LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 2

      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,

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