When I returned to campus junior year, I was once again able to control my addiction when it came to my matches. But for the first time, I brought some cocaine back to campus and got high before a few preseason workouts. When the cocaine ran out, I was too broke to find more. I had used all I had left of my summer “paychecks.” Wrestling once again became my sole addiction, and I was on a mission to place at nationals, if I could survive all the other stupid shit I did to get high.
My campaign started ominously, but not because of any drugs: I was a man behind a literal mask. A road trip back to DC with a bunch of my teammates turned into a weekend of raucous Georgetown nightlife and after-hours street fights. One fight had left me with a knife wound in my left thigh, my face scraped, my nose broken by the concrete sidewalk, and all of us running from the police. We made it back to my family’s basement, where my sister Teri, now an ER nurse, made me go to the hospital. They stitched up my leg and told me to get an ENT doctor to set my broken nose. I couldn’t be bothered. I let it set as it was so I could get back to the wrestling room Monday. Which is how I ended up wearing a protective mask the first tournament of the season. I cruised to the finals where I faced Jeff Parker who had dominated his way through the brackets. Between rounds Parker would strut around the arena in his flashy purple-and-gold LSU attire accessorized with a flamboyant tasseled hat. Parker was extremely strong, he locked me up around the neck; I was disoriented wearing the mask. I got thrown to the mat in a tight headlock and lost 10–5. At least the crowd couldn’t see my humiliated face as Parker celebrated his victory. I threw it away after that match, my broken nose slowly healed, and I stayed motivated to finding a way to beat an opponent as fierce as Parker. I was hungry to win and also just plain hungry, because I was still broke. I was even desperate enough to steal to feed myself.
I had just returned from a prestigious tournament in Chicago during winter break after another crazy but much closer loss to Parker, and State College was deserted. I was hungry, no one was around, and I only had enough money to buy a loaf of bread. I grabbed the bread and a piece of cheese, and then headed to the cashier with my gloves and the cheese in one hand and the loaf of bread in the other. I put the loaf on the counter and paid for it while trying to hide the cheese in my gloves, but the clerk busted me as I left. I considered making an easy dash for the door as he came around the counter, but at that exact moment I saw Coach Lorenzo through the store window, walking down the sidewalk with a recruit and his parents. I ducked back as they passed and decided to bring shame only on myself. I surrendered, and luckily the story was kept out of the news.
My near-arrest shook me enough to focus on training for the NCAA tournament. My intense training, pushing myself to a never-before-reached threshold, left me in tears. My tears turned to laughter when I realized I had broken through to a new level. I worked harder than I ever had, and I knew as our contingent of four Lions headed to nationals that I was going to place. I was not going to lose a match that I deserved to win.
My body’s lactic acids were burning, draining my power and performance, as they often did in the first round of a tournament, but I shook off that usual slow start and won my first match. In fact, the entire Penn State contingent swept round one and was in third place in the team category. But there was little time for celebration. Up next in my bracket: Parker, who had demolished his first-round opponent and stared me down confidently as I stepped on to the mat.
I knew I needed a new strategy, so I hit him like a freight train, with my head in his gut, and plowed through on an explosive double-leg takedown. I rode and turned him on his back several times; he never had a chance to recover. I got the win, but also got a deep bloody gash on my chin. The gash was stitched up that night but it didn’t stop me from stitching together another dominating win the next day over the defending national champ before losing in the semifinals to one of Dan Gable’s guys from Iowa. Dan knew I liked to take that initial shot, so he just had his guy sit back and catch me when I did. I lunged in right off the whistle, hitting my blast double—a modified version of my “patented” second-grade football tackle—but he under-hooked my arms as I wrapped his legs and pancaked me, like a flapjack being flipped on a hot skillet. I spent the next two minutes fighting off my back until I couldn’t anymore.
Undaunted, I wanted to show Coach Lorenzo I had learned my lesson watching the champs last year and vowed to come back and take third. I did by coming back through the consolation brackets and beating Iowa State’s national runner-up Perry Hummel. I then watched Dan’s guy get upset by Oklahoma’s future Olympic champion, Mark Schultz, in the final. Mark became the national champion. As I took my third-place spot next to him on the podium, I looked up at him and had only one thing to say: Hey, I have some weed. You want to smoke? We ended up in a squash court, breaking up the bud and cleaning the seeds on the copy of the winner’s bracket they gave him. Amateur Wrestling News voted mine the best performance.
If they only knew just how true that was, in ways nobody could see yet.
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I returned to campus for the end of my junior year one of the top wrestlers in the country and a genuine campus celebrity. To the victor goes the spoils: I started dating the most popular girl on campus. My notoriety grew as I took down Penn State’s number-one recruit at the Eastern Freestyle tournament held at Rec Hall. He was a local hero who was not only the top-ranked high school wrestler in the nation at my weight class, but also the top recruit in the nation period. A kid who was a big fan of that recruit came over afterward to compliment me on the beating and say how he was glad some of the wind was taken out of his friend’s sails, because his head was getting too big.
When our recruit arrived on campus that fall, he did not challenge me at my weight class. Instead, he cut down and dropped a weight class, in which he also became an All-American. We even became good friends. Because that’s what wrestling does. It humbles you…just not enough for me when it came to cocaine, which now filled most of my non-match days. My girlfriend and I made quite the striking couple, and we met a guy that controlled all of the drug traffic in Happy Valley. He threw parties in his opulent homes and liked to be around beautiful women. He loaded me with cocaine so we’d grace him with our presence. I was happy to oblige.
But while I now had a source for cocaine, I was even more determined to make it to the top of the NCAA podium in my final college season. That summer, before my senior year, I often woke up in the middle of the night replaying the moment I got pinned in the semifinals. I was so close and knew I could get all the way to the top. I vowed to get stronger, and took a summer job with my sister’s boyfriend, who had a large DC-area landscaping company. I mowed steep hills at apartment complexes, tying a rope to the back of the mower and then lowering and pulling it up with my feet planted in a wrestling stance. As I shuffled along each hill, I imitated pulling a leg attack on my opponent—never relenting, or else I would slip under the mower blades and cut myself up.
I got stronger every day, pushing my physical limits in the humid DC heat. But I was also getting weaker. I was still working for the construction company for my bags of coke. Plus, it wasn’t just the cocaine that threatened my life that summer. One hot night, driving out of DC, I got arrested for drunk driving on the George Washington Parkway and thrown into lockup at Washington National Airport. I was released the next day and ended up with reduced charges after I faced the court and admitted I had five or six drinks. Apparently everyone who came before that judge lied about his or her drunken state, and he took the opportunity with me to lecture the court. This young man is the first ever to come in front of me and say anything other than he had one or two drinks. What do people take me for, a fool? I’m so sick and tired of hearing, “One or two, Your Honor.”
My candid response coupled with my otherwise clean driving record led to his leniency. But did my honesty with the judge make me honest with myself about how far gone I was? No. My addiction was pushing its way into everything I loved and pushing me further and further from the truth and honesty I had been raised to honor. I was living a lie, testing the limits of my God-given talents, and my body, and now
