Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  The first time Dave raced the bus to school, the bus won, but narrowly enough that the defeat left him keenly motivated to give it another try. The next day he lost again, but his margin of defeat was even smaller. On his third try the seventh grader triumphed. By then Dave was hooked on the strenuous morning ritual, and he continued to race the bus daily, even through the worst of Davis’s winter weather, with frost on the ground and blinding fog in the air.

  Exactly one traffic light stood between home and school. Some days it was green when the bus reached it, other days red. If the driver was caught by that light, Dave knew he had him. But it felt like cheating. He wanted the bus to flow through so he could beat it fair and square.

  YOUNG DAVE SCOTT could not remember a time when he did not feel the constant pressure of a tremendous energy threatening to split his body wide open. His only release was to engage in as much physical exertion as he could squeeze into a day, every day. He did not learn such drive or absorb it from his environment. He was born with it.

  Dave’s childhood was about as normal as an American childhood could be. Davis, where he was born and raised, was a wholesome, middle-class university town located thirteen miles west of Sacramento—a sort of upscale Levittown of the West, with broad, tree-lined streets; comfortable, unostentatious houses; and pridefully manicured lawns. The Scott home had been custom-built for the family of five but was typical in every detail—a two-story, flat-fronted colonial whose interior resembled the set of Ozzie and Harriet.

  Dave grew up with an older sister, Patti, and a younger sister, Jane. His parents were Verne and Dorothy. A Michigan native, Dot had a generally easygoing disposition, but the full-time homemaker’s devotion and loyalty to her husband and children became fierce when necessary. She kept meticulous scrapbooks that documented the noteworthy doings of each of her three equally beloved offspring, including everything from school play programs to clippings from local newspapers that listed the results of their sports competitions. While Dot was not an athlete herself, Dave may have inherited his endurance through her, as her brother, Jim Forshee, was among the best masters runners in the United States. Verne, like most fathers on Elmwood Drive, taught at the university. Neighbors knew Verne as a “Steady Eddy” type: hardworking and competent yet completely unassuming. A big values guy, Verne saddled his children with household chores to teach discipline and the value of a dollar (their allowances were tied to performance of those chores). He played practical jokes on the Walker family across the street and practiced a teasing sense of humor on everyone he liked. He rode a three-speed bike to work in the morning. That, and a little tennis and a little golf, constituted his exercise.

  Verne came to know his son’s appetite for physical exertion long before Dave began to race the bus to school. The Scott family Sunday service was at a church where Verne was an elder. Dave was miserable there, stuffed inside a wool suit and crammed into the middle of a pew, surrounded by old ladies wearing too much perfume. On one particularly hot summer Sunday, Dave decided he could stand it no longer. During a break in the service he scrambled from the pew, found his father, and tugged on his sleeve.

  “Dad, do you mind if I go home?” he asked.

  If Verne’s instinct was to deny his young son’s unwelcome request, that instinct was countered by the innocent unhappiness on Dave’s face.

  “Sure,” Verne said gently. “Go on home.”

  No key was needed. The Scott home, like every house in Davis, stood unlocked when empty. Dave ran out of the church and had freed himself from his suit jacket before he reached the sidewalk. He took off toward home, a mile and a half away, at a full sprint. Three-quarters of a mile later he was still sprinting. He felt wonderful, utterly impervious to fatigue. Dave was hit by a powerful sense of rightness. His body and spirit fitted this challenge, this thumbing of his nose in the face of exhaustion, like a key in the lock it was made for.

  Evidence of Dave’s bone-deep will to endure first emerged in the pool. In 1960 a youth swim club called the Davis Aquadarts was formed. A year later Patti, Dave, and Jane joined. (The Scott family tended to do most things together.) Despite developing an ugly, thrashing freestyle stroke that no amount of coaching could break him of, Dave excelled in the pool, becoming one of the strongest swimmers his age not by virtue of superior talent but by outworking everyone else in practice and refusing to lose in competition—and every lap was competition. Verne, a man proud of his own professional work ethic, at first was pleased to see such willingness to suffer in his young son. But Verne soon recognized that Dave’s drive far exceeded anything his father or anyone else could give him by example.

