pick the wrong path. That I would be beholden to my parents forever. That they would spend their hard-earned savings sending me to college, and I would screw up and have to come home and remain in Falls Church and live under their roof, bound by their rules. The loser drunk stoner child.
Nothing I did—including drinking, getting high more, or getting into the occasional fight—made things any clearer. They only made me forget. As soon as I was sober or the adrenaline wore off or I was alone again, the anxiety returned.
By high school, it seemed to me that everyone knew where he or she was going but me. My friends were getting ready to enter their family businesses, which we didn’t have, or knew exactly what career they’d pursue. I took a career aptitude test, and it recommended that I become a funeral director.
My father wasn’t much help in guiding me. It wasn’t just the top-secret nature of his work. I asked him once what I should be, and he responded that not many men get to make a living doing something they enjoy, and I “gotta work”—which meant study. Which I was not about to do. I saw no value in learning math or science. Art and English bored me. I hated it all, though I still managed to get A’s and B’s simply by looking the part of the conscientious student, respectful and seemingly attentive.
Thank God for wrestling. Whenever I stepped in the training room or competed with the team, I felt like I belonged, like everything would be okay. It anchored me while allowing me to be the free spirit I longed to be everywhere else in my life. Wrestling was my creative expression, my science, and unlike my schoolwork, I continued to work hard and take beating after beating to get better. My teammates never knew what happened after I got home and crawled into my bed at night, separated from the wrestling and partying, when the anxiety would creep in.
That anxiety diminished on April 5, 1976—the day I got my first letter from a college. It was from Washington and Lee University, a terrific liberal arts school a few hours from us in Virginia. They spelled my name wrong, but what did that matter? Their wrestling coach had seen me capture my State medal, and while there was no mention of a scholarship, my coach said it was implied, assuming I continued to excel on the mat and managed to graduate. He also said this was just the beginning.
Johnny, you are being watched.
And oh, how I wanted that scholarship. I was a shaky investment, but this one letter made me believe I was going to be able to take care of myself on my own terms. I want to pay my own way through college with a scholarship, I said to myself over and over. A free ride would free me to make my own mistakes without my parents paying for them. My dad would never get to question my grades and say, “Why did you get a D in this class? I’m paying for this.”
The letter from Washington and Lee was enough to keep my anxiety at bay, and I worked even harder to see how much better I could do and how high I could climb. I made the national junior team and got to compete in Poland, which was then behind the Iron Curtain my dad was working to bring down. At our first training center in Warsaw, we shared showers with the Polish women’s basketball team. They were excited about our American shampoo, and we were excited to be showering in the same room with six-foot-tall women! My teenage boy hormones appreciated that moment, but the rest of the trip only made me appreciate what I had in America. All I wanted to represent was a symbol of our country’s freedom and capitalism. My American wrestling dream.
We took a team bus through the countryside, passing farms that looked stuck in the previous century, until we reached the small town of Sieradz where we completed our training. We had plenty of Polish money, or złoty, but there was nothing to buy. We were hungry and tired of food like stomach soup and tongue, which was probably delicious to the locals but wasn’t exactly McDonald’s to a fifteen-year-old suburban kid from America. Desperate for something to eat and the comforts of home, we found an ice cream shop one night, but it only sold small individual cones, so we went to a hardware store and bought a bucket and paid to fill it with ice cream. The next day, we left for home, and I actually kissed the ground upon landing in the US. Then I went and found my friends and spent the rest of the summer drinking and smoking, which continued right into my junior year.
In high school, I’d stop drinking and smoking pot in season, but in the offseason I’d continue to train while partying. I’d smoke in the morning before school, at lunchtime, and after school. So did many of my teammates. We saw it as a badge of honor if you could wrestle, and even more so if you could wrestle and also party like an animal. In Falls Church, it wasn’t a big deal to become a state champion wrestler. But to achieve it while also being a top party animal gave you the highest esteem. We played hard and partied hard, like we heard Rick Sanders had, always trying to outdo each other. Our credo was, “It’s one thing to experience wrestling and do everything right and be good at it, but it’s another to experience life and be good at it.”
And I was. I won the Virginia state tournaments in my weight class the next two years and was the runner-up in my junior year at the AAU Nationals. As I won, college letters kept coming, along with phone calls. Scholarship offers poured in. Coaches visited my parents’ living room. They came to school and pulled me out of the classroom. They watched matches under the spotlights, impressed with my performance in front of rabid crowds. They offered me all-expense-paid visits to their schools. The NCAA allowed me to take five of those visits, and I availed myself of all of them.
First up was Michigan State. Though I had been drinking for years, I remember how mature I felt flying alone for the first time, ordering a beer from the Eastern Airline stewardess (I was eighteen, the legal age for drinking beer in Virginia back then), and looking out the window as we passed over my neighborhood upon takeoff.
I didn’t like Michigan State, but two things made the visit memorable. First, when I arrived at the airport in DC, I passed a newsstand and saw my current girlfriend, who happened to be a Ford Agency model, looking back at me from the cover of Washingtonian magazine. I still smelled like her from the night before! Second, I found myself in the company of many other top recruits. The university was hosting a battle between the USA Olympians and the mighty Soviets. I was staying on the same hotel floor as the Soviet team, and I am not sure what impressed me more: how they dominated our wrestlers, or how much they smoked and drank after doing so. These guys were bad dudes—communists, but still my kind of bad dudes. Wrestlers.
After Michigan State, I visited Indiana State. I went because it was close to Indiana University, where I wanted to visit a girl I liked, and I couldn’t afford to get there on my own. I drove to University of Maryland, because my dad was once a professor there, and nearby George Mason University, where the coach offered me an MG sports car to accept their offer to be an anchor for their new program. But I wasn’t interested in either of them. I loved Clemson, where they took me waterskiing and then to a disco and introduced me to the drunken crowd on the light-up dance floor. The University of Tennessee, where all the athletes lived in a tower with an amazing mess hall that served prime rib, also impressed me. I had pretty much settled on those two when my coach stopped me after school and told me another opportunity had come up, a big one. Penn State—the biggest wrestling power east of the Mississippi and the most dominant university in the most dominant wrestling state in the country—had called him. They were very interested in me.
One problem: they didn’t send a plane ticket. Instead they wanted me to drive four hours with my parents and stay the weekend. I’m not sure what I felt was the bigger slight: not flying me up, or having me bring my mom and dad. I was eighteen and had done all my visits solo so far. To me, it meant that I was an afterthought. I resigned myself to going—it was Penn State after all. I’d drive up in my parents’ station wagon. But I was not going to bring my parents. In the backseat were my cooler of beer and my bong. Riding shotgun was my oldest friend from public school and my wrestling teammate, Floyd. We had remained best friends since junior high, and while his dog Whitey still hated me, times had changed at school. As seniors, Floyd was voted “Friendliest” and I was named “Foxiest.”
It
