Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold (3 page)

The hand-control concept was just as effective from on top. If I could control an opponent’s hands, I could ride him pretty well. The funny thing is that the hand-control concept was so simple. I couldn’t understand why more wrestlers—shoot, all wrestlers—weren’t doing it. I never shared the secret of the hand-control standup with anyone.

Thanks to what Jim taught me, I improved at escapes. I was training as hard as I could, too. But still, the wins weren’t coming. I made the mistake of believing that if I learned techniques like Dave, I’d be winning like him, too. The big difference didn’t come, though, until I realized that I would need to add explosive power to the techniques to make them work.

After losing those first four matches, my record climbed to 4-6 by about halfway through the season. That’s when Coach Brown decided to replace me with Wade to make our team better, even though I was still winning our weekly challenge matches.

I didn’t like the fact that Coach had created the challenge system and then didn’t follow it. He had established the rules we were playing by, but then he threw out the rules so he could have Wade wrestle in tournaments instead of me.

On top of that, we were forfeiting matches in the upper weights we couldn’t fill because of our lack of heavier wrestlers. Our team was lousy, so I didn’t understand the “make the team better” reason. And I didn’t care about the team anyway. Sure, they added up points for team totals at tournaments, but as far as
I was concerned, wrestling was an individual sport. It was me against my opponent. That’s all I cared about.

Instead of talking to Coach Brown, I went straight to the principal, who instructed Coach to put me back on varsity. Because of that, the situation was partly my fault, too. I should have talked to Coach Brown first. I could have talked to him about it, because he was a good coach. He made a judgment call I didn’t agree with, and there was nothing more to it than that.

At least on the surface.

But when I look back, I think the reason I went to the principal first is that, mentally, I had already checked out of Ashland. I never was happy in Oregon, I wanted out of there, and I was willing to stir up trouble if that’s what it took to make it happen.

I started skipping classes. I got into a fight in PE and broke my hand when I punched the kid in the back of the head. The only lesson I learned from that incident was to never again punch someone in the back of the head; it’s too hard back there. With my hand in a cast, I flunked typing class. Then I cut off the cast because I got tired of wearing it. The hand didn’t heal correctly.

I couldn’t wait to flee Oregon, but I couldn’t go back to Palo Alto until my probation period expired. Waiting out the remainder of my probation seemed to slow time significantly. I felt as if I had been ripped off in being arrested and put on probation anyway. Then there were the problems on the wrestling team, my broken hand, and wanting to get out of the same house as my mom’s boyfriend.

Dave came for another visit after wrestling season, this one tied to recruiting. It seemed as if every college with a wrestling
program was recruiting Dave, and that made me jealous of him. I had always been a better natural athlete than him and had won the gymnastics championship in California. I would look at Dave and think about how uncoordinated he had been and wonder how he had become so good at wrestling in such a short time. Dave’s success confused me, but it also opened my eyes to the potential I could have as a wrestler. If nothing else, I knew that if I gave my full attention to wrestling, I would have a top-notch workout partner in my brother.

During the week Dave spent with us, Ron Finley, the coach at the University of Oregon, and Bob Rheim from Southern Oregon came to talk with him. While Mark and I were talking to the coaches, he called me a pothead. I couldn’t beiieve he said that right in front of them.

—

D
ave’s senior season at Palo Alto High is the best any US high school wrestler has ever produced.

In November, he missed a few matches of his high school team to compete in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the prestigious Great Plains freestyle tournament. Despite being a high school wrestler, Dave advanced to the finals against Chuck Yagla. Dave was just a high school senior and he was going up against Yagla, who had completed his collegiate wrestling career at the University of Iowa a year earlier. Yagla had won the 1975 and ’76 NCAA Championships and was named the meet’s Outstanding Wrestler his senior year.