  Unlike the other kids on the team, Dave cut no corners in workouts, always doing everything Coach Jerry Hinsdale asked and often more. His work ethic took him only so far, though. At age 12 Dave swam thirteen races at the California State Fair Swim Meet. He was beaten in all but one of them by a hotshot from the Midwest with a naturally beautiful swim stroke and the memorable name of Murphy Reinschreiber. Indeed, Dave never forgot him. Sixteen years later Dave found Murphy at a triathlon, approached him, and jabbed a finger into his chest.

  “I remember you,” he said. “You beat me in twelve out of thirteen races at the California State Fair Swim Meet in 1966. I’m here for payback!”

  No youth sport is more demanding than swimming, which gives most kids all the activity they need. Not Dave Scott. Nowadays children with such energy are often called hyperactive, but in the 1960s Dave was able to avoid being labeled anything other than normal by grabbing for every sport within reach. From swimming Dave branched out to baseball and excelled with ball and glove, becoming a Little League all-star. He dabbled in tennis and golf as well and showed an aptitude for both, getting his golf handicap down to 11 by age 13. In junior high he took up basketball. When he reached high school Dave tried out for the football team and became a starter at tight end and flanker back. When Davis High School created a water polo team Dave signed up and became the school’s first All-American in any sport.

  Although Dave excelled in every sport, he was not the best in any. He tried harder than anyone to be the best, but it seemed there was always a Murphy Reinschreiber standing in his way—some born talent who made it look easy. Dave’s lowest moment as a young athlete occurred on the basketball court during his sophomore year of high school. At the beginning of the season Dave’s unmatched work ethic earned him a spot as a starting guard on the junior varsity team. But as the team’s losses piled up Coach Dennis Pytel became increasingly disenchanted with Dave’s graceless style of play and progressively more enamored of the lazier but more naturally coordinated kids on the bench. Coach Pytel demoted Dave from starter to second string to bench warmer over the course of the season. Eventually Dave found himself on the court only in garbage minutes at the very end of games. This struck Dave as the height of injustice. And he wasn’t going to take it lying down.

  In the last game of the season Coach Pytel summoned Dave with fifty-nine seconds left on the clock.

  “Scotty, you’re in,” he said.

  Dave hated being called “Scotty.”

  “I’m not going in,” Dave said.

  And he didn’t. Why play a game in which his hard work counted for so little? The hardest worker should always win. It was only fair. Maybe, Dave thought, he just needed to work even harder. So he did.

  As a football player Dave lifted weights, which introduced him to the concept of conditioning. Until then he had only practiced for and competed in sports. But general conditioning for sports was something else—something more he could do. So, while his teammates lifted weights only when required, Dave lifted year-round, which entailed some very late trips to the gym after all the practicing and competing were done.

  Verne and Dot had an eleven-meter lap pool installed in their backyard so Dave would never be unable to swim when he needed to, whether before dawn or after dark. Members of the Walker family across the street often heard him splashing around v
ery late at night, after the practicing and the competing in other sports, and the weight lifting, were done. If there was ever a spare moment between practices for his various sports and his extra conditioning workouts, Dave filled it by bouncing a basketball off the wall of the school gymnasium. Passing students would observe the statuesque youth going about what looked like some form of punishment with an incongruous enjoyment—hammering the inflated sphere against painted cinder blocks at a rate of two rebounds per second with impressive force and tirelessness and no regard for how conspicuous his behavior might appear to someone watching him. It was as though the young man feared stillness, like the sharks that stop breathing if they stop gliding forward.

