LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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