Dave was down a few points to Yagla when the two were chest to chest, arms around each other. Dave caught the two-time NCAA champ in a step-around body lock, taking a long step with
his left leg and wrapping it around Chuck’s right leg to trap it. Dave then drove Chuck straight to his back, keeping Chuck’s right leg trapped with his left leg, and pinned him for the victory.

Winning at Great Plains qualified Dave for the Tbilisi tournament in Soviet Georgia, considered the best in the world because all the Soviet wrestlers took part and they formed the most dominant team in world and Olympic competitions. Dave placed second there, higher than any other American.

Dave had finished fourth at state his sophomore and junior years, but competing in Tbilisi kept him out of the high school tournaments that would have qualified him for the California state championship meet. Coach Hart petitioned the state coaches association to allow Dave to compete anyway, but in one class higher at 170 pounds. The coaches agreed, knowing Dave would win state. And he did, easily, with his closest score 12–1 in the finals.

After state, Dave took part in the Greco-Roman National Championships. In Greco-Roman, wrestlers are not allowed to use their legs to attack and cannot attack an opponent’s legs. Dave won that tournament and the Gorriaran Award given to the wrestler who totals the most falls in the least amount of time.

College recruiters were lining up to make their best sales pitches to Dave.

Dave revolutionized wrestling because of his emphasis on technique. Before, most coaches had emphasized pure conditioning. At that time, freestyle matches were nine minutes long and college matches lasted eight minutes. In a nine-minute match, conditioning tended to be the only thing that mattered, because wrestlers with great technique but lousy conditioning could get wiped out by superconditioned wrestlers.

Dave changed that because he was well conditioned
and
possessed super technique. That’s why as a high school senior he was able to beat some of the world’s best wrestlers with a body that looked as if it belonged to, as one friend of ours liked to say, a chemistry professor. Dave’s body was deceiving, though; he actually had incredible core strength.

—

M
y probation ended in the middle of my junior year, and I moved back to Palo Alto, although too late to try out for the wrestling team. I reached out to another one of Dave’s wrestling friends, Chris Horpel, who had recently graduated from Stanford after earning All-American honors. Chris was seven years older than I was. At first, we had almost an older brother–younger brother relationship. I tried to make Chris like me by getting him to laugh at my Steve Martin imitations. After a while, he got pretty good at imitating Steve, too. Steve Martin was the best, and Chris and I cracked each other up with his comedy.

Chris coached me and wrestled against me the remainder of my junior year and during the summer. He also arranged for me to train with some of Stanford’s wrestlers, and that would give me a huge advantage over other competitors my age. Unable to compete on the school team, I wrestled in amateur freestyle tournaments almost every weekend. Most of the time, I lost my first two matches and was eliminated. But I hit a growth spurt during that period and at the end of the summer won a pretty big tournament at West Valley College while wrestling at 145 pounds. Winning the tournament was great, but still my only motivation in wrestling was to become the greatest fighter in the world.

Coach Hart, Dave’s coach, knew I would be wrestling for him the next school year at Palo Alto High, and he kept close tabs on my progress. He also worked out with me, and I took him down ten times.

Dave dutifully kept a wrestling notebook full of notes and observations. I copied Dave my junior year because I thought—and still think—that the way to become good at just about anything is to find someone who is good at it and copy what he does. So, like Dave, I decided to turn wrestling into an academic pursuit.

I organized my notebook into categories of tie-ups, or positions I would find myself in before or after shots. Grabbing an opponent’s wrist, for instance, is a tie-up. But grabbing a wrist and using it to execute an arm drag to a single leg would make the single leg the tie-up. I’ve noticed that most wrestlers tend to divide attacks into three steps: set-up, penetration, and finish.

Set-up, usually executed with the hands and arms, is setting up the opponent for an attack by getting him off-balance and creating an opening to attack. Penetration, often referred to as “the shot,” is the attack itself. The finish is the final move of the sequence designed to score points or, ideally, lead to a pin.

