Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold (12 page)

Down three points, Rinke started attacking me like crazy and I got called for my final stalling warning. I couldn’t afford another stalling.

Then I looked over at the scoreboard and my lead was 4–2, not 5–2. The mat judges had reversed the ref’s decision and awarded me one point, not two, for the gut wrench. That screwed up my calculations on what I needed to win. I thought I could give up two takedowns, instead of three, and still win on criteria. But I failed to take into account that with the subtracted point, all my scoring had come on one-pointers. If I gave up two takedowns, I would lose the tiebreaker.

While I was refiguring my mental math as we wrestled, the ref yelled, “Passive, rouge!” or “Stalling, red!” for the color of my singlet. In my confusion, Rinke exploded with the exact same underhook to a limp arm that Karabacak had used to gain control of my leg. But unlike the Turk, Rinke executed perfectly for the takedown. My lead shrank to 4–3.

That gave Rinke a huge energy burst. A full minute remained for him to get a takedown or a stalling call on me for the tie and, because of the tiebreaker, win. I was still thinking, however, that I could allow a takedown for a tie and win on the tiebreaker.

Rinke was on top, trying to turn me. He couldn’t, and the ref stood us back to our feet. I had used all my stalling calls, and the ref yelled, “Passive, rouge!” again to warn me that he was about to call my final stalling penalty. Unlike most wrestlers I went against, Rinke opted for a standing restart. Rinke knew there would be a better chance to score on me from that position.

Not only had Rinke scouted me, but Jim Humphrey—one of our assistant coaches at Oklahoma—had been hired as the Canadian freestyle head coach. Jim knew better than anyone my style and how adept I had become at preventing opponents from turning me in the down position. It shook me to know that someone who knew me that well was in the opposing corner, and I’m sure Jim instructed Rinke to not have me start down.

I had to make a quick decision. I believed the refs had it out for the Schultz brothers and were looking for a way to get me out of the tournament. I had to do
something
. So I decided to shoot on Rinke’s legs and let him take me down, which also would serve the effect of killing most of the remaining time. So I shot in without first setting up. It was a terrible shot. I barely touched his leg.

Rinke sprawled and locked his arms around my body in a front body lock. I was waiting for him to spin behind, but our positioning caused me to change my mind. I had a move in my repertoire that had been unstoppable, a “duck scoop.” Instead of playing defensively, I decided to attack. I knew I could score with the duck scoop and that would give me even more time to stall if I needed to give away another takedown.

I tripoded up onto all fours with my head down. Rinke held on to his body lock just long enough for me to feel an opening. I exploded, throwing my head up and my hips down as hard as I could. At that exact moment, Rinke felt the attack and let go of his grip. But it was too late. I spun behind him in half a second: 5–3; time ran out; I won despite the confusion.

I then won an uneventful match, 16–5, against a wrestler from New Zealand to advance to the gold-medal match.

—

D
ave’s gold-medal match was the night before mine, against Martin Knosp, the 1981 World Champion who had defeated Lee Kemp in the last Worlds.

The refs were keeping a close eye for the Schultz front headlock, and the special off-the-mat judge had warned Dave three times in his previous match for holds around his opponent’s neck. His opponent was warned once for the same thing, so it was that kind of match.

Every time Dave locked up Knosp in a headlock, the ref broke it up. One time, the ref stepped in and broke up a headlock by Dave and Knosp fell to his back as if he were choking, trying to draw a penalty against Dave. It didn’t work.

With Dave having to wrestle without one of his best weapons, he broke a 1–1 tie with 1:37 remaining with a single point and then added two more scores, including a takedown with ten seconds left for a 4–1 win.

I watched Dave win, but I wasn’t able to enjoy his gold-medal victory. I had too much pressure on my shoulders, and all I could afford to do with my final match the next day was focus on what I had to do to avoid losing.

My last opponent was Hideyuki Nagashima from Japan, who advanced out of Group A. I had watched him in one match and, honestly, wasn’t impressed. With the Turk, me, and Rinke, the top three wrestlers all had drawn into Group B. I knew if I could just keep my head together for one final match, I could take home the gold.

