Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold (17 page)

We recruited seven of the most beautiful girls on campus, took them to the mall, and bought them blouses with a wildcat on the back, Armani shirts, nylons, shoes, socks, earrings, bracelets, perfume, and anything else that looked or smelled good on them. Recruits liked seeing spirit groups like the Mat Cats on their visits to various schools, so they also helped us with our recruiting.

I threw a party to celebrate someone’s birthday, my World Championship, the recruiting class we had brought in, and probably another thing or two I’ve forgotten about. Basically, we wanted to have a party. The Mat Cats were among the invited guests. Word got out about the party, and some of our wrestlers who were underage showed up. There was alcohol there, but I wasn’t going to kick out the underage ones who showed up.

It was just a regular college party. It wasn’t really a problem, but Metzger made it into one.

The next day, I walked into the Butler Annex with Dan. John and Andre were with the team, and Andre was telling the wrestlers they shouldn’t have gone to our party. While I listened, John kept looking at Dan and me with this goofy grin on his face.

John walked out, and Dan and I followed him. I grabbed John by the arm and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

John yelled at me, “You back me and I’ll back you!”

“That’s it!” Dan shouted back. “I’m out of here!”

Dan was on his way out when I grabbed him and John by the wrists and took them into a locker room and unloaded on John.

When I had finished, John looked at me and said, “I’m going to ruin your career.”

That was one time he would make good on his word.

Du Pont sent me to Oregon on a recruiting trip in December 1987. I spent Christmas at my mother’s house, and on Christmas Day, while we were opening presents, John called me.

“You’re fired,” he told me. “Don’t come back on campus because the police are looking for you.” Then he hung up. The police weren’t looking for me. He was just trying to scare me to keep me away for a while.

He didn’t give a reason for firing me and never gave me one after I got back to Philadelphia.

After I did return to Philadelphia following the holidays, I found out that du Pont had flown the team on a Learjet to wrestle in Puerto Rico. The trip was not on our schedule. The trip also, it was later reported, violated NCAA rules because the team did not wrestle enough times to comply with established rules for such trips. They wrestled only once in Puerto Rico. Basically, it was just a free minivacation for the team, and they wrestled one time so they could try to justify the trip.

Rob and Dan came to my apartment to tell me about the trip, and they said du Pont had wrestled against José Betancourt, who had competed on the Puerto Rican team at the ’84 Games. José let du Pont win. That got John to apparently feel all tough because he
ordered the Puerto Rican coach to pick up John’s bags and put them on his plane, as if the coach was his servant.

“I don’t care who you are,” the coach snapped at du Pont. “I’m going to kick your ass!”

That scared du Pont, and he ran to board the plane and told everyone else with the team to hurry up, too.

—

J
ohn wanted credit. He
needed
credit to make up for what he had failed to accomplish.

In 1987, he wrote a book titled
Off the Mat: Building Winners in Life
. I overheard him dictating some of it into a tape recorder. He was zonked out of his mind, drunk. It was a joke, and what he was dictating made no sense whatsoever. I heard he paid to have the book published and given free to college coaches around the country.

He asked me to write the foreword. I reluctantly wrote one but made sure not to give him credit for anything I had achieved. Years later, I read the foreword. My name was on it, but it wasn’t what I had written because it gave credit to John for my success.

I had never considered the possibility of someone creating awards to be presented to himself. Being around John gave me plenty of opportunities to see how he pulled it off.

He had me speak at one of his awards banquets. I wasn’t going to say anything that would make John look good, so I got up and talked about winning my Olympic gold medal and kept the subject focused on me rather than John. I tried to be as funny as I could about myself and had the room laughing.

I was followed to the podium by a guy I didn’t know who had been sitting next to John. Apparently, John had anticipated some
of what I would say and had hired this guy to come in and say things that contradicted my speech. I wanted to get up and punch the guy out when he said, “Winning a gold medal means nothing.”

One of the funniest stories about John’s “awards” involved the Citizen/Athletes Foundation he created. No one I knew of ever figured out what the Citizen/Athletes Foundation was created to accomplish. Other than a special night and award for John, of course.

I didn’t even like the name of the foundation. I wasn’t a citizen/athlete. I was all athlete!

Du Pont had pens, stationery, cuff links, shirts, ties, and pins made up with the foundation’s name on them. For the big banquet in Washington, DC, he hired a professional football player to deliver the keynote address.

