Matt Ruffing, the son of the league commissioner. Matt didn’t pin me, but he beat me in every other way. He was well trained and always steps ahead of me as we fought through positions I did not know were possible. I remember it was loud and I felt like everyone there was against me. My lungs were burning. My mouth was too dry even to spit. The buzzer sounded, reverberating off the gym walls, and that was it. I rose to my feet and stood there humiliated as Matt Ruffing’s arm was raised, tears streaming down my face.
That Matt Ruffing and I continued to tangle and I later had my share of victories against him did nothing to undo how I felt that night. I felt alone. Because I was alone. In wrestling, there are no teammates to hide behind. My father was in the bleachers, but that was no comfort. I had no idea what the word vulnerable meant then, but that’s what I was, standing there in defeat for the first time. I already knew fear. I began having night terrors when I was seven. My sister Teri would come to me in the middle of the night and calm me down by rubbing my hands. Feeling this vulnerable was worse. I had no control over what I saw in my dreams, but I had control over how I performed on the mat. Now I had a new fear, the fear of losing, and I would do everything I could to ensure it never happened again.
Because wrestling made me feel alive. Complete. Like a winner. Smart and capable of learning from my mistakes. Powerful. I bought a set of weights with the money I’d saved up. My dad shook his head disapprovingly. He thought I would just lift and look at myself in the mirror. He saw it as ego. I know he only wanted to make sure I was doing things for the right reasons, but it hurt that he didn’t understand me. I was on my way to becoming a state champion—I knew it and had the record and work ethic to prove it. Still, he made me explain my motives.
The last thing I want to do is lift weights, Dad. But you know what? I want to be the best wrestler I can be, and this is part of the equation.
Dad walked away, which only made me push harder. By my eighth-grade season, I was a junior champion and had an open invitation to the varsity wrestling practice. It was tortuous and painful, but I figured it built character—something the coach always talked about. Besides, I desperately wanted to be a part of his team and wrestle under the spotlights for the Falls Church High School Jaguars. They had a great wrestling tradition, perennially ranked as one of the top teams in the state, while the basketball team sucked. The school packed them in for home meets to capacity crowds all winter long. As the varsity team prepared to enter, the houselights would shut off and the spotlights flared up the circle of the mat as the Doobie Brothers’ “Black Water” would echo through the gym. The team would bang the double doors loudly and then burst into the spotlights. There was nothing cooler in my mind.
Wrestling: what men do during boys’ basketball season. This is where I’m meant to be, I thought. At the same time, I literally got a whiff of what else was to come. Because just after I became a junior champion, I smelled drugs for the first time.
EVERYTHING BEGINS
The summer it happened, I was with my best friend Burt, who lived next door.
Burt and I had a long history of making our own trouble. We’d do anything for fun, even mess with my grandfather, Big Daddy. Big Daddy was a big man and a hard drinker who lived on the other side of us in a house he built with his friends. He would pay me and Burt to collect bottles and broken glass off his property and around the creek that ran behind our houses. That got boring fast, so Burt and I got the idea to break any whole bottles we found against the rocks in the creek and then bring Big Daddy a bucket load of broken glass. When we showed up that day with only shards and cuts on our hands, Big Daddy paid us and then fired us.
Burt and I didn’t care. We were in it together. We stayed friends even after I broke his two front teeth playing hot potato with a heavy plastic wind-up Milton Bradley toy called Time Bomb, and my parents had to pay for his new teeth. We were still best friends in eighth grade, exploring the woods near the field where we played pickup football games, when we stumbled upon a big metal tackle box under a bush.
We opened it and found it packed with drugs—pot, hashish, pills—and a syringe. We had no idea exactly what those things were, and any interest we had in finding out ourselves was trumped by our sense that they were bad and, most importantly, valuable. This is not to pretend that I was a golden child before this moment, or that I’d never felt the temptation to try something. After class one day in sixth grade, a bunch of us stole some liquor and got drunk for the first time in my friend Rocky’s basement. I staggered home, only stopping on the hill between our house and the church, where the world spun and I puked my guts out. I made it home in time for dinner with no repercussions, the advantage of getting lost in a family of six children.
But as Burt and I looked at the tackle box, money was on our minds, not mischief. We thought there might be a reward for finding the box and turning it in. We took the box to Burt’s mom, who called the police. When the officer arrived and saw what we’d found, he said how proud he was of us. Drugs were bad, and maybe we helped save a life. He explained what each of the pills were and then clipped a bud of marijuana on a pair of hemostats and burned it with his lighter so we could know what it smelled like and could steer clear of it.
We told him we would. It smelled nasty to me anyway. We didn’t get a reward. Still, we felt like heroes. But that wasn’t the hero I wanted to be. I wanted to be a hero on the mat.
My idol was a wrestler named Dan Gable, and that summer after eighth grade was the first time I saw him—and real wrestling—on TV at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany. I remember excitedly tuning the antenna on the television in the family den, trying to get the ABC broadcast. The black-and-white picture stayed fuzzy, but it was clear enough to see the athletes in their singlets battling it out in front of a packed arena. I pulled the straps of my own singlet over my favorite wrestling T-shirt and sat ready to follow all the action.
That’s when I saw him: Dan Gable. I’d only read about him in a book—the first one I’d ever gotten from the library, and to be honest the only one I had ever read cover to cover. I knew all about his work ethic and dedication. I knew about his pain: how he came home from high school one day in Iowa and discovered his sister on the living room floor, raped and murdered. I saw in his every move how his anger fueled him, unleashing an unmatched intensity as he ripped through his Olympic opponents. He won the gold medal without allowing a point to be scored on him.
That is going to be me one day.
Shortly after Gable’s victory, the entire Olympic broadcast changed. Jim McKay interrupted images of the thrill of victory, agony of defeat, and spirit of sportsmanship that defines the best of humankind with reports of extreme violence that mark our worst. The screen cut away to images of the Olympic Village where, McKay reported, a Palestinian terrorist group called Black September had taken Israeli Olympians hostage. At least one had been killed trying to help his teammates, who remained captive. It affected me deeply as an athlete who aspired to be on an Olympic podium one day.
The next day, against the backdrop of terror, the broadcast returned to the Olympic wrestling venue and showed a young American wrestler named Rick Sanders, who wrestled like an artist. Fluid and creative with his movements, he made me realize that wrestling can truly be artistic and lethal. His matches inspired me and allowed me to forget about the human tragedy that was still unfolding—but only for a moment. The broadcast was again interrupted with McKay reporting live.
We’ve just gotten the final word. You know, when I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They’ve now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning; nine were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.
The senseless violence of the Munich tragedy—men’s hate for people not like them—echoed