Right on the first whistle, I shot Nagashima and caught him
in the face with an accidental head-butt. Three seconds in, he took a brief timeout to recover. Before the match, I had decided which techniques I would use against Nagashima. A football forearm shiver to a high-crotch followed by an inside leg trip took him down, and then a gut wrench gave me a quick 4–0 lead.

Nagashima put me in a tough spot only once, when he attempted a headlock that slipped off. Other than that, I controlled the entire match, which wasn’t an entire match. A minute and fifty-nine seconds into the first round, the match ended on technical superiority with me leading 13–0.

Backflip!

I was a little winded as the ref raised my hand in victory. We didn’t even wrestle two minutes, but I had scored eight points in twenty-six seconds on a flurry of moves. I was not, however, too tired for my trademark backflip. After the ref raised my hand, I pumped my fist one time to the American partisan crowd, embraced Nagashima, and shook hands with his coaches, I walked over to my corner and did another backflip. Why not? An Olympic gold medal has to be worth two flips, doesn’t it?

With my victory, Dave and I became the first brothers in US wrestling history to win Olympic gold medals. But only because Lou Banach won gold one match after mine. Like Dave, his brother Ed had won gold the previous day.

I wish I could say I was overjoyed to win. But that wouldn’t be accurate. The TV broadcast of that match is on YouTube, and when I have watched it, I’ve noticed that I never smiled before TV broke away for commercial. The strongest emotion I felt was relief. Not exactly a gold-medal moment athletes dream of, but the weight of the world had just been lifted off me.

The medals ceremony was actually rather odd. What separates the gold medalist from the winners of silver and bronze is that only the gold medalist hears his national anthem played. In college, I would get emotional hearing the anthem when it was played before matches. I used that emotion as a way to get psyched up. With my low max VO2, I had to find ways to create adrenaline, and anything I could use to create more emotion was a tool I needed in my belt. But at the Olympics, hearing the anthem after I was finished wrestling was completely different from my routine. As the anthem played, and the home crowd sang along, and the Stars and Stripes was raised in the arena, I didn’t know what to feel.

I first realized the significance of that last match in a bathroom, of all places. Just as in the moments after winning the 1978 California state championship, I retreated to a bathroom to have a few minutes alone. My path to gold in the Olympic tournament was different, not to mention more interesting, than other wrestlers’ because of the disqualification and being forced to come back from an early loss. I don’t know if this is still the case, but I was told that I was one of only two men in Olympic wrestling history to lose a match and still win gold.

When I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I saw the recipient of a miracle. There had been the disqualification and the controversy surrounding that match, followed by the close scrutiny Dave and I were under in the rest of our matches. Then it had taken everything I could call up from within myself physically and mentally to defeat Chris Rinke. He was gunning for me hard.

Then there were the comparisons to Dave. I knew before the tournament, as did many others, that he was going to win gold.
Dave was the only reigning World Champion at the Games, and he was very good in 1984. No one in the world, whether he had come to Los Angeles or not, could have beaten him that year.

But I didn’t think that Dave believed I was going to win. I didn’t know if I was going to win, either. That had been an inconsistent year for me. Sometimes the great Mark Schultz would show up, sometimes the lousy one would. And on our sport’s biggest stage, carrying the overbearing burdens of the expectations of the once-every-four-years US wrestling audience, I had kept the lousy Mark Schultz from popping up from wherever he had been showing himself without warning.

Before leaving that bathroom, there was one thing I knew for sure: God had blessed me with a miracle.

Dave and I didn’t have a conversation that night about both of us winning. We knew each other so well, we were so in sync with each other, that neither of us needed to share our thoughts to know that the other was relieved to survive that tournament with a gold medal to show for his perseverance in the fight.

Now, I did have a celebration that night. Dave had his wife with him. I had my girlfriend with me, and Terry, a group of her friends, and I partied that night. We partied hard, too. If there were an Olympic gold medal for celebrating, we would have won it!

