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 the senseless violence I experienced and also could not understand in my own life.
In seventh grade, I was no longer in Catholic school but bussed to J. G. Whittier Junior High School, a recently integrated school in the same neighborhood as T. C. Williams High School, which had its racial tensions captured in the movie Remember the Titans. The movie told the story of how the school’s football team overcame its own racial bias and hate in their hearts. They began to appreciate one another and destroy their opponents, who often continued to spew hate as TC went on to win the state championship.
Despite that victory, tensions remained high, as they had since the DC riots of 1968. We were integrated but not together. Every morning after the buses arrived, white kids would gather on one side of the lobby and black kids on the other. Most mornings, I hid my 85-pound frame behind Charlie, a 280-pound wrestler who lived on my block and had been held back, which made him even bigger than the biggest kids. Charlie knew me as a “little” wrestler, and he let me stay behind him as fights broke out all around us. On a few occasions, the violence was bad enough to close down the school for the day and bus us home.
Despite my wrestling prowess, I avoided fighting anywhere but the mat for three reasons: I was still small, I didn’t want to give my dad a reason to put me back in Catholic school, and I had no desire to fight people who I did not hate. In fact, my best friend Floyd was the first black kid I became close to. We knew each other from football before junior high, and I talked him into doing wrestling. Despite our different backgrounds, Floyd became part of my family, and I became part of his, though his chained-up dog, Whitey, never accepted me. Every time Whitey growled at me, Floyd just laughed. Don’t mind her. She just hates white people.
After a local high school football game one night, racial tensions spilled over into the streets of our town. Floyd’s older brother was killed in a hit-and-run that the news attributed to racism. It was as senseless and tragic as the Munich Massacre unfolding that summer. It all left me confused, nervous, and unsettled.
A few days later, we learned of more death in the shadow of the Olympic tragedy. Rick Sanders had left Munich, silver medal around his neck and girlfriend on his arm, and started hitchhiking through Eastern Europe. His body had been found along the road, apparently run over by a truck. His bag contained his red USA Olympic team pants and jacket and six dollars. His Olympic silver medal was never recovered.
Reports of Sanders’ end affected my wrestling brotherhood deeply. The older wrestlers from my neighborhood told us younger ones incredible stories about him, how he was known