Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold Read Online Free PDF Page A

Cutting involves heavy workouts to make you sweat as much as you can; cutting back on food, or even cutting out food altogether; and, when a wrestler is really having to work hard to make weight, sticking a finger in your throat so you vomit. Done the wrong way—as in those extreme cases—cutting weight is dangerous. But it has been a part of the sport for as far back as I’ve heard it explained.
    When I was competing in wrestling, the predominant philosophy was that cutting lots of weight gave a wrestler an advantage in that he would be bigger than a wrestler who didn’t cut to the same weight. Basically, a wrestler who cut would lose body fat to get down in weight and would have more muscle mass than the other wrestler.
    I thought it was a stupid philosophy, especially for someone with a lean body type, which I had from gymnastics. I weighed 136. Six pounds may not sound like too much of a difference, but because I was lean, I was cutting water weight and my body was eating my muscles. When calories aren’t coming in from outside the body, energy must be found from what is stored in the body. Carbs are burned during aerobic (with oxygen) actions, and proteins are burned with anaerobic (without oxygen) actions. Because I didn’t have much body fat, the only way for me to lose weight was to burn energy from muscle protein and by dehydrating water weight through sweating. As a result, my ability to perform was significantly hampered.
    Wade Yates, one of my best friends, was a district runner-up the previous season for Ashland in my weight. Coach Brown created a rule that if two wrestlers were in the same weight, they would wrestle challenge matches each week for that weight’s spot on the varsity. Wade and I wrestled eleven times in ten weeks, and I won ten times. I had to lift my level of intensity so high when I wrestled Wade each week that I suffered a drop-off for the ensuing competitions.
    I think I got pinned in my first four matches and didn’t have a clue why I was getting destroyed.
    Dave’s reputation was that he became so good because of his vast knowledge of techniques. I was new to wrestling and didn’t know any moves, so I set out to learn as many as I could. Dave and I had a friend named Jim Goguen who wrestled at Southern Oregon College (now Southern Oregon University) in Ashland.
    I went over to the campus, and Jim introduced me to the concept of gaining hand control from the bottom to escape an opponent riding you on top. I call it the “hand-control standup.”
    Here’s how it works: You’re down on the mat, and your opponent has his arms around you. You grab his fingers so that he can’t grab his own hand to get a locked grip around you or grab your hands so that he has what’s known as hand control. Then you put your feet out in front of you, arch your back so that you can get your hips away from his hips, and then cut free from your opponent with a quick turn. That’s an effective way of escaping your opponent.
    The hand-control standup worked well because of one indisputable fact: The back of your head is harder than your opponent’s face. If the other guy’s face was behind my head, Jim told me, I should smash his face with my head. No opponent would want to hang on if he was being smashed in the face.
    After Jim taught me that move, almost no one could hold me down. I employed that move all throughout high school and college and into national and international competitions. At the college level, scoring includes one point for riding time. Riding time comes when a wrestler is in control of an opponent on the mat, and the wrestler being controlled is unable to escape or score a reversal. At the end of the match, if a wrestler has one minute more ofriding time than his opponent, one riding time point is added to his score. After my second year in college, no opponent scored a riding time point against me.
    The hand-control concept was just as effective from on top. If I could control an