Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold (16 page)

Emblazoned right beneath my red wrestling shoes, on one of the white stripes of the flag, in all caps, were the words TEAM FOXCATCHER. I’d bet that was John’s favorite part of the poster. I had a mixed reaction when I first saw the poster. It was quite a compliment to have such a huge poster made of me, and I liked the way I looked. On the other hand, I loathed seeing TEAM FOXCATCHER under me and on my singlet. I resented being portrayed as giving credit to the team, and thus John, for my accomplishment, because that was exactly what John was trying to buy.

Du Pont was taking credit for my success while at the same time trying to ruin my
career.

J
ohn du Pont was a collector. When he was younger, he had collected seashells, birds, and bird eggs and stored them upstairs in the mansion. It wasn’t just any collection—he had traveled to the Philippines, Samoa, the Fiji islands, and Australia, among other places, accumulating hundreds of thousands of seashells and more than forty thousand specimens of birds.

He took me once to view his collection at the Delaware Museum of Natural History, which he had paid to build. When du Pont’s father died in 1965, John received his family inheritance, reported to be in the range of $50 million to $80 million. With that money, he was able to fulfill his long-held plans to build the museum, which opened in 1972, to display his collection.

I experienced a strange mix of emotions being there with John.

On one hand I felt sick because the building was filled with dead animals he had collected, stuffed, labeled, and stored. On the other hand, I felt bad for him because that collection obviously had been a huge part of his life. That museum was one of John’s most sacred places, and although I thought his primary reason for taking me there was to impress me, I did appreciate John’s revealing a part of himself that he hadn’t showed me before.

I was more saddened than impressed. That trip to the museum was a window into John’s soul, and it didn’t seem filled with
philanthropy, kindness, and generosity. Instead, his soul seemed dark, small, and cramped.

There had been many things in my life I had not had the money to buy, but I had learned that you didn’t need currency to find confidence, happiness, loyalty, brotherhood . . . and love. Du Pont had none of those. He had the money to buy just about any material possession he could have wanted, but despite his best efforts, he had failed to obtain the things he yearned for the most. And he had made himself morally bankrupt in trying.

That all the animals in his museum were dead and stuffed made perfect sense to me. He didn’t have to feed them, he didn’t have to maintain them. All he had to do was collect them. He killed them, owned them, controlled them, and hung them on walls for other people to admire.

Now, I realized, he was collecting wrestlers. We were his newest trophies. We had become his objects to control with his ancestors’ money, and we were more fun to play with than his seashells and birds because we were collectables that he could manipulate. If you didn’t want to be displayed on his wall, he threatened to ruin you.

•

I discovered during the ’87 Worlds that the conditions for me at Villanova were about to sink even lower. I heard that du Pont had offered Andre Metzger, my and Dave’s teammate at Oklahoma, a coaching job and that Andre had accepted.

Andre placed third at Worlds at 149.5 pounds. He had permitted John to sit in his corner during his matches, and John’s camera crew was there to record every second of it.

I felt as if Dave, Andre, and I were brothers at OU. We’d had our picture on the front page of the newspaper the year all three of us won NCAA championships. But when du Pont hired Andre, that proved to be the beginning of the end for me at Villanova.

John had already suspiciously rejected my recommendation for a hire. He wanted a coach for the middleweights, and I told him about Bill Nugent, the Outstanding Wrestler at the 1985 US Open at 149.5 pounds. Bill was coaching a clinic in Pennsylvania, and I suggested he come to Villanova to meet John.

I introduced Bill to John as “the best middleweight in the nation last year.”

Normally, I would bring a recruit over to John’s house and he would offer the kid the world. Not only did he not offer Bill anything, but when Bill left, du Pont told me, “Never make a recommendation to me again.” Looking back, I suspect John didn’t like the fact that Bill and I were friends, because I later came to the realization that John wanted someone in place whom he could use against me.

After Worlds, I asked John for a five-thousand-dollar raise. He turned me down. With Andre also on staff, I sensed John had worked himself into a position where he didn’t have to have me around anymore. “Now I’ve got two foxes in the henhouse,” John boasted to me.

