won the nine-team South Peninsula Athletic League, pinning my opponent in the final, to qualify for Regionals. There, with wrestlers from about twenty schools competing, I won again and qualified for the Central Coast Section, which consisted of about ninety schools. At CCS, I defeated one opponent who had beaten me during the regular season, and advanced to the finals to face Joe Guillory.

  Guillory took me down and rode me the entire first period. In the second period, I reversed him to his back for five points with the Bob McNeil side roll. I won the match by one point, was named the meet’s Outstanding Wrestler, and qualified for the state championship at San Diego State University.

  Most states broke down their state tournaments into different divisions or classifications based on the sizes of schools, so they wound up with multiple state champions in each weight class. California, despite having more than eight hundred schools that competed in wrestling, didn’t do that. Schools of all sizes competed together, with one state champion crowned at each weight. A wrestler who won a state championship in California truly was the state champion.

  Joe Guillory lost in the first round. There I was in my senior year, most likely my last season to wrestle, getting ready for my first match in my first state tournament, and a wrestler I knew firsthand was one of the best in the state had lost right off the bat.

  You’ve got to be kidding me! I thought. These guys are tough. I might be in over my head here.

  I relied on Krishnamurti’s teachings and told myself to live totally in the present. I focused solely on my first match, not even taking a look beyond that match on the bracket sheet. For as long as I kept advancing through the tournament, I would contin
ue to look only to my next opponent. That’s a trick I used throughout my career to help keep me completely in the present.

  My first match was against a wrestler who had finished fifth in the Southern Section. I was never in danger of losing during that match and gave up a takedown at the end to win by one point.

  My next opponent was Tim Johnson of Vallejo’s Hogan High. Johnson was undefeated and a favorite to win the championship. He led me 3–2 with ten seconds remaining when I escaped to tie the match and send us into overtime. We had a one-minute break before the start of overtime, and I had used up so much energy to rally for the tie that I lay down as soon as I reached my corner. I was so exhausted that I almost threw up.

  About forty-five seconds into the break, Coach Hart looked at me, then over to my opponent, who was sitting up on a knee and talking to his coach. Johnson didn’t appear tired at all, and here I was sucking wind. Coach Hart slapped me really hard and pulled me to my feet. I’d never seen him do anything like that, and his slap startled me. I felt a rush of needed adrenaline. Coach knew what he was doing!

  Overtime consisted of three one-minute periods. We finished the first period scoreless, but I scored three points in each of the next two periods for a 6–0 win in overtime. Johnson, by the way, worked back through the consolation side of the bracket and placed third.

  My semifinals match was against Kerry Hiatt of Poway High. Hiatt was undefeated, and Poway had won four state team titles. Plus, Poway was near San Diego State and had a large number of fans at the meet. Hiatt took me down in the first period and rode me the entire round. In the second round, I chose to start on the bottom and hit him with the side roll that I had used in every critical match that season. I put Hiatt on his back for five points and rode him for all of the third period to win 5–2.

  When the ref raised my hand to signify my victory, I looked over to Coach Hart and gave him a thumbs-up. He knew what I was asking. The old gymnast in me had been doing backflips on the mat to signify big victories, and winning in the semifinals was a big victory to me. But Coach Hart waved me down and yelled, “No!” When I walked over to him, Coach told me, “Save it. It’s not time.”

  Another undefeated wrestler awaited me in the final, Chris Bodine of Pleasant Hill. Bodine was a junior, but we both were seventeen.

  The score was 4–4 starting the third period, and he chose bottom. Basically all he had to do to win state was escape. I rode him for about a minute, then he stood up, broke my grip, and turned to face me. Right before he completed the escape, I let go of his body, snatched his left leg, and held on with all I had. I didn’t know what to do from there. But I did know that if I let him go, he would win. We both were exhausted, and I thought this might be the last time I would ever wrestle.

  But with both arms clutching Bodine’s leg, I died to the past. You’re not dead yet, I told myself, then exploded one last time and did something I’d never done before: I lifted my opponent off the ground with a single leg and arched into a back suplay. We both began falling, and I turned into Bodine and landed on top of him when he hit the mat. He was lying right on his back, and I slapped him in a half nelson with one arm, grabbed his leg with my other arm, and locked my hands into a cradle. I held him on his back in the cradle for three points. He got off his back with a few seconds left on the clock, and I rode him out to win the state championship, 7–4. I punctuated my victory with a backflip.

  That 1978 California State Wrestling Championships was the most miraculous tournament of my life, even of all my future tournaments on the national and international levels. Winning the state championship made me start thinking that perhaps there was a god after all.

  Two years earlier, I had been a gymnast, not a wrestler. Then in only sixteen months, I had progressed from a 4-6 record and losing my spot on the team to walking toward the winners’ podium as the California state champion. As I made the walk, I was wearing the green sweatshirt my dad had bought me and that I had poured dozens of gallons of sweat through.

