Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  On January 26, 1996, Angle and the whole wrestling community were shocked by the murder of his coach Dave Schultz. John du Pont, the eccentric billionaire who had sponsored Schultz and his Team Foxcatcher protégés like Angle, had snapped and shot the 1984 Olympic gold medalist to death, firing three bullets from his black Lincoln Town Car. In the tense standoff with police that followed, du Pont would demand to be addressed as “his holiness” as he locked himself in his library. Police captured him after they shut off the boilers heating his giant mansion in the cold Pennsylvania winter and he journeyed outside to attempt to fix them. Eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, du Pont died in prison in 2010.

  Schultz was one of America’s most important wrestlers, not just for his achievements on the mat, but for his role as an ambassador of the sport, bringing home technical knowledge from Russia and other wrestling hot spots. Mixing exotic judo techniques with the staples every American collegiate learns, Schultz was a technical wizard and his students counted on his expertise heavily.

  Angle was devastated. While some wrestlers like 1996 gold medalist Tom Brands stayed at du Pont’s world-class facility and kept cashing his checks even after the murder, Angle and others couldn’t bring themselves to do it. In the middle of his final preparations for the Olympic Games he had lost his coach and mentor and his training facility. Just two months before the Olympic Trials, he lost his good health as well.

  At the U.S. Nationals, Angle was caught off guard with an arm throw by Greco-Roman specialist and Army soldier Jason Loukides. Trying to avoid the loss of the three points that were automatically docked when you were taken from your feet to your back, Angle tried to block his opponent’s arm throw with his own face. In his memoir, Angle recalls, “I felt everything crack, crunch, and pull in my neck. And the force of the throw still carried me onto my back, so almost immediately I heard the ref say, ‘Three,’ and that sickened me more than the sound effects my neck was making.”

  Angle would later find out he had herniated two disks, cracked vertebrae, and pulled four muscles in his neck. The doctor on the scene was concerned about his long-term health — Angle was more concerned with his match in the finals six hours later. Instead of the hospital, he went to a chiropractor and an acupuncturist and came back to beat Kerry McCoy, a talented wrestler who was still in college and would later go on to represent the United States in two Olympic Games.

  DANNY HODGE GIVING HIS APPROVAL TO KURT ANGLE

  © WREALANO@AOL.COM

  Almost unable to move, and giving up almost 40 pounds to the larger McCoy, Angle held on, keeping the match, and winning on a judge’s decision. It was an important win. As the national champion he wouldn’t have to compete at the Olympic Trials later a mere two months away. Instead, he would meet the winner to decide who would represent America in Atlanta that summer.

  Doctors told Angle it would take six months for his neck to heal enough to give wrestling another shot. The problem? He had less than three before he would have to face the winner of the Olympic Trials for a spot on the team. Instead of giving up on his Olympic dreams, Angle decided to do whatever was necessary to perform. He got injections of mepivacaine, a local anesthetic, in his neck and soldiered on.

  Angle and most wrestling fans expected he would meet future UFC champion Mark Kerr in a rematch of their close World Team Trials matchup the year before. The two were evenly matched and Angle had escaped by the skin of his teeth. But Kerr was eliminated early and Angle instead faced Dan Chaid, a 1985 NCAA champion at the tail end of his wrestling career. Like Angle, Chaid was a Schultz protégé. He was a rugged wrestler who tried to grind opponents down, a wrestler Angle knew would target his injured neck.

  The neck didn’t end up being an issue for Angle but was a problem for Chaid. He attacked Angle’s injury relentlessly but at the expense of smart strategy or any sense of caution. In a best of three matchup, Angle won two in a row. Chaid never scored a point.

  Golden Boy

  In the Atlanta Games, Angle was awestruck to be among the world’s best wrestlers. Although he had been the world champion the year before he wasn’t favored to win the gold medal. He had never been in the Olympics before and jitters were common. Besides, his win in the World Championships had been a surprise, and no one was quite sure if he had what it took to take home amateur wrestling’s top prize.

