Foxcatcher Page 5

  John had two sisters and a brother, the youngest of whom was already eleven when John was born. Their parents separated when John was only two, and his mother kept Liseter Hall in the divorce settlement. John’s sisters and brother went off to boarding schools and then started their own families, but John attended a local private school and remained on the estate with his mother.

  John’s father married tennis star Margaret Osborne six years after the divorce. They had a son together, William III, and divorced while John was in his midtwenties.

  William Jr. had little to do with John as his son grew up. John once told a reporter that he “spent a lifetime looking for a father.” His mother, a strong-minded woman, did not remarry and lived in the mansion, overseeing the farm’s operations, until she died at age ninety-one. Without his father’s presence, and with his older siblings often away from home, John basically grew up alone with his mother. Perhaps that caused, or at least contributed to, his lifelong inability to have normal relationships.

  Shy and a stutterer into adulthood, John faced teasing at the prestigious boys-only Haverford School. Classmates voted him, curiously, both the laziest student and the most likely to succeed. John participated in swimming and wrestling at Haverford. He once proudly showed me a picture of him on the wrestling team during his freshman year. He was on the bottom row at the very end of the line, wearing a Haverford singlet. That was the only photo I saw of him in a wrestling uniform from his school years.

  John struggled to develop meaningful friendships at school, but he reveled in a graduation party he threw at his estate despite the fact that he had fallen behind in his classwork and would not graduate on time. John told the boys that none of them was allowed to bring a date. During the party, a few of the boys tried to drive a car into the estate’s swimming pool.

  That prank was one John would replicate later in life, but with a much more sinister purpose.

  —

  Du Pont graduated from high school in 1957 and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, but he did not finish out his freshman year before leaving. John did earn a college degree, in marine biology, from the University of Miami, where he competed on the swim team.

  Du Pont dreamed of swimming in the Olympics, and he had the financial resources to train in California with the best swim club in the nation, the Santa Clara Swim Club.

  John bought a home in Atherton, California, to live in during his training. Some twenty years before I would hear du Pont’s name for the first time, John lived less than five miles from Dave and me.

  The Santa Clara Swim Club trained Olympic champion swimmers. At that time, the club’s list of Olympic gold medalists included—and certainly was not limited to—Mark Spitz, Lynn Burke, Donna de Varona, Chris von Saltza, and Steve Clark.

  Du Pont was, at best, a good swimmer. He clearly could not compete at the level necessary to make an Olympic team.

  In 1963, du Pont decided to take up the sport of modern pentathlon, which consisted of five events: cross-country running, fencing, freestyle swimming, pistol shooting, and show jumping.

  I’ve heard two stories of how John reached that decision.

  One said that the Santa Clara swim coach convinced John that he was not cut out for the Olympics in swimming and recommended that if John really wanted to achieve his goal of competing in an Olympic Game, pentathlon could be his best chance.

  According to the second account, which was John’s story, he visited the home of Lynn Burke, the 1960 Olympic backstroke champion, and her father told du Pont that, considering he already knew how to swim, fire pistols, and ride horses, he should try pentathlon and then introduced him to a fencing coach.

  Both stories could be true.

  Pentathlon made sense for John’s Olympic dream because it wasn’t a widely contested sport at the time. It required money to pay coaches to train an athlete in the different disciplines, which limited the number of hopefuls. John could pay for that training, and he also had the financial means to construct training facilities on his mother’s property.

  Du Pont built a pistol range, cleared out a cross-country course, and had an indoor Olympic-size swimming pool installed. Along the wall beside the pool, du Pont paid to have mounted a mosaic of himself performing each of the five disciplines. The tiny pieces of tile for the mosaic were shipped in from Florence, Italy.

  Du Pont could also afford to cover the costs of traveling to other countries to compete. He won a tournament that was reported back home to be the Australian national championship in 1965, when there was very little interest in the sport there.

  But in the United States, as with swimming, he just wasn’t Olympic material. In 1967, he hosted the national championship in his backyard and, despite his home-field advantage, placed in the middle of the pack. The following year, in the competition to determine the US team members for the 1968 Games in Mexico City, du Pont finished next to last.

  John’s money had paid for the best coaching he could find in the United States. His money had allowed him to build practice facilities that allowed him to train without leaving home. But his abilities couldn’t earn him a spot on the team.

  For the 1976 Olympics, as a reward for his financial contributions to modern pentathlon, du Pont was given a manager’s spot on the US team, allowing him to wear the team’s warm-up suit and pose in the team photo.

  But du Pont never possessed what it took to make it to the Olympics without buying his way in as a noncompetitor. The determination was there, along with more than enough resources, but the skills were not.

  John was approaching thirty when he failed to make the Olympic team in modern pentathlon. With four years until the next Olympics, du Pont faced an insurmountable combination: At his age, he had run out of time to reach an elite level in the sports he had been best at, and he had run out of sports for which he could try to purchase another attempt at an Olympic bid.