The important people were given seats up front. The Villanova wrestlers and coaches sat at the back end of a narrow hallway. Technically, we weren’t even in the banquet room. But we could see the football player as he spoke, and it was comical listening to him move from story to story trying to make a point coordinated with a subject that had not been defined.

The player would have been just as effective if he had stood up there and read us the back of a cereal box. I wondered what was going through his mind, other than,
I just have to get through this to collect my check.
Not that it mattered anyway. The whole event was a ruse to give du Pont another of his own awards and boost his name in public.

After the football player, another guy got up to present du Pont with his award. I’ve never attempted this, but it must be difficult to, with a straight face, say good things about a man who was
receiving an award he had made up for the sole reason of giving it to himself. From the way the guy struggled with the presentation, it looked difficult.

When du Pont received the award, I didn’t clap. I just sat there and stared at the farce of a scene. Du Pont thanked a billion people no one had heard of and tried to sound like a wrestling expert.

At the end of his acceptance speech, he addressed us in the back of the room/hallway. He obviously had been drinking and paused several times to try to create drama. Then he blurted out, “Practice tomorrow at seven
A.M.
!” Of course, he wouldn’t be there. He would never get up that early for practice.

He walked around the room after the ceremony, stumbling often, going from one guest to another, sometimes accidentally spitting in their faces, so he could receive congratulations that were as fake as his latest award.

M
oving to Villanova was supposed to bring the stability I had been looking for since finishing my college career. But now I had lost my job, and being around du Pont was sapping my will to compete. Getting away from du Pont’s influence was my best bet to win gold at the Seoul Olympics, but I couldn’t for financial and training reasons. Things were going so badly for me that even a normally routine procedure to fix my eyesight went terribly wrong.

My nearsightedness had contributed to my loss at the 1986 World Championships because I was unable to see the scoreboard after FILA had changed its angle to the mat. I had thought about getting eye surgery to eliminate the problem. John had fired me but I still had health insurance, and I thought that would be a good time to have the surgery.

But the procedure didn’t fix the problem. I was still nearsighted and had slits in my eyes for nothing. I was taking painkillers for the severe pain. But I was having to think about my future at the same time, too. There was no chance of finding another college job that time of the year. Plus, the trials for the World Championships were a few months away. I was in great shape and probably more confident than I had ever been in my career. I couldn’t afford to let this opportunity slip.

Joining the military became an option again, but basic training would run through the trials and I didn’t think the military would let me skip out to compete in them. Yet my money wouldn’t last long enough that I could keep training without income.

I went over to John’s house. He was drunk and babbling incoherently, then started freaking out and yelling and screaming. I couldn’t tell what had him so upset, but he kept asking, “You understand what I’m saying?” “You understand what I’m saying?” “You understand what I’m saying?”

I told John that I didn’t care if I coached at Villanova anymore, I just wanted to keep working out with Dan Chaid. John said he would think about it, and I went back to my apartment.

John started calling me every day.

“You can stay,” he’d say. “But you have to move onto the farm if you do.”

That didn’t make sense. He had fired me from Villanova but wanted me to live on his farm? Rent-free?

He kept offering, though, and even told me that if I would trade in my Camaro, he would replace it with a Lincoln Grand Marquis. Financially, I had few options. Not having to pay rent would alleviate a big financial burden. So about three or four weeks after getting fired, I moved out of my apartment and into the chalet on his estate. John’s mother lived in the mansion and he lived in both the mansion and the chalet, but he spent more time in the mansion. I assumed—I hoped—he would stay in the mansion more when I moved into the chalet, but he didn’t.

The mansion was old and in need of repair. The chalet was new. In addition to the fortresslike steel blinds, it had a kitchen
with the most modern appliances available, a fully stocked bar and a nice piano in the living room, a Jacuzzi room, and bedrooms on opposite ends of the place. My bedroom was surprisingly small, and the mattress was too soft. It was like sleeping on a hammock. That’s fitting, because I never felt comfortable in the house. The chalet appeared much nicer, but my apartment was a significantly better place to live.

I moved in prepared to make a quick exit if necessary. Other than my clothes, I took little more than two bags of workout gear with me and a pin collection I had won after winning the ’87 Worlds, with pins from all the countries in the tournament. I rented a storage unit to hold the rest of my possessions, including all my medals and awards. I wasn’t going to consider his place my home, and I didn’t want John to see any of my awards because I didn’t want him looking at them and thinking he had helped me win even one of them.

