Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold (5 page)

U
ntil 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.

—

T
he 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.

The police had been called about the party, and a police car pulled up right as I was showing this girl the foot sweep. The policemen got out of the car and walked directly to me.

“Can I help you, officer?” I asked the first one.

“You can’t even help yourself,” he replied.

Then they started walking toward the elevator to bust up the party.

I followed them and decided I would take the stairs and warn everyone at the party that the cops were coming.

The cops stopped and turned toward me.

“What are you doing?” they asked me.

“I’m going upstairs,” I answered.

“You can’t go upstairs,” they said.

“It’s a free country,” I said, then opened the door to the staircase.

One of the cops grabbed me from behind and tried to get me in what I call a “police academy headlock.”

I immediately lifted him up and slammed him to the ground. That was easier than any match I’d been in. As soon as that cop hit the ground, the other tried to get me in the same headlock. I picked him up and put him on the ground, too. The first cop got off the ground and tried the exact same move again. I gave him the exact same treatment.

Then his partner got up and shoved me into a fire extinguisher case, but his hand was between me and the case. When I hit the case, the glass cover broke and blood started spurting from the officer’s hand. They pulled out their handcuffs, but I kept moving my hands around and they couldn’t cuff me. That’s when the one with the cut hand took a swing at me. I ducked and grabbed both his legs and pulled them. He landed directly on his cut hand and started screaming in pain.

“That does it,” the other said. “You’re going to jail, dead or alive,” and reached for his gun.

I immediately jumped over a fence and took off running.

By this point, the ruckus had gotten the attention of some at the party. One guy was all excited and ran after me. I was tired from the skirmish, and the guy caught up with me.

“Here, take my shirt,” he said.

Mine had been torn off during the fight and the guy knew that the policemen would be looking for someone without a shirt. Seconds after I pulled his shirt on, a cop car drove past.

But then that guy flagged down the driver of a car at a stop sign, told him what had happened, and asked the driver to give us a ride to the dorms. The driver peeled out. I knew that guy wasn’t
going to be any help, so I gave him back his shirt and told him to leave me alone.

I jumped a fence and hid in bushes, but the owner of the place had seen me and called the police. A police helicopter was already in the air looking for me, and it wasn’t long until officers had semicircled the bushes.

Over a loudspeaker, they told me to give up. I wasn’t convinced I should. I thought I could still get away and was preparing to make a run for it.

The clicking of their gun hammers changed my plans. I came out of the bushes with my hands up, and they cuffed me, threw me into the back of a police car, and hauled me off to jail.

My phone call went to Coach Auble. I told him what had happened. Half serious, half joking, he said, “Good job. I knew you had it in you.” Then he told me he’d call my dad.

I had been placed in a holding cell at first, then they moved me alone into a cell with no pillow or mattress. A cop came up and asked me to take a Breathalyzer test. I said okay, and he looked a little too happy about my willingness to cooperate, so I changed my mind and told him to forget it.

The next day, I was charged with assault and battery on two LAPD officers and my dad put up five thousand dollars bail. Coach Auble helped connect me with a lawyer. One of the girls who had taken me to the party told the district attorney that I had not punched or kicked the officers, that I had only broken their holds and used their own force against them.

The charges were dropped, although my dad had to pay about a thousand dollars to the lawyer. Dad didn’t make me pay him back for the lawyer, but years later I paid him back sevenfold.

—

C
oach Auble was one tough man. He was about forty years old, and I wished I could have watched him wrestle in his prime. He could be a little unpredictable and had an aggressive nature, but that’s what I assumed had made him so tough on the mat. Coach carried a mouthpiece wherever he went just in case he got into a fight. I admired him, and we got along great.