Читать книгу Wrestling with Angels - John Hanrahan - Страница 12
ОглавлениеALL-AMERICAN ADDICT
Before that night of my last home match, I had survived everything college, cocaine, and wrestling had thrown at me. In fact, I didn’t even come in contact with cocaine my first year at Penn State. Never sought it out, despite the craving I had the summer before college started. Because I wanted something more: to be the best wrestler at Penn State.
I survived temptation when the roommate I requested, an All-American transfer from another school whom I’d met on a recruiting trip, turned out to be much crazier than I thought. He would jump me from out of the blue, lock me in a hold, and I’d have to wrestle my way out of the predicament. It could happen while walking across campus or through a building lobby. He attacked me from behind as I got ready for a date. I split my lip on the sliding closet door, leaving me with an upper lip the size of a golf ball, black thread stitching the cut all the way to my nostril, and a face no sorority girl was going to kiss. Another time he grabbed me from behind. I got my hips in position and tossed him head over heels, and he landed on his head, cracking open the skin of his skull on the tile floor. He actually began laughing and howling with pleasure as the blood flowed through his dark hair and dripped down his face. Not long after that, I began avoiding him and staying out of the dorm room as much as possible.
I survived when I started pulling the same shit I did in high school and tried to fake my way through classes. In the evenings, while everyone was studying and doing classwork, I would go over to Dan’s frat house looking for something to do. It wasn’t long before I learned there was no pretending being prepared at Penn State. My writing professor was the first to contact the athletic academic counselor to let her know I was falling short and would need extra work. Unlike high school, I actually listened, pulling off a string of A papers to finish strong. I even enjoyed some classes, especially my photography and marketing courses.
I had no choice but to survive. My biggest fear now was to fall short, become academically ineligible, and miss my chance to be a varsity wrestler for Penn State as a freshman. I pushed through Coach Lorenzo’s grueling workouts. I became a warrior, unafraid of anyone, determined to win a spot on varsity over the three guys in front of me. I spent nights after practice with ice bags wrapped around my bruised and battered joints. I arrived early to have a trainer tape my ankle, knee, and fingers—armor protecting any part of my body that felt vulnerable.
When the time came, I tore through the first two challengers. First was a senior, a former state champion, lifeguard, frat boy, and big man on campus. I took him down and clamped him to his back so quickly and easily that he left the room, quit the team, and became captain of the cheerleading squad instead. Next up was another senior, this time a tough street-fighter type who spent his free time in a motorcycle gang. He was a scrapper—a real-life bar room brawler—who I wouldn’t want to mess with outside the ring. But inside? He couldn’t intimidate me even when our bout turned to a fistfight. I thumped him too.
The stage was set for my final challenge: a wrestle-off against a two-time Maryland state champ, a strong farm boy whom I had previously torn apart during my recruiting visit. He told our teammates he was confident that this was his year. I used that confidence against him to get the first takedown and then cautiously controlled the first period, waiting to see if he showed me something I had not seen before. He didn’t. I took bottom position to start the second period and quickly rolled out for an escape to my feet. I immediately came back in, tying up his arm, faking one way, and exerting a Japanese arm throw in the opposite direction he was anticipating. My explosive arm throw dislocated his shoulder. The match was stopped.
I had won my spot. I made my debut in my Penn State singlet at the East Stroudsburg Collegiate Open, blazing through the bracket and winning the tournament. I made my home debut in Rec Hall just after that, against a top-ranked opponent and all-around aggressive brute from Cal Poly who was ranked fifth in the country. When we stepped out of bounds in the first round and the referee blew the whistle, I stopped but he didn’t. He bulled me off the mat, across the gym floor, and up onto the scorer’s table. The crowd gasped, but all I thought was, What an asshole this guy is. I baited him by walking meekly back to the center, my body language reading I’m totally intimidated. Come at me again like a bull and I’ll crumble. And when he came at me like a bull again, I stood firm and allowed him to bear hug my torso. When he did, I over-locked and clamped down on his arms, stepped in between his legs, popped my hips with extreme force, and took him for a high-flying ride with me in a chest-to-chest arching Salto with a twist. I scored the feet-to-back takedown, and the match was stopped as he rolled to his back in agony. EMS rushed in. I shook his hand as he was rolled out to the hospital. It was not the way I wanted to win, but it was a legal technique, and the referee raised my arm in an upset victory over a top national contender.
I later heard that he had broken his neck, 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.
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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 I took my third-place spot next to him on the podium, I looked up at him and had only one thing to say: Hey, I have some weed. You want to smoke? We ended up in a squash court, breaking up the bud and cleaning the seeds on the copy of the winner’s bracket they gave him. Amateur Wrestling News voted mine the best performance.
If they only knew just how true that was, in ways nobody could see yet.
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I returned to campus for the end of my junior year one of the top wrestlers in the country and a genuine campus celebrity. To the victor goes the spoils: I started dating the most popular girl on campus. My notoriety grew as I took down Penn State’s number-one recruit at the Eastern Freestyle tournament held at Rec Hall. He was a local hero who was not only the top-ranked high school wrestler in the nation at my weight class, but also the top recruit in the nation period. A kid who was a big fan of that recruit came over afterward to compliment me on the beating and say how he was glad some of the wind was taken out of his friend’s sails, because his head was getting too big.