  In fact, Dave was one of those sharks, in a sense. At about the same time that he started racing the bus to school, Dave began to notice that on the very rare occasions when he missed a few days of activity for some reason—illness, family travel—he felt miserable. One day might be okay. But after two days he was edgy, and three days would send him right over the edge. Normally outgoing and positive, Dave would turn antisocial and irritable. His entire personality would change. Dave just wasn’t Dave without the freedom to move.

  In his early adolescence Dave began to foster a vision of perfection. Having discovered that a little exercise was good and more was better, Dave decided that he wanted to work toward becoming as fit as he could possibly be, if not the fittest man alive, if not the fittest mammal that had ever walked the earth. When he was younger, Dave had spent untold hours poring over the Guinness Book of World Records, reading and rereading each annual edition until it fell apart in his hands. He was fascinated by bests and superlatives and dreamed of earning his own page in a future edition of his favorite book through some feat of inexhaustibility. His vision of ultimate fitness filled Dave with excitement but also caused him to continually judge his current self unfavorably against his ideal. He developed a gently self-mocking sense of humor; like most self-deprecatory jokesters, Dave genuinely believed and privately fretted over everything he said. (“My swim stroke is horrendous,” he half-joked to one writer.)

  Dave was maturing into a magnificent human specimen: tall, tan, blond, and lean. Girls loved his eyes—not so much the eyes themselves as the hypnotically droopy lids and the femininely long lashes. But Dave was also becoming increasingly self-conscious about his appearance. Even at 5 or 6 percent body fat, he occasionally felt too flabby to be seen shirtless. Perhaps his only real flaw was a thin upper lip, inherited from Verne. As soon as he was able, Dave covered up the problem with a mustache that would become his trademark.

  “My biggest motivator is to live up to my own standards,” Dave told one of his earliest interviewers. “I create the fear that lives within me.”

  ON A WITHERINGLY HOT afternoon in September 1978, Linda Buchanan sat in her dorm room at UC-Davis doing homework. The room lacked air conditioning, so she had flung open a window for ventilation. Suddenly her attention was drawn away from her book by the sound of heavy breathing coming from the college green outside. She peered through the window frame and saw a shirtless, golden-skinned man running by in the blazing heat, wheezing with effort.

  That’s pretty crazy, she thought.

  A few days later the scenario was repeated. It became a regular happening, and before long Linda found herself looking forward to seeing the suffering Adonis. Most of the UC-Davis students who did not know Dave Scott personally knew of him through similar encounters. He was that guy who never stopped moving.

  As the son of a UC-Davis professor, Dave had been destined from birth to matriculate there. He became a physical education major, which would not have been Verne’s first choice for his only son, but Dave couldn’t have cared less; he loved the subject. Moreover, it was easy—no drain on the energy resources he needed for sports. Dave told his friends he never studied. Instead, he said, he placed his books under his pillow and slept on them, absorbing their contents through a form of osmosis.

  The march toward physical perfection continued through college. Dave was named captain of the water polo team. Almost having no choice, the coach (the same Jerry Hinsdale who had coached Dave as a youth swimmer) placed him in charge of the team’s conditioning program. Dave led his teammates on slogs through the 100-degree heat of Davis summers—runs that he would have done with or without them. The team practiced twice a day for a total of five hours during the preseason in August. After the last session of the afternoon, when his teammates went off to eat and pass out, Dave hustled over to Hickey Gym to pump iron in the tiny, airless, wood-paneled weight room.

  “Come lift with me,” Dave told the team’s star goalie, Craig Wilson, after one long day of practice. “It’s fun.”

  “You’re completely psycho,” Craig replied, backing away.

  When he started at UC-Davis, Dave knew zero about nutrition. As a phys ed student, he began to learn the science of healthy eating, and he had an epiphany. Here was a whole new way to improve his body and its capacity. Dave had been raised on an All-American diet of roast beef and buttered potatoes for dinner and ice cream for dessert. He now learned all about the negative effects of such fattening staples. (He might not have done all of his assigned reading, but he did pay attention in class.) Then he considered how these consequences were surely compounded in his body by the incredible quantities in which he consumed food.