  John du Pont would never be an Olympian. The best he could do was associate with those who were.

  With a nod to the name of his father’s stable of Thoroughbreds, John concentrated on bringing in the best athletes for his Team Foxcatcher, recruiting and encouraging swimmers, triathletes, and pentathletes to train at what was known as “the farm.”

  •

  He had already learned the benefits of association through his contributions to law enforcement. While training in California, he donated to the Atherton Police Activities League and showed off the badge he had been given by the Newtown Township Police Department back home as appreciation for donations he had made there.

  His association with the Newtown Township police deepened beginning in 1970. He allowed the police to train at his indoor and outdoor shooting ranges. (He named the indoor range for FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.) As an expert marksman from pentathlon, he volunteered his time to train Newtown Township officers in shooting. He bought bulletproof vests and radios for the department and allowed the police to use his helicopter.

  That association benefited him in a couple of ways. First, he was able to potentially gain a deeper level of protection, both legal and physical, that would buy him more power if he ever got in legal trouble. Second, and more immediate, he was able to wear a police uniform and perform volunteer, reserve-type duties. In look and in thought, he could be a cop. His badge and standing with the police department also provided him the ability to purchase high-powered guns.

  John liked the feel of powerful weapons in his hands. There is one strange story from the late seventies, about a day when the fish weren’t biting at the farm’s pond. He became so enraged that he pulled out a gun and fired at geese on the water, almost shooting the son of a swim coach.

  Du Pont and guns were a dangerous combination long before the months leading up to when he murdered Dave.

  CHAPTER 4

  One and Done at UCLA

  Until I won the state championship,
I was headed to the military after high school graduation. College coaches weren’t pursuing me to wrestle for them, as they had with Dave, and I hadn’t given much thought to attending college without a scholarship. I had already visited with a recruiter for the US Marine Corps because I didn’t know what else I could do after high school.

  But my state championship provided me an unexpected option. There are no guarantees in college recruiting, but because of California’s reputation for producing elite high school wrestlers, winning a state championship just about guarantees an opportunity to wrestle in college. My problem was one of timing. I hadn’t been on any college’s radar, and my state title came at the point in the recruiting calendar when most of the wrestling scholarships had already been committed.

  Two schools offered me scholarships: Oklahoma State and the University of California, Los Angeles.

  Oklahoma State was a perennial national powerhouse, and UCLA, well, wasn’t. At the time, Oklahoma State had won twenty-seven team national championships and had placed third my senior year. To show how dominant the Cowboys were (and are, with thirty-four championships currently), all these years later, no other college team has as many championships even now as Oklahoma State did back then.

  Oklahoma State also happened to be Dave’s team, as coach Tommy Chesbro had been the fortunate soul to sign Dave out of high school.

  Honestly, I believe Coach Chesbro’s offering me a scholarship had more to do with Dave than with me. I think he feared that if I went anywhere other than Oklahoma State, Dave would leave to join me.

  Dave had a 30-4-1 record as a freshman and placed third in the NCAAs at 150 pounds, losing to the eventual champion, Mark Churella, 13–10, in the semifinals. Dave was miserable at Oklahoma State, though. Coach Chesbro wanted to keep Dave at 150 so Ricky Stewart could wrestle at 158. College athletes have five academic years in which to complete their four years of athletic eligibility. Athletes can “redshirt” one year, which allows them to attend classes and practice with their team but not participate in competitions. The redshirt year doesn’t count against their four years of eligibility. It is most common for a redshirt to be used during athletes’ first year in college to allow them to adapt to college life and ease their transition into competing at the collegiate level. Ricky had redshirted the 1978 season, his freshman year, after an 88-0-1 high school career in Oklahoma that included three state championships.

  Dave was having to cut hard to make 150, but Ricky was bigger than Dave and wouldn’t be able to cut to 150.

  My brother was good enough to wrestle at any weight, but cutting weight is no fun, and it is especially difficult when you are having to work as hard as Dave was to make weight. He also had academic struggles. Dave went to college to wrestle, and classes were a necessary evil that allowed him to be in college to wrestle. Having dyslexia certainly didn’t help with his attempt to remain eligible.

  I had my own concerns about Oklahoma State. Going into OSU’s wrestling room with two years of experience seemed like a recipe for possible disaster. Oklahoma State signed the most-talented wrestlers in the country each year, and going up against them in practice could have shattered my confidence.

  Dave flat out told me not to go to Oklahoma State.

  I chose UCLA, which had been looking like a better option for me anyway, because I had a much greater chance of making the starting lineup there. Oklahoma State had finished third at the 1978 NCAA championships with five All-Americans. UCLA had been a middle-of-the-pack team in the Pac-8 Conference but seemed to be putting together one of the nation’s strongest recruiting classes to add to Fred Bohna, the best heavyweight in the country.

  •

  I had friends going to UCLA, including my high school teammate Jeff Newman and Pat O’Donnell, whom I had wrestled a couple of times (and lost to) in the summer before my senior year. Pat would become my roommate and later became an NCAA All-American at Cal Poly–San Luis Obispo.