The timeline is a little fuzzy for me all these years later, but after I had left Villanova and moved onto the farm, Metzger and du Pont had a falling out. Sometime during that period, I was talking on the phone with Hal Miles, a good friend who was head coach at Virginia State. I told Hal that du Pont should have started a freestyle program instead of an NCAA program because freestyle wouldn’t have required following NCAA rules.

I didn’t know until du Pont walked into my office after the call that he was listening to my end of the conversation.

“Should we drop the program?” John asked.

“Honestly,” I told him, “we shouldn’t have started it.”

“That’s it,” John said. “We’re dropping it.”

Metzger left the program in January or February. I was no longer part of the program and only went to Villanova to pick up wrestlers to work out with me in the wrestling room at the farm.

After the season, university officials announced the program was folding because of facilities, which meant the lack of a private wrestling room. I wasn’t around the university after being fired, so I have no knowledge of the university’s role in the closing of the program, but I do know that after du Pont overheard my phone call, he decided the program would be dropped.

The program needed to be put out of its misery. It was never a legitimate program. It was just du Pont and his money. Nothing more, nothing less.

Villanova’s administrators liked du Pont’s money and had been willing to tolerate him for his money. John wanted to have a wrestling team there, so they gave him an office and said he could have a team. But the program was doomed from the beginning because the administrators never gave us a wrestling room. If they were serious about having a wrestling program, they would have given us the Butler Annex. It would have been a minor concession considering the money John had donated to them. They didn’t really want wrestling on their campus, though. They didn’t really want du Pont on their campus, either. Who would? The guy was a disaster.

I get that it must be tough growing up rich, not knowing whether people like you because of your money or because of who you are. But it seemed like nobody at Villanova made any meaningful efforts to put any kind of controls or organization into the wrestling program. The program violated NCAA rules regarding recruiting. They left John alone and he took full advantage.

I felt bad for our wrestlers. I remembered what it was like my
freshman year at UCLA when there was turmoil in that program. The mess associated with Villanova’s wrestling program went far beyond what I experienced at UCLA. It had to be stressful for the wrestlers to go through all the crap in the program and then have their wrestling careers yanked out from under them.

I couldn’t remember our record, but I recently came across an old newspaper article that said the program won eight out of thirty matches in its two years of existence. I was surprised to read we had done that well.

We were able to bring some good wrestlers in for the second year. Tom Rogers placed third in conference our second season. Lyndon Campbell wrestled at Cal State Fullerton after Villanova’s program folded, and he qualified for the NCAAs three times there. But even with good wrestlers in place, the program was so bad it was a no-win situation. As far as I know, the rest of the wrestlers’ careers ended along with the program. Fortunately, they were able to stay at Villanova because the university honored their scholarships for up to four years.

With the Villanova program folded, John turned his attention to amateur wrestling. He made his first donation to USA Wrestling that year, for $100,000. He gave another $100,000 the following year. From 1989 through 1995, he donated $400,000 per year.

He became an at-large member of USA Wrestling’s board of directors. His name began appearing in the titles of the US freestyle national championship and World Team Trials. The team’s warm-up suits bore his name. In 1991, John was named USA Wrestling’s Man of the Year, with the picture of a smiling John appearing on the cover of
USA Wrestler
magazine.

If his goal was to buy access and power, he achieved it.

—

A
fter I moved onto the farm, one of my first orders of business was to do something about du Pont’s hair. He still had the same style as when I’d first met him—parted down the middle with long, gray roots beneath that Ronald McDonald red color.

I kept my head shaved and offered to give him a shave like mine. I offered not for his benefit, but mine. I don’t think he cared how he looked, and I just couldn’t look at that ugly hair any longer.

He agreed to let me cut his hair. I have to say, the new style didn’t look too bad. The shave improved his appearance significantly, but as long as he was on alcohol and drugs, he was always going to look like a bumbling fool.

John had undergone multiple knee surgeries, and in addition to being an alcoholic he was hooked on prescription medication. He would come to Villanova and blame his lack of balance on pain pills he took for the various injuries he had suffered, including both knees and his back. He blamed the knee braces he often wore for causing him to stumble. But he was both drunk and on pills. I don’t know exactly at what point this took place, because I didn’t see it until I moved to the farm, but cocaine became his preferred drug.