When our recruit arrived on campus that fall, he did not challenge me at my weight class. Instead, he cut down and dropped a weight class, in which he also became an All-American. We even became good friends. Because that’s what wrestling does. It humbles you…just not enough for me when it came to cocaine, which now filled most of my non-match days. My girlfriend and I made quite the striking couple, and we met a guy that controlled all of the drug traffic in Happy Valley. He threw parties in his opulent homes and liked to be around beautiful women. He loaded me with cocaine so we’d grace him with our presence. I was happy to oblige.
But while I now had a source for cocaine, I was even more determined to make it to the top of the NCAA podium in my final college season. That summer, before my senior year, I often woke up in the middle of the night replaying the moment I got pinned in the semifinals. I was so close and knew I could get all the way to the top. I vowed to get stronger, and took a summer job with my sister’s boyfriend, who had a large DC-area landscaping company. I mowed steep hills at apartment complexes, tying a rope to the back of the mower and then lowering and pulling it up with my feet planted in a wrestling stance. As I shuffled along each hill, I imitated pulling a leg attack on my opponent—never relenting, or else I would slip under the mower blades and cut myself up.
I got stronger every day, pushing my physical limits in the humid DC heat. But I was also getting weaker. I was still working for the construction company for my bags of coke. Plus, it wasn’t just the cocaine that threatened my life that summer. One hot night, driving out of DC, I got arrested for drunk driving on the George Washington Parkway and thrown into lockup at Washington National Airport. I was released the next day and ended up with reduced charges after I faced the court and admitted I had five or six drinks. Apparently everyone who came before that judge lied about his or her drunken state, and he took the opportunity with me to lecture the court. This young man is the first ever to come in front of me and say anything other than he had one or two drinks. What do people take me for, a fool? I’m so sick and tired of hearing, “One or two, Your Honor.”
My candid response coupled with my otherwise clean driving record led to his leniency. But did my honesty with the judge make me honest with myself about how far gone I was? No. My addiction was pushing its way into everything I loved and pushing me further and further from the truth and honesty I had been raised to honor. I was living a lie, testing the limits of my God-given talents, and my body, and now my life.
Then, I pushed even farther. That summer, I injected cocaine for the first time in a sort of blood brother ritual with a friend. We knew it was dangerous, but that didn’t stop us. We agreed before inserting the needle that if one of us died and the other one lived, that person should take the body and put it up by the creek that separated our neighborhoods and not tell anybody. No one should get blamed.
We never discussed what would happen if we both died.
We lived, and I went back to Penn State my senior year with dreams of winning my first NCAA title and a big bag of cocaine in my duffel. No more needles, though—as if that was some kind of moral victory and meant things weren’t falling apart. Which they were. The first sign was that I returned to campus senior year without having lined up a place to live, like every other student had done. I ended up living out of my Honda Civic for the first weeks of the semester, crashing wherever I could, and using the team’s locker room at Rec Hall to shower.
I managed to get clean before the season, which started with high expectations, as I was ranked second in the country behind Dave Schultz. I had only wrestled with Schultz as a junior, but even then he was clearly one of the very best in the entire world. We finally met in a dual meet in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and prior to the match, I found myself nervous in an unfamiliar way. I had seen Dave perform and realized his potential to put me in situations I had never visualized. Dave was dangerous. Sure, I had broken someone’s neck, but Dave had the power to paralyze an opponent with his explosive technique and unique positioning. I thought about Susan. I wondered if that could be me, but then I fell back into my pre-match ritual of turning my anxiety into fuel.
Our battle began. I took the first shot on Dave with an explosive deep single leg, but Dave was able to get around my neck and tighten the head and arm lock like a boa constrictor, cutting off the blood supply to my brain. Let go of the leg or go unconscious was what his hold told me, but I came up with another option and, with my last moment of pre-suffocation consciousness, tried to drive us out of bounds. The ref, who had no idea I was being strangled, blew the whistle and stopped the action. Able to breathe again, I attacked with a different approach—a head in the gut double—that scored the first takedown on Schultz that season. But with Schultz in top position in the second period, I got stuck on my back in one of his patented spine-breaking leg rides. I submitted and turned to my back. Done.
I met Schultz one more time before the national tournament started, at the East-West All-Star event where I represented the East. He beat me again and opened a deep cut around my eye socket in the process. I got stitched up at the arena and upped my determination to beat him at nationals.
I returned to Penn State as a man on a mission. No one was going to beat my work ethic. I had never missed a practice, a match, or ever lost a challenge match since taking that varsity spot at the beginning of my Penn State career, and I wasn’t about to start now. I would lead by example and groom the next generation to take my place—but they would have to fight for the right. Every day, I walked into the wrestling room with the intent of not only breaking my opponents, but also protecting myself in the process. I figured the only way a challenger could take me out would be by injuring me during practice.
Which did happen. One of the underclassmen had thrust his hand toward my face as we battled, and his finger knifed deeply into my eye socket, cutting the white of my eye. I fell to the mat clutching my face and screaming obscenities. The trainer pulled my hands away and wrapped the eye, which was bleeding from the socket, and got me to the hospital. Coach met me at the hospital. With my eye patched up, the doc said I would be fine, but we were only concerned about one thing: could I wrestle? We faced Lehigh University the next day. Doc said I could, and I did. And I won.
There would be no excuses for losing in this part of my life—no lies, no blame. After letting my pre-match anxiety wash over me, I walked into every match fueled with confidence, regardless of who was on the other side—even Schultz. I had doubled down on wrestling again. My addiction could never break through here.
Until it did. The night of my last home match.
