For years after Lance was gone, Willine and Micki kept his picture inside oval gold lockets that hung around their necks. In his grandmother’s locket, he is an infant, maybe ten months old, wearing a fire-engine-red romper. In his aunt’s, a toddler with a goofy smile.
To this day, Willine is haunted by the last time she saw Lance. She was babysitting him, and he was about four. His mother swung by to pick him up, and found him under the Gundersons’ dining room table. The grandmother remembers the boy saying, happily, “I’m just going to live under here. I won’t take up too much room. I’m just going to live under this table.” But his mother grabbed Lance by the arm and led him through the front door, the boy crying as they went. She slammed the door. The grandmother never saw the boy again.
The Gundersons had no idea that the Armstrongs were living in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas, and had no money to hire a lawyer or investigator to find him. The Gundersons held out hope that Armstrong would come looking for them someday, maybe when he had children of his own. At their church—Four Mile Lutheran, which his relatives helped found and build east of Dallas 165 years ago—the congregation for years had prayed for Armstrong every Sunday.
The Gundersons wrote to Armstrong occasionally, but he never answered. They rarely called Linda’s family, and when they tried they heard only the click of a phone being put back into its cradle.
Linda’s brother, Alan, felt sorry for Sonny and was the Gundersons’ only source of information about the boy. He once came over to Sonny’s place and gave him a school picture of Armstrong, a color 8x10. The Gundersons inspected Lance’s face closely, the first time they had seen it in more than five years.
He had the same deep blue eyes as his father, and the same high cheekbones. They wondered if he possessed other family traits: Would Lance be hard and stubborn? Did he have problems with authority? Did he see the world in extremes? Did he hold grudges?
Armstrong’s grandmother is now nearly ninety. When she turned eighty, she moved in with Micki, who resides in one of Dallas’s most exclusive neighborhoods, among mansions and estates with guardhouses. Her husband, Mike Rawlings, was elected mayor in 2011.
Willine’s thick brown hair has turned snowy white. Her once rod-straight posture has become permanently bent. She uses a walker and needs thick glasses and bright lights to see. Her hearing is going, too, but her mind is sharp. Next to her bed she has photos of six of her seven grandchildren and six of her eleven great-grandchildren—but not a single photo of Lance Armstrong at any age, nor photos of any of his five children. It’s as if Lance Armstrong had never existed in her family.
The last name is all that remains of Terry Armstrong. Just as she had erased Eddie Gunderson, Linda removed Terry. Divorce records show they were married fourteen years, until Lance was nearly seventeen. Linda, meanwhile, continues to represent herself as a single mother who raised her son alone.
In her career as a motivational speaker –that pays her as much as $20,000 a pop—there is hardly a word about Terry’s involvement in Lance’s life. (Some newspapers have quoted her saying the marriage lasted only until Lance was thirteen. She declined to be interviewed for this book.) In her autobiography, she never uses Terry’s name. She calls him “the Salesman” or “Sales.” The best allowance she makes for him is that “Sales coached Lance’s Little League team, he did do that. He gets some credit for effort there, but I’m not sure how much he enjoyed it. Lance wasn’t the budding baseball star Sales would have liked him to be.”
In truth, Terry Armstrong could not have been more different from Eddie Gunderson. One had been the cool bad boy in the Pontiac GTO spending late nights at R&B clubs rather than with his wife and newborn child. The other was the twenty-two-year-old son of a minister, a churchgoer with a steady job and an eagerness to be a father.
A wholesale food salesman who hawked barbecued meats and corn dogs to schools and businesses, he had met Linda Mooneyham Gunderson at a car dealership and was smitten with the cute, spunky brunette. He looked like the kind of guy who could buy a car with cash, which was its own sort of handsome. They started going steady and it fast-tracked into a marriage proposal. With Linda, Terry married into the role he had always wanted: father to a son. With Terry, Linda had found a solid, stable provider.
According to divorce records, and Terry himself, the two were married for most of the boy’s formative years—ages two through sixteen. In that time, Lance learned how to compete in his trademark way: as an irritable, cocky bruiser.
Both father and son were driven by an intensity that often turned to ruthlessness. Lance saw it when Terry coached his football teams and advised him in his early efforts in bike racing. Terry could be demanding, especially when his son didn’t meet his expectations.
At the boy’s first BMX bike race, Lance fell and started crying. Terry marched over to the fallen child and said, “That’s it, we’re going.” Then he grabbed Lance’s bike. “We’re done. No kid with my name’s gonna quit.” Properly admonished, or frightened, Lance got back on his bike and competed in another race. Terry thought it was proof of his son’s toughness.
When Lance was seven and then eight, he played for the Oilers, a team in a YMCA tackle football league in Garland, Texas. Terry Armstrong was one of the coaches. At the team’s first practice, Terry gathered the players and the fathers around him.
“Let me tell y’all about this football team we’re gonna have here,” he said. “If your kid’s not any good, he ain’t playing. This is not just a show-up-and-run-around situation. We’re going to win.”
Against the league’s rules, he videotaped other teams’ workouts and held after-school practices in the privacy of his backyard to gain an edge. His idea of a bedtime story for Lance was an old copy of a Vince Lombardi fire-and-brimstone speech about winners and losers. Once, when he believed Lance had loafed through a football game’s fourth quarter, he didn’t talk to him for a week. Lance would come to the dinner table, and he’d say, “You’re just a loser—you didn’t put the effort out.” Meanwhile, his team of eight-year-olds went undefeated through eleven games.
Terry and Linda never were a perfect match. Neither claims to have ever been madly in love, or even that love was the foundation for their union. Neither Linda Armstrong in her book, nor Terry Armstrong in interviews, can remember any details of their wedding.
Several of Lance’s pals say that his mother was more of a friend to him than a parent. They remember Lance once asking her to get dolled up so she could ride around in the limo he had rented for his prom, making it quite an uncomfortable trio—Lance, his prom date and his mother. Lance’s friends and some of his former coaches say Linda was a permissive parent who indulged her son’s every wish. (Example: He drove himself alone to his driver’s license test.)
So, according to Terry Armstrong, he became the disciplinarian by default. When Lance disobeyed or mouthed off—both frequent occurrences—Terry had a routine. He waited for Linda to come home. He armed himself with his fraternity paddle before telling Lance, “Grab your ankles!” Then he used the paddle against the growing young man’s rear end.
If Lance didn’t clean his room—not so much as a sock out of place, per the protocol of Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, where Terry had been wrapped in a blanket and viciously beaten by other cadets—Terry administered two licks. Talk back? Two licks. Years later, Lance described those spankings as traumatic, saying that the pain was more emotional than physical.
Terry and Linda often fought about Lance’s schoolwork. Terry remembers, “I would say, ‘You can’t go outside until you get your homework done,’ and she would say, ‘Well, he’s my son and I make the rules.’ I would ask for his report card, and she would say, ‘I’ll handle it, he’s my son.’”
One perhaps inevitable result of the parental disagreements was that Lance became an angry,