It sounds odd to say, but switching to cocaine was better for him. It was like the movie
Flight
with Denzel Washington, whose character would get drunk and they would sober him up by giving him cocaine. That’s the effect cocaine had on du Pont. After he had been on cocaine for a while, he became more coherent.

While I was living on the farm—and not while I was coaching at Villanova—John asked me if I knew where to get cocaine. I had done coke once or twice at parties before moving to Villanova when someone had given me some. (Coke was too expensive for me to buy.) I told John I knew a guy who had some, and John gave me fifteen hundred dollars to buy some for him. I picked some up, and we did coke two or three times together. The last time I did coke was in 1989. I took too much and my knees buckled and my heart started racing. That scared me enough to get me to stop.

One night, John showed me what looked to be a kilo of coke in a dresser drawer. Because of all he had done for the local police, he had an official badge. I witnessed him using the badge once to get into the Pennsylvania state wrestling championships. He did not have a ticket and, despite all his money, he didn’t want to pay a few bucks to purchase one. So he flashed his badge and walked right on in.

I guess he had even used the badge to get into the police’s evidence vault because the bag of cocaine read
EVIDENCE
in bright orange letters. John shoved a straw into the bag and took the biggest hit of coke I have ever seen anyone take. It was so big a hit that I feared something bad could happen to him.

“What do you want me to do if something happens, call 911?” I asked him, just in case.

“No,” he said. “Call my lawyer.”

There was never a period when I was around John that he was not on something, whether it was alcohol, prescription meds, or cocaine.

•

The role John’s mother played in his life received a lot of publicity after my brother’s murder. John seemed to be a mama’s boy. He was the only one of the four du Pont children who didn’t leave the estate to have a family of his own. I didn’t have much occasion to talk with his mother, so I knew little about her personality.

She died in mid-August 1988 at the age of ninety-one. John took over his mother’s decision-making role for the estate, and he seemed comfortable with the step up in power. John changed the name of the estate from Lisiter Hall Farm to Foxcatcher Farm. I had never known anyone to call the place by its official name. Everyone I knew had been calling it Foxcatcher or, simply, “the farm.”

After his mother’s funeral, John had the mansion remodeled. His “awards,” athletic trophies, sports posters, and photos of him with celebrities were given places of prominence over his mother’s mementos.

The death of John’s mother has been frequently cited as a turning point in John’s life. His family members have said that when John’s mom died, his mental condition began deteriorating. I left for the Olympics that September and spent about two months after the Olympics living at the farm before moving away, so that’s not a long period of time. But I didn’t see any change in his mental condition immediately after his mother died.

I did not see anything different about him at all, and he didn’t say much to me about her death. From my dealings with him, it was almost as though her death didn’t happen.

—

T
he Olympics were to begin in mid-September in Seoul. I was actually ready to retire before then because my association
with du Pont had drained the motivation out of me. I was tired physically, mentally, and emotionally. The only way out was to quit wrestling. But I couldn’t quit.

I had won the ’87 World Championship and was ranked as the favorite to win the Olympics and become the first American to win two Olympic gold medals in wrestling since George Mehnert in 1904 and 1908. And 1904 was the first Summer Games to include freestyle, and only the US team had competed that year.

Expectations were through the roof, and if the people who held those expectations could have spent just a couple of days with me when du Pont was around, they would have seen how unrealistic their confidence in me was.

Part of me thinks John wanted me to lose because he had never been a winner and didn’t want me to win. Another part of me thinks John wanted me to win so he could take credit for my success. Whichever was his true motivation, he wouldn’t stop distracting me.

I told him to leave me alone so I could focus.

He didn’t.

I told him I was going to have a T-shirt made that read
SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE
. He showed up with a box shortly thereafter. Inside were two T-shirts bearing that statement. One was for me, one for him. What I had intended to be my message to him, he made our message to the world. That demonstrated how John perceived himself: special and above others. In his mind, nothing applied to him, and he was royalty and could do whatever he pleased.

I was as unmotivated as I had ever been going into the Olympic qualifier in Topeka, Kansas, in mid-May. Mike Sheets beat me in the final match on a defensive pin. It was my first loss to an American in five years.