—

A
large group of US medalists went on a three-city tour with parades and parties, and Dave and I were included. I wouldn’t have gone without Dave, but the tour turned out to be a blast. There were no rules on the flights. We didn’t have to buckle our seat belts,
for one. On one takeoff, while the nose of the plane was higher than the tail, one athlete I didn’t know stood on a magazine at the front of the plane and “surfed” down the aisle. A volleyball player shook up a bottle of champagne and started spraying people. When he got me and Terry wet, I pushed him to the floor in fun.

At one parade, I rode in a car with gymnast Mary Lou Retton, who’d won five medals, including gold for the individual all-around. Mary Lou was really nice, and getting to meet her and spend a little bit of time with her was cool. As a former gymnast and as the winner of a wrestling gold medal, I had an appreciation for how amazingly she performed in winning five medals.

I want to say that parade was in Dallas. We were riding in the second convertible behind the first car with some city official. When we came to the point along the parade route where we were supposed to stop briefly, the city official got out of his car and walked back to ours. He didn’t say anything to Mary Lou or to me. Instead, he walked directly to Terry and said, “I’ve just got to ask who you are.” I’m telling you, Terry was good-looking enough to stop a parade.

Being a gold medalist afforded me the opportunity to meet other great athletes, such as gymnast Peter Vidmar and track star Edwin Moses. I also met then–New York City mayor Ed Koch.

My biggest thrill, however, came when President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, met with medalists at the Beverly Hills Hilton.

Bob DeProspero, a member of the Secret Service, had a son, Bobby, who had been a wrestler at Oklahoma while Dave and I were there. Mr. DeProspero was the head of security under Reagan, and when the athletes were lining up to meet the Reagans, Mr. DeProspero spotted Dave and me in the middle of the line and
shouted out, “Hey, Mark. Dave. Come on up here.” He motioned us through the velvet ropes to the front of the line.

“Mr. President,” he said, “these are the guys I was telling you about.”

That stunned me. Someone had told the president of the United States about us? Thanks to Mr. DeProspero, I was the first athlete to meet the president that day. We posed for photos, and I moved my head forward to give Mrs. Reagan a polite kiss on the cheek. She turned her head to the side at the same time and I kissed her right on the lips.

I started to walk away, not sure what someone was supposed to do after planting one on the lips of the First Lady. Then I guess my dad’s comedic influence kicked in and I turned back to face the Reagans.

“I’ll vote for you!” I said.

“Say it louder!” Mrs. Reagan responded with a smile.

—

O
lympic wrestling champions are given the official bracket sheet as a keepsake. I hung mine on a wall in my apartment. About a year later, I was looking at the bracket and reviewing the highlights of the tournament in my mind. That is when I realized for the first time that I would have lost the criteria tiebreaker to Rinke if I had allowed that final point instead of scoring on the duck scoop.

The fact that I had changed my mind in a split second and decided to attack instead of playing it safe made all the difference. At the time, with my misunderstanding of the situation in that match, it seemed like an almost insignificant decision. But it
changed my life forever. I would not have become an Olympic gold medalist if not for that one decision. It was the most important decision I’ve ever made, and I made it in the blink of an eye.

Sitting there in my apartment, almost getting lost in the realization of what the bracket was showing me, I began to picture who I was: someone who would try his hardest regardless of the outcome, who would go down doing his best.

I had become a fighter.

I
didn’t get into wrestling to win medals.

Dan Gable once said, “Gold medals aren’t really made of gold. They’re made of sweat, determination, and a hard-to-find alloy called guts.” Wrestling is not fun. I’ve heard countless wrestlers through the years talk about how much they enjoy the sport. Not me. I never felt that way when I wrestled. My philosophy was that if I was having fun, I wasn’t working hard enough.

For me, the sport provided the way for me to become a great fighter. I wanted to fight and defeat the best wrestlers in the world, and the medals served as proof that I was becoming the person I wanted to be.