  After the medals ceremony, I went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror, staring into my own eyes for probably five minutes. I wondered why it was that this brain had enabled me to be better than anyone else in the state.

  Why me?

  Whatever sins I had committed must have been forgiven for me to receive this incredible blessing. For that, I could only give thanks and pledge to do my best to preserve this feeling and parlay it into even greater heights.

  Again, I wondered, Why me?

  Other wrestlers knew as much as I did, worked as hard as I did, and wanted to win (probably) as much as I did. But yet somehow, there was something different I had that they didn’t.

  I didn’t know what it was, but as I continued to look into that mirror, I saw someone who had been granted a gift, an undefinable edge. More important, I saw someone I loved. I was happy with myself.

  When I returned to Palo Alto, Dad threw me a party with a cake, balloons, and a banner that read CONGRATULATIONS! That was the first time in my life I felt that I had accomplished something Dad had never imagined I could do. My dad the comedian had made me laugh all throughout my growing-up years. But on this day, I was making him smile and laugh!

  That state championship–winning move, in all its unplanned glory, was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me in my life. If it hadn’t worked, I would have lost and become a US Marine and a former wrestler.

  CHAPTER 3

  John du Pont

  On another coast and years before, John Eleuthère du Pont had a very different childhood. He grew up in a forty-plus-room mansion on an eight-hundred-acre estate in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, just west of Philadelphia. The mansion was an exact replica of President James and Dolley Madison’s Montpelier home in Virginia, which had been designed by Thomas Jefferson, a du Pont family friend.

  The du Pont business acumen—most associated with the DuPont chemical and explosives company and, later, General Motors—elevated the family from French immigrants to American royalty, listed alongside the likes of the Rockefellers, the Astors, and the Vanderbilts.

  As one of hundreds of heirs to the du Pont fortune, John was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His life journey, though, evolved into an unfulfilled quest to taste Olympic gold—even after it had become painfully obvious that he would never be able to earn that chance through his own talents and abilities.

  John du Pont became rich simply by being born. His great-great-grandfather, French-born Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, built a gunpowder mill in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1802 that would grow into the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, which came to be called DuPont for short.

  E.I.’s expertise at making gunpowder led to the company’s establishing itself as a leading supplier of gunpowder to the US military. The company expanded into the production of smokeless gunpowder and dynamite.

  In 1902, while DuPont celebrated its one hundredth anniversary, company president Eugene du Pont’s death resulted in a transaction that would mark a new era in DuPont’s history and position the company for remarkable growth.

  Du Pont cousins T. Coleman, Pierre S., and Alfred I. purchased the company and transitioned DuPont into a scientific-research-driven chemical company. DuPont’s profits allowed Pierre to later acquire controlling interest in the struggling General Motors company in which he was a shareholder. The DuPont company then invested in the automaker, perhaps saving GM from collapse. Pierre made his and DuPont’s investments pay off richly when he became GM’s president and steered the company into its spot as the world’s largest automobile maker.

  With its emphasis on science, DuPont entered the field of synthetic textile fibers and rose further in prominence. The company struck it big in the 1930s by introducing women’s hosiery into the marketplace. During World War II, DuPont became a large supplier of the material used in parachutes and B-29 bomber tires. DuPont also played a key role in the Manhatta
n Project, which produced the first atomic bombs.

  The family’s business acumen led to the du Ponts’ becoming one of America’s wealthiest and most influential families.

  The line from Eleuthère Irénée to John E. du Pont passed from E.I.’s son Henry to grandson William to great-grandson William Jr.

  John was born in 1938 in Philadelphia, the youngest of the four children of William Jr. and Jean Liseter Austin, who also hailed from a well-to-do family.

  Jean’s father had given the newlyweds more than six hundred acres of land called Liseter Hall in Newtown Square. William Jr.’s father then built the couple the mansion that John grew up in.

  The Montpelier replica estate became part of a family legal squabble in the 1980s in which John was involved. Family members spent millions of dollars on legal fees alone before the matter was worked out.

  The du Ponts resolved family problems by hiring lawyers; Dave and I settled our disputes with our fists.

  John’s father, president of the Delaware Trust Company, owned Thoroughbreds that raced under the colors of his Foxcatcher Farm stable, and he was also a major player in the construction of racetracks and steeplechase courses, gaining international acclaim for the more than twenty he designed. His love of foxhunting led to the establishment of his well-known Foxcatcher Hounds kennel. John’s mother bred Welsh ponies and championship beagles for competition. She was highly regarded in equestrian circles for her, as she called them, Liseter Welsh ponies, and she won more than thirty-two thousand awards over seven decades of showing horses.