I had been the coach with all the wrestling skins, but Andre sported a solid résumé. Ever the manipulator, John could use Andre as leverage against me. He could run me out of there with a moment’s notice and still have a big-name assistant to attract recruits
and
give him credibility in the wrestling community.

Du Pont did wind up giving me a raise going into my second
year, but when he wanted to give one to me, instead of when I had asked for it. In other words, on his terms.

He bumped my salary up to thirty thousand dollars, although he changed how he paid me. The first year, he paid my full salary up front. The second year, he paid the coaches in thirds. I assumed he thought that as long as we had money still coming instead of having already received the full amount, he could better keep control over us.

Actually, John didn’t pay me directly. I had a contract that paid me one dollar per year so I could receive insurance coverage through the university. The rest of the money from John was routed through a trust fund at USA Wrestling. My accountant checked with USA Wrestling and was told the money would be considered a scholarship and, thus, tax exempt. USA Wrestling later dropped the trust fund program, though, and said that what they had told my accountant was incorrect. I ended up having to pay more than six thousand dollars in back taxes and penalties to the IRS.

Our second season was the first for which we had been able to put in a full recruiting effort. We were able to attract some good talent. Most of the recruits had been state champions in high school. But the program was in such disarray that we weren’t going to win no matter who we signed.

Other than du Pont’s presence, the lack of a devoted wrestling room was the biggest hurdle we were unable to overcome. By that, I mean a wrestling room on campus that had ceilings higher than a shooting range’s.

“Soon” never materialized.

But then again, “soon” always came from the lips of the guy
who also said he wouldn’t be around except to drop in and see if we needed anything.

I got so fed up with not knowing where I stood that I wrote up a proposal for the program with rules, job descriptions, and a chain of command. I took my proposal to John and asked him to read it, make any changes he wanted, and sign it. He refused. If we had established any structure, he couldn’t have been the dictator.

As if the writing on the wall wasn’t enough of a message when Andre came aboard, the letterheads he had printed spelled out clearly what was going on. Stacks of letterheads were delivered to our office, and John’s name was at the very top with the title of head coach. Andre’s was right below John’s name as assistant coach. Down at the very bottom of the page were the other assistant coaches—Chaid, Calabrese, Glenn Goodman, Bill Hyman, and me. My phone number was the one listed. In other words, if there was anything that needed to be done, call me, but John and Andre were the marquee names.

“Did you approve this?” I asked John.

“No, I didn’t,” he answered.

Then when the guy from the printer came in to collect for the job, du Pont said he wasn’t going to pay him and the two got into an argument that ended only when the guy got flustered and walked out.

John smiled when he left. Here was this multimillionaire acting as if he had won some big victory by not paying for stationery.

It wasn’t about the money with John, even though that’s what people focused on with him. For John, it was about control, and his money gave him control over others.

I made a deal with du Pont to let me run a wrestling camp at Villanova. Many college coaches today put on camps, and often they have permission to run camps written into their contracts. Camps provide a variety of benefits. They promote your program, they’re a good way to teach your sport to younger athletes, they’re good community relations, and they bring in extra income that can be used to supplement a coach’s salary or be placed right back into the program for scholarships or equipment.

John hooked me up with someone who he said could put together a camp brochure that would be mailed out to every high school coach and wrestler in Pennsylvania. The guy came into the office and he was disheveled, unshaven, and overweight, and his eyes aimed in different directions. The brochures came out fine, though. Somehow.

Calabrese, Hyman, and a couple of other friends helped as camp instructors, and we drew about eighty kids. Not bad for a camp’s first year. We made $8,000 in that one week. A week later, du Pont asked me, “What are we going to do about the cost of the brochures?”

Turned out his guy had charged $7,500. I wound up splitting the cost with du Pont and when all was said and done, we netted only about half of the $8,000.

Another time, I bought a few office supplies at the student union. They were on my desk when John found out I had made the purchases, and he picked up a paper clip and looked at it long enough for me to stop what I was doing and look at him.

“Do you know how much this cost?” he asked. “This cost a nickel. You know how much a nickel is?”

He made a big freaking deal out of a nickel, and then he took
some of us on a Learjet to fly off to South Carolina so he could fire the starting gun for that triathlon. Then we got back into the jet and flew home.

