Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold (15 page)

Judging from what I could hear on John’s side of the conversation, it sounded like a phone call that Spitz wasn’t too thrilled about receiving. Du Pont gave me the phone at one point to have me talk to Spitz. Mark said practically nothing to me, as if he was wondering why John had handed the phone to me.

I think the primary purpose of the call was for du Pont to show off to me.

After the call, John wanted to talk wrestling.

“Do you want to be the head coach at Villanova?” John asked.

I told him I didn’t, and I’m pretty sure he knew that before he asked. There’s no way I would have taken Chuck’s job after watching John’s meddlesome ways. Plus, Chuck was the head coach.

“I don’t think Chuck can be the coach,” John said.

Honestly, as someone who liked Chuck, I have to say that du Pont should not have hired him as head coach. He was a high school coach. Chuck, who was thirty, would have made an excellent administrator, but he didn’t have the credentials to be a Division I coach.

I’ve always speculated that was why du Pont hired him as Villanova’s first coach. He wanted someone in the top job whom he could control. John wanted to be the head coach, but he didn’t want to have to do all the head coach’s work. John didn’t want to have to be there every day scheduling practices and working the mats and doing all the tedious work required to run a program. He had no interest in learning the NCAA rules regarding recruiting.
I couldn’t have pointed to one part of a typical Division I coach’s job description that du Pont could have carried out. I mean, he couldn’t even grasp the simple concept of dividing and offering scholarships. But he wanted to be treated like the head coach and, probably more important, to feel that he was the head coach. In a media interview the previous fall, John had referred to himself as the head coach.

From his hospital bed, du Pont told me that he would be leaving town soon and that when he returned, he wanted Chuck gone and that I was the one to fire him.

I should have told John I wouldn’t do it. I should have left with Chuck.

I can’t remember how I told Chuck he was fired. I’m glad I can’t remember because it pains me enough more than two decades later to know that I did fire him. I wish I could erase that awful moment from my life. I should have made John do his own dirty work. I don’t even think he would have had the guts to do it. He was so weak that he would latch on to strong personalities and hide behind them, using them to get done what he wanted done.

The university’s handling of Chuck’s departure was telling. A school spokesman told reporters that the wrestling coaches understood all along that although Yarnall held the title of head coach, du Pont would function as the team’s head coach. What a bunch of bull. I never had that understanding, or I wouldn’t have gone to Villanova in the first place.

The school’s athletic director, Ted Aceto, said in a released statement, “Du Pont is and always has been our head wrestling coach. Chuck Yarnall’s title had been co–head coach. John du Pont will continue as our head wrestling coach.”

It appeared that something fishy was going on behind the scenes, as that was all breaking news to me.

—

I
felt trapped at Villanova for two reasons: I needed the money, and the 1987 World Championships were just a few months away and I couldn’t disrupt my training. I wouldn’t have been able to find workout partners as I had there.

But beyond then, I saw little to be optimistic about.

I couldn’t count on USA Wrestling for support and would have to be a college coach to keep training and competing. But wrestling jobs were growing increasingly scarce. Title IX was signed into law in 1972 to end sex discrimination in education. In athletics, that meant leveling the playing field for men and women so that both genders would have equal opportunities.

I assume the hope behind Title IX was to increase the number of opportunities for women up to the level men enjoyed. However, the way it played out more often than not was that the funding and opportunities for men decreased. In some cases, greatly decreased. Wrestling, with much higher participation among men than women at all levels of the sport, was one of the hardest-hit sports at the collegiate level.

Wrestling programs across the country were being swept out to help meet the requirements of Title IX. Fewer programs meant fewer jobs. Fewer jobs meant more coaches holding on to the jobs they were fortunate enough to hold. I was a twenty-six-year-old assistant coach, and there were too many older, experienced, former head coaches looking for jobs.

When I had come to tight spots in my life, I would look to
joining the military as an option. I considered that again. The military had a special wrestling team, and if you were a good enough wrestler, you could fulfill your duties by representing the military in wrestling competitions. But the military had never become a plan A because of my memories growing up, watching Vietnam vets come home. They were wounded and disabled, yet our own American citizens were calling them “baby killers” and the government seemed to be neglecting them.