  I liked UCLA’s coaches, too.

  Dave Auble was head coach and a living legend in my eyes. He had won two NCAA championships, been selected Outstanding Wrestler once, and also placed fourth in the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo. I knew Coach Auble to be hard-nosed, hard-working, hard-playing, stubborn, aggressive, and fearless. Coach Auble was tough, and that’s what I wanted to be known as more than anything. I wanted his toughness to rub off on me.

  Brady Hall, one of the assistants, had accomplished something I could only dream of at that point by winning a national Amateur Athletic Union freestyle championship. Brady had roomed with Dave at the 1976 US training camp the summer after Dave’s junior year, when Dave was the only high school wrestler at the camp. Brady had also become a successful businessman through what we now refer to as flipping real estate. I looked at Brady as someone I could learn from not only about wrestling but also about every area of life.

  That year, Chris Horpel was hired as an assistant at UCLA. Coach Auble had been an assistant at Stanford when Chris wrestled there. I was already sold on UCLA, but adding Chris as an assistant made going to school there that much better.

  Oh, and there was this one other recruit who wound up coming to UCLA whom I had heard of: this Dave guy from Oklahoma State. My brother decided to join me at UCLA and transferred in even though he would have to sit out one season because of NCAA transfer rules.

  Dave and I had spent the entire summer working out together. I was thinking I was pretty good after winning state, but Dave turned summer into a nightmarish three months for me. He wanted to work out all the time, and I—reigning California state champion—wanted to enjoy my summer.

  “You want to go work out?” Dave would ask.

  “Not today,” I’d say. “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Pussy,” Dave would say in an effeminate voice.

  Dave really knew how to piss me off.

  “Okay, that’s it!” I’d say, all mad. “You’re going to die today!”

  Then we’d go work out and he’d destroy me.

  That routine went on almost every day that summer.

  “Want to go work out?”

  “No.”

  “Pussy.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Dave would take me down what seemed like fifty times a day, and I’d never take him down. I dreaded wrestling against him each day.

  Finally, after telling myself “This sucks” enough times to want to do something about it, I determined I had to develop a better strategy: If I couldn’t score against Dave, then the least I could do was to keep him from scoring.

  I started spending all my time on the mat with him backing up, stalling, breaking his hold, even running backward sometimes. I didn’t care if I could score, but I’d do anything I could think of to prevent him from scoring. Pretty soon, I got good enough at stalling that I no longer had to back away from him. I could hold my ground and even push back a little and still stall. Every time I was on the mat with Dave, I’d go into a defensive shell. When I got proficient at that, I started making brief attempts at attacks. If my attack didn’t work—and against Dave, it often didn’t—I’d go right back into defensive mode.

  My strategy worked. Instead of getting destroyed, I started losing by scores like 4–0 and 5–0. That pissed Dave off, and I didn’t care. Actually, I enjoyed getting under his skin a little.

  That summer turned out to be a game changer for me as a wrestler because of the emphasis I learned to place on defense. Eventually, my offense became as good as my defense, but my style developed with defense first.

  —

  The decision to attend UCLA appeared great in the beginning. With our recruiting class, I thought Coach Auble was building a West Coast dynasty. I was on a full-ride scholarship. Movie stars were seemingly everywhere in the area. (I sat in front of Lorenzo Lamas in a movie theater for the premiere of the wrestling movie Take Down.) Our wrestling room was huge,
and it was always sunny in Southern California.

  Every day, the choice to attend UCLA looked better and better.

  My first year of college consisted of eating, sleeping, going to class, wrestling, and sneaking in extra workouts. As a freshman, I was required to take general studies courses as prerequisites. Philosophy was one of my classes. From studying Krishnamurti, I did well in that class and considered choosing philosophy as my major.

  We were required to take a course about cancer in which the professor showed us pictures of people with horrible cases of cancer, mostly from using tobacco. Some of the pictures showed how people had parts of their faces cut off because of cancer, leaving them terribly deformed but at least still alive. I think the purpose of the course was to scare the crap out of us. It worked.

  I also took a jazz appreciation class—although I didn’t learn to appreciate jazz until after college—and a Western civilization course. What I remember most from the latter course was the professor telling us that in the history of Western civilization, whenever leaders had a choice between doing what was best for society or best for themselves, the leaders chose what was best for them, and that usually resulted in chaos, war, and the deaths of thousands of people.

  I turned eighteen during my first quarter, and late that quarter, a couple of girls invited me to a party. The party was in a third-floor apartment, and everyone was loud and drinking. I didn’t know anyone else there and quickly got bored. The girls asked if I wanted to leave, and I said I did.

  We went downstairs and one girl went to go get her car and pull around to pick us up. The one waiting with me asked if I would show her how to wrestle. We went out onto the grass and I showed her a gentle version of the foot sweep, where you place your foot behind your opponent’s calf and make a sweeping motion to take that foot off the floor and then take him to the mat.