Du Pont would drop thousands, tens of thousands, of dollars in a heartbeat if it would bring him attention, and then he would turn around and nickel-and-dime us just to remind us we were dependent upon him.

He provided us with meal tickets to eat at a cafeteria across from the field house. Then one day he decided to take them away, no explanation given. The upside, though, was that if he didn’t know we would be eating at the cafeteria, he couldn’t join us for lunch.

His table manners were horrendous. He would talk with his mouth wide-open as he ate, as though there was nothing in his mouth. Once, I got stuck sitting directly across from him and he was spraying food and spit all over the table, my food, and my clothes. It was so disgusting that I couldn’t touch my food. I got up and left right in the middle of the meal.

—

D
u Pont’s meddling carried over to the mat. At one dual meet, he sat next to me on the bench. I was shouting moves to one of our wrestlers and John started arguing with me right there in the corner about which moves our guy should be doing and what I should be telling him to do. I looked over at him and let my eyes tell him,
You’re an idiot.

Nothing good happened when du Pont was around.

He came to a practice on his farm dressed as a cop and started waving a gun around. The wrestlers scattered. I just stood there
and looked at him. He was trying to act like a big man. Nobody thought du Pont would shoot, much less kill, another person. Why would anyone with his money, power, and influence risk losing all that to live in a prison cell? John was unstable, but he was not insane.

What was more disturbing was the wrestling move he claimed to have created. He called it the “Foxcatcher Five.” Basically, it was him grabbing someone’s balls with five fingers.

His idea came from a story I had told about a match I had in college against Don Shuler. Don and I wrestled five times, and he was the guy I had to beat in the finals of the Olympic trials to make the ’84 Olympic team. Don was one of the few guys to put me on my back in college, and I think he might have been the only person who didn’t lose to me in Oklahoma’s home arena.

The first time we wrestled was at home, and I was leading 4–0 in the third period. Don reversed me to my back and tried to pin me. He received two points for the reversal and had me on my back getting pinned. Holding an opponent on his back for two seconds was worth two points and three points were awarded for holding him for five seconds.

I was on my back scrambling like crazy trying to get Don off me because three points would have given him the win. He had me in a tight hold and I felt his groin press down hard on the palm of my hand, trapping my hand against the mat. I had to free my hand or lose. I squeezed Don’s balls for a fraction of a second. He yelled and popped off me like a champagne cork. I spun belly down. Don complained to the ref, but the ref hadn’t seen the quick squeeze and instructed him, “Keep wrestling.” The match ended in a 4–4 tie.

John had a tendency to not pay close attention to other people’s stories, but that one captured his attention. From that, John came up with his Foxcatcher Five. He was overly proud of his “move” and loved to tell people about it, even women. Whenever he would talk about it, he’d laugh and attempt to make a big joke out of it.

During my summer camp at Villanova, I was sitting on a stage and he came up to me and made a claw with one hand and said, “The Foxcatcher Fiiiiiive.” He moved his hand toward my balls. I stared at him like,
Touch me and you’re dead.
He didn’t touch me. But he did put his move on other Villanova coaches and wrestlers.

One wrestler came and told me about John grabbing him. He was nervous about telling me, saying half-jokingly, “Yeah, that Foxcatcher Five. John got me. Ha-ha.”

I should have reported John to the athletic director. That was another one of my “should haves” at Villanova. The sexual abuse scandal involving a Penn State football coach a few years ago has dramatically changed attitudes toward reporting and disciplining for such abuse. I don’t know what would have happened back then if I had told the athletic director. But if that incident had happened today, post–Penn State scandal, du Pont would have been disassociated with Villanova and his name taken off the buildings before the university president could have asked him, “You understand what I’m saying?”

That would have abruptly ended du Pont’s reign on campus. Who knows what else that might have stopped.

—

T
he clock started ticking the night of a party at my apartment.

We put together a group of female students called the Mat Cats. (Villanova’s nickname was the Wildcats.) It was common for wrestling programs, and other sports in colleges, to have a support group like that. Their basic function was to assist and cheer for the team. They kept score and stats during matches, helped with water, cheered, that type of stuff.