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.
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When I returned to campus junior year, I was once again able to control my addiction when it came to my matches. But for the first time, I brought some cocaine back to campus and got high before a few preseason workouts. When the cocaine ran out, I was too broke to find more. I had used all I had left of my summer “paychecks.” Wrestling once again became my sole addiction, and I was on a mission to place at nationals, if I could survive all the other stupid shit I did to get high.
My campaign started ominously, but not because of any drugs: I was a man behind a literal mask. A road trip back to DC with a bunch of my teammates turned into a weekend of raucous Georgetown nightlife and after-hours street fights. One fight had left me with a knife wound in my left thigh, my face scraped, my nose broken by the concrete sidewalk, and all of us running from the police. We made it back to my family’s basement, where my sister Teri, now an ER nurse, made me go to the hospital. They stitched up my leg and told me to get an ENT doctor to set my broken nose. I couldn’t be bothered. I let it set as it was so I could get back to the wrestling room Monday. Which is how I ended up wearing a protective mask the first tournament of the season. I cruised to the finals where I faced Jeff Parker who had dominated his way through the brackets. Between rounds Parker would strut around the arena in his flashy purple-and-gold LSU attire accessorized with a flamboyant tasseled hat. Parker was extremely strong, he locked me up around the neck; I was disoriented wearing the mask. I got thrown to the mat in a tight headlock and lost 10–5. At least the crowd couldn’t see my humiliated face as Parker celebrated his victory. I threw it away after that match, my broken nose slowly healed, and I stayed motivated to finding a way to beat an opponent as fierce as Parker. I was hungry to win and also just plain hungry, because I was still broke. I was even desperate enough to steal to feed myself.
I had just returned from a prestigious tournament in Chicago during winter break after another crazy but much closer loss to Parker, and State College was deserted. I was hungry, no one was around, and I only had enough money to buy a loaf of bread. I grabbed the bread and a piece of cheese, and then headed to the cashier with my gloves and the cheese in one hand and the loaf of bread in the other. I put the loaf on the counter and paid for it while trying to hide the cheese in my gloves, but the clerk busted me as I left. I considered making an easy dash for the door as he came around the counter, but at that exact moment I saw Coach Lorenzo through the store window, walking down the sidewalk with a recruit and his parents. I ducked back as they passed and decided to bring shame only on myself. I surrendered, and luckily the story was kept out of the news.
My near-arrest shook me enough to focus on training for the NCAA tournament. My intense training, pushing myself to a never-before-reached threshold, left me in tears. My tears turned to laughter when I realized I had broken through to a new level. I worked harder than I ever had, and I knew as our contingent of four Lions headed to nationals that I was going to place. I was not going to lose a match that I deserved to win.
My body’s lactic acids were burning, draining my power and performance, as they often did in the first round of a tournament, but I shook off that usual slow start and won my first match. In fact, the entire Penn State contingent swept round one and was in third place in the team category. But there was little time for celebration. Up next in my bracket: Parker, who had demolished his first-round opponent and stared me down confidently as I stepped on to the mat.
I knew I needed a new strategy, so I hit him like a freight train, with my head in his gut, and plowed through on an explosive double-leg takedown. I rode and turned him on his back several times; he never had a chance to recover. I got the win, but also got a deep bloody gash on my chin. The gash was stitched up that night but it didn’t stop me from stitching together another dominating win the next day over the defending national champ before losing in the semifinals to one of Dan Gable’s guys from Iowa. Dan knew I liked to take that initial shot, so he just had his guy sit back and catch me when I did. I lunged in right off the whistle, hitting my blast double—a modified version of my “patented” second-grade football tackle—but he under-hooked my arms as I wrapped his legs and pancaked me, like a flapjack being flipped on a hot skillet. I spent the next two minutes fighting off my back until I couldn’t anymore.
Undaunted, I wanted to show Coach Lorenzo I had learned my lesson watching the champs last year and vowed to come back and take third. I did by coming back through the consolation brackets and beating Iowa State’s national runner-up Perry Hummel. I then watched Dan’s guy get upset by Oklahoma’s future Olympic champion, Mark Schultz, in the final. Mark became the national champion. As