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 B

Alto High is the best any US high school wrestler has ever produced.
    In November, he missed a few matches of his high school team to compete in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the prestigious Great Plains freestyle tournament. Despite being a high school wrestler, Dave advanced to the finals against Chuck Yagla. Dave was just a high school senior and he was going up against Yagla, who had completed his collegiate wrestling career at the University of Iowa a year earlier. Yagla had won the 1975 and ’76 NCAA Championships and was named the meet’s Outstanding Wrestler his senior year.
    Dave was down a few points to Yagla when the two were chest to chest, arms around each other. Dave caught the two-time NCAA champ in a step-around body lock, taking a long step withhis left leg and wrapping it around Chuck’s right leg to trap it. Dave then drove Chuck straight to his back, keeping Chuck’s right leg trapped with his left leg, and pinned him for the victory.
    Winning at Great Plains qualified Dave for the Tbilisi tournament in Soviet Georgia, considered the best in the world because all the Soviet wrestlers took part and they formed the most dominant team in world and Olympic competitions. Dave placed second there, higher than any other American.
    Dave had finished fourth at state his sophomore and junior years, but competing in Tbilisi kept him out of the high school tournaments that would have qualified him for the California state championship meet. Coach Hart petitioned the state coaches association to allow Dave to compete anyway, but in one class higher at 170 pounds. The coaches agreed, knowing Dave would win state. And he did, easily, with his closest score 12–1 in the finals.
    After state, Dave took part in the Greco-Roman National Championships. In Greco-Roman, wrestlers are not allowed to use their legs to attack and cannot attack an opponent’s legs. Dave won that tournament and the Gorriaran Award given to the wrestler who totals the most falls in the least amount of time.
    College recruiters were lining up to make their best sales pitches to Dave.
    Dave revolutionized wrestling because of his emphasis on technique. Before, most coaches had emphasized pure conditioning. At that time, freestyle matches were nine minutes long and college matches lasted eight minutes. In a nine-minute match, conditioning tended to be the only thing that mattered, because wrestlers with great technique but lousy conditioning could get wiped out by superconditioned wrestlers.
    Dave changed that because he was well conditioned
and
possessed super technique. That’s why as a high school senior he was able to beat some of the world’s best wrestlers with a body that looked as if it belonged to, as one friend of ours liked to say, a chemistry professor. Dave’s body was deceiving, though; he actually had incredible core strength.
    —
    M y probation ended in the middle of my junior year, and I moved back to Palo Alto, although too late to try out for the wrestling team. I reached out to another one of Dave’s wrestling friends, Chris Horpel, who had recently graduated from Stanford after earning All-American honors. Chris was seven years older than I was. At first, we had almost an older brother–younger brother relationship. I tried to make Chris like me by getting him to laugh at my Steve Martin imitations. After a while, he got pretty good at imitating Steve, too. Steve Martin was the best, and Chris and I cracked each other up with his comedy.
    Chris coached me and wrestled against me the remainder of my junior year and during the summer. He also arranged for me to train with some of Stanford’s wrestlers, and that would give me a huge advantage over other competitors my age. Unable to compete on the school team, I wrestled in amateur freestyle tournaments almost every weekend. Most of the time, I lost my first two matches and was eliminated. But I hit a growth spurt during that period and at the end of the summer won a pretty big