The thought came to me that I could leave Villanova, pick a school I liked, move to be near that school, and then go on welfare. Based on the way I had been raised, that wasn’t an option I would seriously consider.

I was stuck, and with all pretense removed in the wave of Chuck’s departure, John was free to be the official and undisputed head coach of Villanova wrestling.

But he couldn’t run the program. I couldn’t, either, because he was constantly in my office, drunk, telling those stupid, pointless stories. I think it was more important to John that I humored him than that I tried to make the program successful.

We traveled together for the last few matches of the season. He would have delirium tremens, and I would sit there and look at that miserable wretch I was with and think,
I can’t wait for this season to end. This is my last year at Villanova.

John had to have sensed my frustration. How could he not have? Toward the end of my first year, he asked if I wanted to bring in a workout partner. I knew the perfect guy: Dan Chaid. Dan had been a high school wrestler in California whom Dave and I had gotten to know and help train. Dan was an eighth-grader my junior year and was in the stands when Dave won the state
championship as a senior. Dan wound up winning two state championships of his own.

Dan followed us to Oklahoma to wrestle, where he was a four-time All-American and won the 1985 NCAAs at 190 pounds. He had worked one year as an assistant at Arizona State when John hired him and provided him housing. Dan was made an assistant coach whose job description basically consisted of two things: coming to practices and training with me.

—

I
n going to Villanova, I had been made a part of du Pont’s Team Foxcatcher. Du Pont had established his team, named for his father’s Foxcatcher Farm stable of Thoroughbred racehorses, to financially support athletes in swimming, modern pentathlon, and triathlon. He decided to add wrestling, and I was the second wrestler to join behind Rob Calabrese. Everything about the name Foxcatcher and being a part of the team had felt wrong in my gut.

After I came aboard, John quickly began adding to his team more world-class wrestlers who had been struggling to get by on shoestring budgets.

Dave joined du Pont’s club after the 1986 Worlds and while he was coaching at Wisconsin. Du Pont paid Dave to be a Foxcatcher wrestler and assistant coach to go along with the salary Dave was drawing from Wisconsin. Knowing that Dave had no intention of leaving Wisconsin, I didn’t see any need to warn him about joining Foxcatcher. At that point, John was paying Dave what amounted to a second salary. But wanting to prevent a repeat of the mess at Stanford, I negotiated a deal with John by which he would never pay one of us an amount different from the other’s or
give one of us a lesser title than the other’s. That turned out to be a shrewd move on my part.

Without telling the Foxcatcher wrestlers, du Pont scheduled a dual meet against the Bulgarian national team. I think he scheduled the meet to screw with me, because I would have to wrestle again against Alexander Nanev, whom I could count on running into in the bracket of just about every World Championships. I believed I held an edge over Nanev and wrestling him with another Worlds coming up could benefit only him. Videotape was becoming more popular at the time, and I didn’t want to have a match with him on tape that he could study to try to close the gap between us.

John insisted that I wrestle Nanev, and I repeatedly told him I didn’t want to. I didn’t wrestle in dual meets after college except the one opportunity I had to get revenge on Vladimir Modosyan in Chicago. But Dave agreed to participate in the Bulgarian dual, and that trapped me into having to wrestle, too.

I don’t talk about competitions or opponents beforehand. Once that dual was in place, though, du Pont wouldn’t shut up about it. Every other sentence out of his mouth was, “The Bulgarians are coming!” It bothered me, and he knew it. I tried to avoid John even more than usual, spending as much time alone in my apartment as I could.

The day of the dual, Calabrese and I crashed our cars into each other’s on the way to the gym. We were messing around driving in circles to get our minds off the dual. I was preoccupied with the rage I felt over John’s trapping me into wrestling against Nanev, and we had a fender bender. Rob got mad at me, and that incident about finished me off mentally for the dual.

I lost to Nanev 1–0 in a next-to-nothing match. I didn’t try to win. I didn’t care to show him anything in a stupid dual that amounted to no more than an exhibition, especially with Worlds coming up.

