and he never competed again. I got my win, but we lost to Cal Poly, and nothing after that went the way we wanted. Our team steadily fell apart and dropped in the rankings. We lost three starters—all of them nationally ranked—due to academic ineligibility. We lost another to injury. Me? I was taken down by a different foe. I contracted gladiatorum, a strain of herpes unique to wrestlers. It was all over my face and even written about in the newspaper. I was 8–0 and nationally ranked at the time. My skin condition cleared up, and I proceeded to go on the worst losing streak of my career.
It started at the match against Florida. Free of the virus on my face, I stayed out drinking the night before with some upperclassmen, trying to seduce a girl. I lost my match. That the coaches blamed the upperclassman didn’t matter. Nothing anybody said mattered. I had lost for the first time at Penn State, and my failure stuck in my head like it hadn’t since I lost in third grade. It took me five matches to break the streak and eke out a tie against a Naval Academy wrestler—a result that pulled me out of my funk and into the winning streak that led to my first NCAA National Tournament in Des Moines.
Only one other guy from the team made it, a senior named Sam, and while everyone else left for spring break, he and I trained on campus. The night before we left for Des Moines, Sam shared how happy he was to be finished with wrestling. I figured he meant going out as an All-American. Hell no, I’ll be lucky to make it past the second round. I hate wrestling. Sam told me his father had been his coach in high school and had made him wrestle, berated him at every practice, managed every plate of food, and forced Sam to go out on after-dinner runs every evening while he followed in the car.
I didn’t love that my father never supported my wrestling life, but I had never appreciated him more. I resolved never to be like either of our fathers when I became a dad. About anything. Ever. When Sam and I fell short in placing in Des Moines, he was ecstatic; I was devastated. But then Amateur Wrestling News named me as the top freshman in the country at my weight class. My mindset shifted. I was more determined than ever to become a national champion, and I had a new goal too: the 1980 Olympic Trials.
Dan and I had been picked to compete for the New York Athletic Club, or NYAC, which was the top Olympic wrestling club in the nation. At my first national event with the NYAC, I won, defeating the top NYAC guy and solidifying my spot on the club. If that wasn’t enough, Dan Gable’s wrestling camp in Pittsburgh hired me as their only college-age clinician. My wrestling hero and gold medalist from the 1972 Olympics—the guy I begged to do takedowns with four years earlier—now wrestled with me for real between our teaching sessions.
As I headed back to Virginia for the summer after camp, everything was about as perfect as it could be. I took a job working construction for a high school buddy, who had become a bit of a DC gangster and hired former wrestlers to roll into bad sections of DC and tear apart buildings.
Yep, everything was perfect…until I learned my friend dabbled in more than construction. He also moved large quantities of cocaine to local dealers.
Rather than run away from the source, I ran right into it. Almost a year to the day since first trying cocaine, I was all in. With no wrestling, I had no reason to stop. By the end of the summer, I was basically paid with a Ziploc bag filled with white powder, which I snorted all weekend to get that full feeling I had been longing for.
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When I returned to Penn State, I steered clear of cocaine as I worked to keep my grades up and be ready for wrestling season. Not that I had any money for cocaine on campus…or money for anything. NCAA rules did not allow any funding to go toward things like film or art supplies, and also did not allow a scholarship athlete to have an on-campus job. We made some money off-book during football season selling programs at Beaver Stadium, but I basically lived off of boxed mac and cheese. As the season progressed, I started feeling sorry for myself and alone, thinking no one understood how brutal and difficult my life was while I was living off $100 a month—not nearly enough to feed myself properly after hours of daily training.
It got worse. That fall, I got a call that my cousin Susan, just a few years younger than me, had been paralyzed in a car accident with three other girls riding home from a football game. She was sitting in the back of the car and wasn’t wearing her seatbelt when they hit a drainage ditch. Her spine just snapped. She was the only one injured.
Susan and I were close, and I went back to DC to see her in the hospital. What I saw made me freeze. Her bed was a table that got flipped every hour so she didn’t get bedsores. There was a halo screwed into her temples and attached to a cable on two weighted pulleys, designed to gently get everything flowing in her back so the nerves would hopefully start working again.
I did everything I could to keep her spirits up. If her table was turned down, I rolled underneath to talk to her face to face. Who was I to complain about being on the floor, when I couldn’t comprehend what she was going through, and what she’d have to go through just to try and regain use of her fingers? I had broken someone’s neck less than a year before. I always knew there was a risk to my sport. But this shook me. I realized just how much life could change in an instant.
Susan eventually did more than regain the use of her fingers. She moved her arms too. She persevered. She used a motorized recumbent to exercise her legs, to keep them strong even when they couldn’t move on their own. Years later, she walked down the aisle at her sister’s wedding with a specialized walker that moved her legs forward. It was incredible. Everybody in the church was in tears, because everybody knew Susan’s story.
No one knew me—not even me. If I was really the man I believed I was, I would have straightened up my situation. Stopped drinking. Stopped doing drugs. I saw Susan’s pain. I felt it. I felt it just as I had years before, when I wrestled in Poland as a junior national champion. Not wanting to leave as the Ugly Americans on our final night, the team gathered up all of our remaining złoty, placed the crumbled bills and coins in a paper bag, and went down to the town square. We found a man who had lost a leg sitting beside a fountain.
We all sat and knelt around him and presented him with the bag. He stared at us with tears in his eyes, and as we left, each of us shook his hand. But did I go back home that summer and realize how fragile life is and change? No. It was summer—time to drink and smoke and enjoy my All-American life and become the All-American athlete I longed to be. And then a different kind of Ugly American: the full-blown addict who destroyed it all.
After I saw Susan, I made sure I wore my seatbelt and stopped throwing myself a pity party. I returned to school, recommitted myself to dominating my opponents, qualified for the NCAA Nationals, and suffered a heartbreaking first-round loss to an opponent I had defeated earlier in the season.
Deflated, my coach told me to not hit the bars like most disappointed wrestlers, but to sit in the arena and watch the champs. Learn how they carry themselves through each match and onto the podium. Know what you don’t know and then make it happen. It was literally and figuratively the most sobering experience of my life. That, and maybe Susan’s perseverance had taught me something. By the time I got to the Olympic Trials in Madison, Wisconsin, I was ready.
Problem was, my country was not. No one left those trials to wrestle for gold. The United States led sixty-five countries in a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, protesting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. My only consolation prize was that I qualified for the twenty-and-under Junior World Team run by the US Olympic coach. His camp demanded ten miles of running a day, along with two hours of live wrestling sessions, where I battled the legendary Dave Schultz, of Foxcatcher fame, and his brother Mark for the first time. They took me every match but also sharpened my resolve, and I left camp a better wrestler.
Problem was, that meant I was also going home to be a better addict. I took the job at the construction company again, and again took my paychecks in Ziploc bags.