The status that comes from earning an Olympic gold medal is unparalleled in wrestling, although the other medalists and I in ’84 had to deal with questions about the merits of our accomplishments. Sometimes the questions appeared to be a deliberate attempt to take some of the shine off our medals.

In wrestling, the United States won its first four Olympic medals ever in Greco-Roman. In freestyle, we won seven of the ten gold medals plus two silvers. The seven golds tied the record for most wrestling gold medalists from one country in a modern Olympics.

When Dan was asked about the boycott’s effect, he claimed that we still would have won at least four weight classes if the
Soviets and Bulgarians hadn’t stayed home. No doubt, we had a strong team that year. It’s just that we didn’t have an opportunity to prove how strong. I’ve often been asked how we would have fared against a full field at those Games, and I still struggle to come up with a good answer. I don’t really know how it would have turned out if the Russians and Bulgarians had participated, and we’ll never know.

I do know, though, that the boycotted Olympics resulted in a brighter spotlight than normal shining on the next World Championships because all the top wrestlers would be there.

Before that came the ’85 World Cup in Toledo, Ohio, which had been billed as featuring the best teams from each continent, except that South America was not represented. I beat Chris Rinke 10–0 in advancing to the finals against Vladimir Modosyan, a four-time Tbilisi champion. Modosyan was the toughest opponent I ever wrestled against. And the hairiest. His body was covered with so much hair that I called him “Hairy Guy.”

Modosyan beat me 9–1. Dave won his finals match, but the Soviets defeated us 7–3 for the team championship.

I received a plaque for placing second to Modosyan. Leaving the University of Toledo’s Centennial Hall, I held the plaque in my hand like a discus, spun once, and heaved it into the Ottawa River. I was wrestling with the Sunkist Kids club at the time, and the next week, club president Art Martori called and asked if I wanted a rematch with Modosyan. We met again during a dual in a mostly empty high school gym near Chicago, and I beat him 8–1.

—

T
he year 1985 was the best of my career. The loss to Modosyan was my only one that year.

I did come close to losing in an unusual situation at the US Open after my luggage got lost by the airline. Bobby Douglas, the Sunkist Kids coach whose book on takedowns I had memorized as a high school wrestler, gave me two options: wait for my gear, which I needed to cut weight in order to compete at 180.5 pounds, or take the twenty bucks he was offering me, go eat, and wrestle up a weight at 198. I didn’t know if my luggage would show up in time, so I opted to wrestle up even though I weighed 187.

My opponent in the finals was Bill Scherr, the runner-up the year before. I led Bill 4–2 with about thirty seconds remaining when I attempted a fireman’s carry. It was a stupid move to try at that point in the match, and he made me pay for my mistake, catching my arm and throwing me on my back to tie the score. Bill would have won on a criteria tiebreaker, so with fifteen seconds on the clock, I hit every move I could think of. As we were going out of bounds with five or six seconds left, I spun behind him for the winning point.

The much-anticipated World Championships, with every nation that boycotted the ’84 Olympics competing, were held October 1985 in Budapest, Hungary. I had been hearing for more than a year how we weren’t real Olympic champions because of the boycott. There was no special designation in the official list of champions to denote the boycott, but there were plenty of critics who had mentally placed asterisks beside some of our names. Mine included.

During the eleven-hour trip overseas, I prayed the plane would crash so I wouldn’t have to deal with the pressure. I prayed that more times than I care to admit on the way to big competitions.

I had doubts about my ability to win in Hungary. I knew I was
good enough and had solved the inconsistency that had been a concern leading up to the Olympics, but wrestling was so violent and there was so much pressure. Good wrestlers choked all the time, it seemed, and in my mind I could put together a list of wrestlers who had lost when they shouldn’t have. It was one of those scenarios where, going in, I hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.

Sometimes you do get what you hope for.