On a basic move like the arm drag, for example, my set-up would be allowing my opponent to grab my right wrist with his left hand. Then I would lower my wrist to move his arm into the position I wanted. Next, I would grab the back of his triceps with my left hand and throw his arm directly sideways, which would break his grip. I would throw so hard that his arm would almost be horizontal to the ground, twisting his upper body away from me.

There wasn’t much to the penetration. After I got my opponent’s arm horizontal, I would drop my hips and shoot. That was
my penetration step. For the finish, after throwing his arm horizontal, I would keep both arms out wide, like a net, to catch anything I could (usually both legs, but sometimes just one). As I took the penetration step, I would wrap my stepping leg all the way around the back of my opponent’s left leg/foot, trapping it and tripping him as I drove my left shoulder into his stomach/groin area. Trapping his leg would result in either my tackling him or my forcing him to fall backward to the mat.

In my notebook, I eliminated the penetration, because that was a given, and turned the three-step process into two steps.

If a technique didn’t have a name, I created one for it.

Each page was dedicated to one tie-up. Examples of tie-ups are single leg, double leg, high-crotch, over-under, double overhook, double underhook, front headlock, and, for one with a funny name, the whizzer. I wrote the name of the tie-up at the top of a page and listed underneath all the different ways to finish from that tie-up. Upper-body finishes included throws, kick-ups, and trips. I discovered the seven basic categories of finishing all leg attacks: lift, trip, spin behind, switch to another move, crack the opponent down to his hip, run the pipe, and go out the back door. On the back of the page, I listed counters to each tie-up. Then I had separate pages for reversals, pinning combinations, and escapes. Inside the front cover, I listed hints to relieve pressure, stay focused, and perceive reality. All of that was designed, in my sixteen-year-old mind, to improve as quickly as possible.

I studied my wrestling notebook far more than any of my school textbooks, and I reread my notebook until I memorized every note on every page. I took mental snapshots of the pages, and when I got into a tie-up during a match, that particular page would flash
into my mind and I could “see” a menu of moves to choose from. I would decide how to finish before I shot so there would be no hesitation.

My notebook was pretty full by the time I went to Joe Seay’s Bakersfield Express camp the summer before my senior year. I roomed with Jeff Newman, who would also be a senior at Paly, as our school was commonly called. When Jeff saw me making notes in my book and I explained what I was doing, we got into a fun debate about the effectiveness of making such a book. Jeff was a good wrestler, and we would become training partners and good friends, but I knew the book worked for my big brother and that was the only point I needed to consider.

At the camp I developed the idea of “chain” wrestling, or transitioning from one move to another and then another and then another in an infinite chain of moves. I jotted down a lot of chains in my notebook until I concluded there was no limit to the chains and I stopped writing down moves. From that point, I focused on which moves and chains were the most effective and, ultimately, they became my most-guarded secrets. In fact, my most effective attack was so secretive that I didn’t even realize how much I employed it until watching myself on video.

A couple of more traditional books greatly influenced me. One was a book on takedowns that was written by Bobby Douglas, an African American who broke racial barriers in wrestling, finished with a career record of 303-17, and was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

The second was
You Are the World
by Indian teacher J. Krishnamurti. I had read inspiring stories of Zen masters accomplishing incredible physical and mental feats, including one who had spent
a day in meditation, sipping tea and relaxing, then got up and shot an arrow into a dark corridor and nailed the center of the target. As I checked out
You Are the World
, it looked as if it contained Zen philosophy. I flipped to a chapter about overcoming fear and began reading. I was so intrigued by the chapter that I read that book and then others by Krishnamurti.

At first, it was difficult to understand Krishnamurti. He didn’t write books that offered, for instance, six easy steps to overcoming fear. He would ask questions but not provide answers. His books didn’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t think. Instead, he wrote in a way that seemed as if he were walking alongside me, teaching me how to live without him and not to depend on him.

Before reading Krishnamurti, I had never heard phrases like “dying to the past every moment”; “observing what is, not what should be, including my thoughts without judgment, and seeing what happens”; and “living totally in the present.”