I was disappointed—both that I never got to face Schultz in the finals, and that I would never be enshrined in Rec Hall at Penn State as a National Champion. I would never be one of the exalted few—big pictures of the biggest stars that ring the top of the wrestling complex walls. Every time I entered the Hall from that day forward, I would be reminded of my failure. Mine is one of the commemorative plaques beneath them, celebrating Penn State All-Americans over a century of wrestling.
But I was more than disappointed. I was over. My four years competing for Penn State were done. The next Olympics were two years away. There was no going back. No undoing past mistakes and avenging past losses. No daily anchor of wrestling to keep the drugs away.
Wrestling gave me more than just a sense of power and control. From second grade on, it had given me the approval that I never got anywhere else. I hid my drug use from people, not only because I did not want to taint the sport I loved, but because I couldn’t bear to taint what others thought of me.
If I was addicted to anything besides wrestling and drugs, it was the praise. I wanted people to see me as the best and strongest version of myself—the winner I usually was, even in defeat. Wrestling was my stage. At the end of every performance, there was a judgment—from the referee, but also everyone else. I didn’t and still don’t know why I did cocaine before my last match at Penn State. But I do know the reason for my self-imposed panic attack: I would be exposed as a fraud to everyone. I would wonder what they thought of me, like I always did, but this time I would be exposed as an addict unworthy of their praise and applause.
Now what? I loved and still longed for the feeling I got on the mat and for the high I got from cocaine. In my last match, drugs and wrestling had come together. Where did that leave me?
The terrible answer came the summer my collegiate career ended, when I freebased cocaine for the first time with a few friends holed up in a seedy DC apartment. The drug sped through my body. It overtook me. I crawled into the bathroom. My ears were ringing. I splashed cold water on my face, and the sound of the water made my ears hurt. I threw up. I wound up awake for days, looking for more, and when there was none, I crawled around on the floor, fishing around in the shag carpet, picking at every little white piece and hoping it would burn like a rock of cocaine.
I never got my thumb fixed, nor anything else in my life that was broken. I was crawling around on the floor looking for rock because I was broken. I was making more money than I ever had in my life and was sure nothing would be the same again. I was right in more ways than one.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
After I made the team my freshman year, Coach sent me down to Mac’s Haberdashery in Happy Valley to get fitted for my varsity blazer. The morning I was there, a photographer snapped shots of a Penn State sweater Mac was advertising in the Daily Collegian. Mac looked at me and said, Hey, you’re a good-lookin’ fella. Will you do me a favor and try this on? I’d never posed for a picture outside of school, but reluctantly said okay. I was too shy to say no. Mac found me a sweater in my size and we headed outside the shop on College Avenue, where the photographer took shots as I leaned against a tree. The next day at practice, the full-page ad was up in the wrestling room: “The Look is Penn State,” with a picture of me in the sweater, smiling.
My debut as a fashion model. I also thought it would be my finale. I was wrong. Just when I was leaving the wrestling stage, the book of my life opened to the modeling page.
The night my eye was cut by the underclassman that knifed his finger into my eye socket, I was worried I would miss my next match at Lehigh’s Stabler Arena in Allentown. Thankfully, the doctor at the hospital cleared me, excusing me from my test that morning and sending me on my way with an eye patch and a Go beat Lehigh! My match was an uneventful, 17–4 thrashing of my opponent. Meanwhile, one hundred miles away in New York City, it was the beginning of something more eventful than I could possibly imagine. Our match was televised. A guy named Scott Copeland happened to be smoking a joint and looking for something to watch on TV, when he stopped on the broadcast just as I was about to start wrestling and my name appeared on screen: John Hanrahan, Falls Church, Virginia.
Scott immediately picked up the phone, called directory assistance, got my parents’ number, and spoke with my father, who put him in touch with me. He told me I jumped off the screen, but not for my wrestling skills. He knew little about wrestling. He was a fashion agent in New York City who had discovered several top models and wanted to represent me. Something about me just stood out.
Honestly, I figured he was a pervert. A lot of athletes got calls for “modeling,” which turned out to be propositions for sleazy soft-core porn magazines like Blueboy. It sounded crazy that a wrestler with a broken nose and a face that had been sewn back together in eight different places would attract the attention of anyone working in high fashion. Then I looked up the guys he said he discovered and represented—guys on the cover of GQ, and even the face of the hot new Calvin Klein campaign. He was the real deal.
I called Scott back, and he asked when I could come to New York City. His instincts were right about my looks. Everyone liked that I wasn’t just another cookie-cutter model. He said he’d shown Bruce Weber the pictures I had sent up, and Bruce wanted to shoot me as a wrestler for L’Uomo Vogue. This never happens, Scott kept saying over and over. Then he told me what the job paid, although I would have taken anything. I was broke.
What, I get paid that much? I’m ready now!
On my first trip to New York City, I didn’t just shoot with Bruce. I met with Giorgio Armani, received an invite from Calvin Klein to attend his daughter’s Sweet Sixteen at Studio 54, and was soon working with other renowned photographers like Francesco Scavullo. But Bruce was the first to book me. Despite it being my first shoot, I wasn’t nervous at all. The nervous kid who posed outside Mac’s that day was gone. I treated the shoot like a match and arrived on set with the same confidence I brought into the ring. But it was more than that. I had enjoyed studying photography at Penn State, and I was fascinated by the whole process. I was amazed that my first experience on the other side of the camera was with a guy who had changed the whole fashion industry with his work for Calvin Klein. I looked at the camera like I was looking at the most beautiful girl I could imagine. He told me that there were too many handsome guys who were just flat in pictures, which was why he booked inexperienced guys like surfers and athletes for big campaigns, like the pole-vaulter he used in a Calvin Klein ad. He liked real men who had more behind their eyes. Guys who could kick your ass, take your girl, and make her love them.
Bruce discovered what I had inside and outside and captured it with his camera. He would tell me to put something on to see how it felt and just move around naturally—then suddenly say, Stop! That’s perfect. Just tilt your head a little bit this way. Eyes over here, eyes over there. You look so handsome. Oh hold that…that’s beautiful, Johnny.
Afterward, Bruce took the time to answer my technical questions for the high-level photography classwork I had to complete. I grilled him about the Ansel Adams zone system, calculations for developing film, and the different shades of gray the same way I drilled Dan Gable about wrestling techniques. Bruce said it sounded like I knew more about some of those things than he did. As I got ready to head back to campus, exhilarated by the idea of these shots appearing in Italian Vogue, Bruce left me with one piece of advice about the modeling business: Don’t give up everything and focus solely on modeling. There’s a lot of creepy people in this business; keep doing your wrestling too. I said I would.
I spent the next year of my life driving back and forth from campus to Manhattan in my battered Honda Civic, each job seemingly bigger than the last. Bruce, Scavullo, and Juan Ramos shot me for Vogue. I had the cover of Menswear shot by Albert Bray. I was featured in Macy’s runway show at the Waldorf Astoria—all before moving to New York and making any real effort to pursue