I defeated Bulgarian Alexander Nanev, a three-time runner-up in the World Championships, 10–5 in the finals. Earlier, I had beaten a Soviet, Aleksandr Tambovtsev, 1–0. With victories against the best wrestlers from the two best teams not to compete in Los Angeles, my Olympic gold medal shined brighter than ever.

I was one of two Americans to win in Hungary, with Scherr taking the 198 title. Dave was one of two Americans to place second, but his World Championship in ’83 and mine that year made us the only ’84 Olympic gold-medal winners to also be world champs. In addition, Dave and I became the only US brothers to win world and Olympic titles—a feat accomplished only by two other Soviet brother combinations.

Winning the ’85 world title silenced the critics who had been saying I was not good enough to win at an Olympics with the Russians and Bulgarians. It partially silenced the critic within me, too.

—

I
was on a real high when Dave and I returned from Hungary to our jobs at Stanford. My first day back in the Stanford wrestling room, the entire team clapped and cheered for me. Finally, Chris
Horpel could no longer remind me that my brother was a world champ and I wasn’t.

That first day, Chris called me into his office. He didn’t congratulate me on my new title. He didn’t apologize for treating me as lesser than Dave. He didn’t promote me or give me a raise from my ten-thousand-dollar-a-year salary after two years of working for him.

He fired me.

There went the great day I was enjoying.

I sat there stunned. Confused.
Pissed
.

Was Chris jealous? Was he trying to prove his authority over me?

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know what to say other than, “Okay, fine.”

“You can work out here,” he told me, “but I can’t pay you.”

I got out of my chair and turned to leave his office. As I reached his door, he added, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to need the keys to the car back.”

Brad Hightower was one of the Stanford wrestlers I had taken under my wing. His dad owned a car dealership and wanted to express his appreciation by giving me a badly needed Toyota Tercel. In order to write the car off, though, he had to donate it to a charity and officially designated the car as a gift to the Stanford wrestling program. The car wasn’t legally mine, but it was given for me to use.

Chris gave the car to Dave’s wife. She wasn’t a Stanford employee, but he gave the keys to Dave to give to Nancy. That created a weird dynamic because Dave, Nancy, and I were renting rooms in our dad’s home. We were all under the same roof, and I had to
look out the windows every day and see Dave’s wife getting in and out of “my” car.

That sucked.

The only reason Horpel gave me for firing me was that he couldn’t afford me. I wasn’t a yes-man. Dave wasn’t, either, but he had the ability, which I never developed, to express himself while staying within the lines. Maybe that was a factor. I don’t know. But after I was let go, Horpel gave my salary to Dave, doubling his pay to twenty thousand dollars per year. So much for the affordability reason.

Dave got my money, and his wife got my car.

I felt betrayed by my own brother. I never asked him about it, but he had to have known I was going to get fired. That’s not the kind of thing that happens without someone in Dave’s position being made aware of the plans. Dave must have consented to my being fired, even if reluctantly. But for a decision that major, how could he have kept it from his brother?

Our situations were different. Dave had a wife and son, Alexander, by that point. He needed more money than I did, and I was pretty desperate for money. USA Wrestling sure wasn’t helping us.

My firing cut one of the cords between Dave and me. It stung badly. I thought he and Horpel were against me. I felt isolated and alone. I got real serious and became sensitive and oppositional to everyone around me. Anyone who had an opinion to share with me didn’t need to waste his time, because I didn’t care.

Dave and I continued to practice against each other in the room, and I got cutthroat with him. I was ready to fight him every time we stepped onto the mat. I targeted his crotch. That’s the opponent’s center of gravity and a man’s most vulnerable area. Once I started attacking his crotch, I began taking Dave down at will.
Horpel seemed surprised at how easily I was taking Dave down. Going after Dave’s crotch made me a better wrestler because in attacking the crotch I realized how I was getting my hips directly under his center of gravity instead of off to one side. That gave me an awareness regarding my center of gravity that I put to use against everyone I wrestled after that.