The match most fans wanted to see was Valentin Jordanov, who had won two of his six World Championships at that point, against Ed Giese at 114.5 pounds. By the time Giese’s career had wrapped up, he had placed twelve times at Nationals in freestyle and Greco-Roman, and had been a five-time finalist for the US World Team. Jordanov defeated Giese.

That dual marked the start of a friendship between Dave and Jordanov.

Du Pont kept badgering me to let him sit in my corner during my competitions, but I kept telling him no. I let Chris Horpel sit in my corner at big tournaments after he fired me, with no choice but to forgive him as I’d had to forgive everyone so I wouldn’t have to carry that extra burden. Chris was a good coach, and it helped me to have him there. But du Pont—forget about it. He had nothing to contribute. He just wanted to be seen in my corner and then take credit later for anything I won.

John hired a camera crew to shoot video of him at the 1987 World Championships in Clermont-Ferrand, France. John was having a documentary made about himself called
Quest for the Best
, which later aired on the Discovery Channel. Everywhere John went at Worlds, his camera guys followed him.

Later, after we had returned to the States, John flew some of us with him to South Carolina, where he fired the starting gun for a triathlon. His film crew was trailing him there, too. They wanted video of me talking about what a great leader John was. I tried to
put them off, but they kept coming back to me. They must have really wanted that sound bite, because they were persistent in asking. I found a way to meet both of our desires. I got drunk and then told them du Pont was great, blah, blah, blah. I was so drunk that they couldn’t use the footage in the final product.

In one of my early matches in France, I went up against West German Reiner Trik, who had placed fourth at the ’84 Olympics. I had the lead, and he shot on my legs. I grabbed a double wristlock, the same move with which I had broken the Turk’s arm in the Olympics. I didn’t hurt Trik, but the refs must not have liked my making that move, because with about ten seconds left in the match, they cautioned me for stalling.

That loss put me in a spot where the only way I could advance to the finals would be to pin, caution out, or shut out the defending World Champion, Vladimir Modosyan of the Soviet Union.

I went outside the arena to just get away, and one of John’s cameramen came out and handed me a beer. I had never consumed alcohol during a tournament, but I drank that beer. I didn’t think it would matter, because if Modosyan simply scored a point against me, I wouldn’t wrestle for the championship.

Bruce Baumgartner walked up to me.

“You can do it,” he said.

“No, I can’t,” I told him.

“Oh, yeah,” Bruce said. “I forgot about the power of negative reinforcement.”

The first period against Modosyan was scoreless. In the second period, I took him down with about a minute left for a 1–0 lead. That was the only point of the match. I couldn’t believe that I had shut out Modosyan.

I advanced to face Nanev for the second time in a Worlds finals match and beat him 2–1 to win my second World Championship. Lee Kemp had won three World Championships from 1978 to 1982, and with my two world titles and my Olympic gold, I tied Lee for the most wrestling world titles won by an American. We even received an entry in the
Guinness Book of World Records
for our feats.

After winning Worlds, I had to take the required drug test. The testers told me I could drink beer, water, or soda if that would help me produce a urine sample. I asked for beer. Then Ri Jae-sik, the 105-pound champion from North Korea, came into the room to take his drug test. He asked for a beer, too. We kept drinking beers and got hammered.

Neither had any idea what the other was saying in our native languages, but that didn’t stop us from laughing our asses off. When the testers asked if we were ready to pee into the cup, we both said no so we could drink more beer. I had to pee badly, but I wasn’t going to cut off the supply of free beer. Finally, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I filled up three cups with pee running over onto my hand, and I spilled my first cup on one of the testers. Good thing I had filled those other two cups.

•

Immediately after we returned from my becoming the first American wrestler to win the Olympics and two World Championships, John wanted to make a Team Foxcatcher poster with me, Foxcatcher’s first World Champion, as the poster boy. John wanted to send a poster to every college program in the country as evidence that his team was on the wrestling-world map and had to be
contended with. I took part in a photo shoot with me acting as if I had just won the title, wearing Team Foxcatcher’s red-and-white singlet with yellow trim, oil on my body to make me appear sweaty, head down, index fingers raised, with a large American flag behind me.