  For Dave Scott was, on top of everything else, the hungriest man in the world. He had to be to support his extreme level of activity. A typical lunch in his freshman year of college consisted of thirteen grilled-cheese sandwiches. He once ate eight and a half pounds of ice cream in one sitting. But his greatest gustatory feat occurred on Thanksgiving 1973. The Scott home was always bustling with extended family, friends, and other guests, and in the hospitable spirit of his clan Dave brought along a few teammates to grub on Dot’s home cooking. After eating a heaping plate of turkey and fixings, Dave said, “I think I’ll have seconds. Anyone else?”

  He gave his friends a challenging look. Dave could turn anything into a competition. They took seconds also.

  Minutes later, having cleaned his plate again, Dave threw the same challenging look and announced, “Thirds, anyone?”

  His friends were silent. One mumbled something about room for dessert. Dave took thirds. And fourths. And fifths. And sixths. And sevenths!

  Upon swallowing his last bite, Dave immediately crumpled to the floor and slept under the dining room table for two hours.

  More than half of the foods Dave gorged on that day would be self-proscribed at the following year’s Thanksgiving dinner. At age 20 Dave transformed his diet. He made a long list of bad foods, which included red meat and all confections, and eliminated them from his meals and snacks. That was fine. But because the healthy foods that remained in his diet were less calorically dense than those he had purged, Dave had to increase the volume of his intake even further. A typical breakfast (as reported in Sports Illustrated) became six oranges; six apples; five rice-cake-and-banana sandwiches; ten ounces of cottage cheese (which Dave rinsed in a strainer to reduce its fat content); and a homemade puree of almond butter, onions, garlic, garbanzo beans, and lemon juice on rice cakes and wheat crackers.

  “That’s what I was up against,” Mark Allen is fond of saying in public-speaking engagements. “If I was ever going to win Ironman, I had to beat a man who rinsed his cottage cheese.”

  UPON GRADUATING from college Dave started an adult swim club—Davis Aquatic Masters—with his sister Patti and his dad, Verne, who by then had taken up swimming as a way of bonding with his offspring. Verne handled administrative duties while Dave and Patti coached. Jane would eventually take her sister’s place after Patti enrolled in nursing school and Jane graduated from UC–Santa Barbara. As a sports team captain Dave had discovered a passion for coaching that rivaled his love of training and competition, and he threw himself into the vocation with perfectionist zeal. He coached four workouts a day, five days a week, prowling the pool de
ck like a lion tamer while his swimmers swam and pushing each of them toward his or her own perfection with a good-humored refusal to accept excuses of any kind.

  “Gee, I feel kind of flat today, Dave.”

  That’s too bad. Next set starts in five seconds.

  “Kid’s sick. Up all night.”

  Four. Three.

  “Just got back from a business trip.”

  Two. One.

  Dave drew commitment from his swimmers by proving his own commitment to them. He not only knew all of his athletes by name but also remembered everyone’s splits and routinely stunned and flattered swimmers by singling them out for individual instruction and correction that revealed a total knowledge of the person as a swimmer, whether a recent dog paddler or a national champion. Membership in the group grew from five to more than four hundred in a few years, and it became the largest masters swim club per capita in the country. Dozens of local residents became swimmers during Dave’s tenure as coach of the Davis Aquatic Masters just to experience Dave.

  Fifty-five hours of coaching per week did not leave a lot of waking hours for his own training, but Dave managed. Davis residents often saw him jogging through town after eleven o’clock at night, and he took advantage of the privilege of possessing a key to Emerson pool to swim while others slept.

  Although Dave was no longer on a team after college, he had an aspiration. Having been named an NCAA All-American in water polo in his last two seasons at UC-Davis, he set a goal to earn a spot on the national team and to compete in the Olympics. He scored a rare opportunity to train with the national team in Berkeley, California, but did not make the final cut. Dave had already hit the ceiling in swimming, where he never qualified for an NCAA championship, so he took it hard.