Despite everything that happened with my firing, I still loved Dave. He still was my brother, and nothing was going to come between us. I couldn’t forget all he had done in helping me develop into the man I had become. But my getting fired, and assuming Dave at least knew what was happening, changed me. I became more independent from Dave. I quit looking to him to be my leader.

•

To replace my lost income, I took time off from training to put together a bunch of wrestling clinics. I had a directory of high school wrestling coaches, and I would pick out a particular area and call coaches in that area to book clinics. Luckily, I was one of only two reigning World Champions in the United States. Wrestlers may not have received much publicity outside of Olympic years, but inside our sport, my name meant something. I could tell as soon as I identified myself if a coach would invite me to put on a clinic based on how he reacted to my name.

I needed a car, though, to drive to my clinics and contacted Brad Hightower’s father. He sold me a light blue 1982 Camaro Berlinetta (with a cruise control that didn’t work well) for seven thousand dollars. That wiped out my savings. My “Victory Tour”—that’s what I called my clinics—and my Berlinetta took me to different parts of the country.

The clinics brought in twenty-four thousand dollars in three months. It would have taken me more than two years to make that much at Stanford. But putting on clinics was hard. The travel became a grind. More important, the 1986 US Open and World trials were coming up, and I needed a stable training environment to begin preparing for those.

I started looking for coaching jobs, and Marlin Grahn offered me a position at Portland State University. Marlin had defeated me at the 1979 Far West Open, while I was at UCLA, and we became friends for life. Marlin said he could pay me fifteen thousand dollars. But there weren’t many good workout partners there, and I turned down his offer.

Chris Horpel did wonderful things for me. His help while I was in high school was instrumental in my becoming a successful wrestler. But his firing me at Stanford felt like a betrayal. He has made attempts to discuss it since, but I haven’t wanted to talk to him about it. He knows what he did, and I don’t see any need to relive it.

There hasn’t been anyone in my life who has helped me
and
hurt me as much as Chris did.

—

I
won the 1986 US Open, defeating Mike Sheets 8–6 with four gut wrenches in the finals. Sheets had won at 180.5 the previous year when I wrestled up a weight. After the tournament, my frustration over having to compete while living in near poverty boiled over. I found Gary Kurdelmeier, USA Wrestling’s executive director, and got in his face.

“You need to change the meaning of the word
amateur
so we can
make money and keep our amateur status like other sports,” I told him. We would watch athletes in other sports receive media attention and secure endorsement deals because their sports promoted and marketed them. Their sports not only allowed them to make money off their success and retain their amateur status to compete in the Olympics, but they also put them in position to do so. Those other sports seemed to genuinely care about their athletes.

“No one can stop you,” I told Kurdelmeier. “You are a monopoly in the US.”

Kurdelmeier disagreed, and I was close to doing something that would have gotten me in trouble when my former OU teammate Dan Chaid grabbed me and dragged me away.

I was sick of it. Some athletes decided to cash in after they won an Olympic gold medal. That’s not a criticism. They could choose their path, and more power to them. For my part, I wanted to keep competing.

They gave some wrestlers small stipends that didn’t come remotely close to covering financial needs. They were more like a small amount for administrators to give up in exchange for being able to say they were helping us financially. With as little as they were sending us, they could not claim they were doing
all
they could to help us financially.

I couldn’t tell you what kind of money USA Wrestling brought in, but I do know that they were hosting hundreds of tournaments each year and made a lot of money off entry fees. And before you could enter a tournament, you had to purchase a twenty-five-dollar membership card. But little of what USA Wrestling made went to the wrestlers. I remember that in 1983, when I placed seventh at the World Championships, US wrestlers who placed in the top
seven received $1,500. Dave won the World Championship that year, and I think he received $5,000. I don’t know if the money came from an Olympic development fund, from USA Wrestling, or from the United States Olympic Committee through USA Wrestling. My $1,500 didn’t make much of a dent in my living expenses. Whatever USA Wrestling brought in, it seemed like barely any of it went to the wrestlers and it certainly didn’t help my financial situation.