  Angle nearly proved the doubters right when he almost didn’t make it past the quarterfinals. Ukrainian Sagid Murtazaliev took him down early with a fireman’s carry, pocketing three points. Three points is an almost insurmountable lead among world class competitors but Angle rallied to win 4–3. In the semifinals he cruised to a win over Kyrgyzstan’s Konstantin Aleksandrov, but suffered a hip flexor injury. It never bothered him during that match, but in the hours between the semi-finals and the finals, the muscle got tighter and tighter. So did a wound-up Angle, who nearly lost control minutes before the biggest match of his life. Angle writes, “I got a little panicked, with tears in my eyes right there in front of all these other guys. I think I was reflecting back to my childhood, how my fear used to overcome me. I started breathing quickly, almost hyperventilating. My coach, Bruce Burnett, came over to me and said, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’. . . I couldn’t even look at him, but Bruce slapped me in the face and made me look him in the eye.”

  His coach sent him out to the mat with fire in his eyes. Angle had conquered his fears, but there was still an Iranian champion to overcome. Abbas Jadidi had been the world champion in 1993 — at least for several months before his drug test came back. He tested positive for the steroid nandrolone, the same drug that would later plague Barry Bonds, UFC champion Royce Gracie, and athletes throughout the sports world. Jadidi forfeited his medal and sat out a two-year suspension. He returned in 1995 to finish third in the World Championships.

  At the top of his game, Jadidi took the early lead on Angle, but the American came back immediately to even the score. At the end of overtime it was deadlocked. The score was tied 1–1 and both men had two stalling warnings. The officials met with the referee to discuss who would be awarded the gold medal. The Iranian entered the discussion, adamant that he should be the champion despite nearly passing out from exhaustion in the overtime period. Rick Reilly gave the match national play in Sports Illustrated:

  At first it appeared that the referee was raising Jadidi’s arm, but it was only Jadidi trying to force it up. “That scared the heck out of me,” said Angle. Then suddenly the referee raised Angle’s arm, and the American fell to his knees in jubilation, tears flowing down his perfectly square jaw and chiseled body. Angle gave the gold to his mother, who raised him alone after her husband died in a construction accident 11 years ago. Then Angle said, “If I died right now, I’d still be happy.”

  The Iranian, though, could not accept the decision. At the medal ceremony, he stood off to the side glaring at the international wrestling officials, gesturing and cursing until he was pushed to the podium by his coach.

  Following his win, Angle told reporters he was considering becoming an actor. When Vince McMahon came offering a $250,000 a year multi-year contract, Angle didn’t even consider it. “Immediately after I won, they flew me out and offered me a very nice, very sweet contract,” Angle told Fox Sports. “I never took it seriously because I was always told not to watch it and not to do it, since I was doing the legit wrestling, the amateur wrestling. I was told to turn my back on pro wrestling.”

  Instead, after a brief flirtation with Hollywood, Angle tried his hand at local news, becoming the weekend sports anchor at Pittsburgh’s Fox affiliate. But his heart just wasn’t in it and he didn’t have a real affinity for the news business. He was downgraded from anchor to reporter and eventually left all together.

  At a loss for what to do next, Angle decided to give wrestling another try. This time there would be no giant contract offer. He would be just another guy trying
his hand at the wrestling game, albeit a guy with an Olympic pedigree and great look. Success seemed inevitable from day one.

  Going Pro

  “The first day of training was a Monday,” Angle remembered. “By Friday they had me do a wrestling match in front of a live crowd. No one’s ever done that. For some reason they thought I could.”

  Like he had with his amateur career, he put his heart and soul into it. Despite already operating on two bum knees and a busted neck, Angle was willing to do whatever it took. Not just to make it: to be the best in a competitive industry.

  At first, he wasn’t quite cut out for the Machiavellian games that went on backstage at wrestling events. Before his first major match, a loss to ECW mainstay Taz at the 2000 Royal Rumble, Angle talked to Mick Foley about what to do if the match became a shoot — something that essentially never happened. Someone had gotten in Angle’s head about Taz, who worked a shooter gimmick, with work being the operative word. Foley remembered, “He goes, ‘What do I do if Taz tries to test me out there?’ I looked at him and said, ‘Kurt are you serious?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Kurt, you’re kind of an Olympic champion aren’t you?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘First of all, I don’t think that’s what this match is about. Second of all, I don’t think you have to worry about that.’”

  It didn’t take long for Angle to find his way. Brand new to the sport, Angle was able to work intricate and dynamic matches with the best wrestlers in the business like Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero. From an aesthetic standpoint, the matches were fantastic. Fast-paced and hard-hitting, the bouts made it clear these were elite athletes in a dangerous game of high-stakes stunt work, But for his career’s longevity and his long-term health, he couldn’t have picked two worse role models.

  Guerrero and Benoit were the professional versions of Angle: obsessed to the point it wasn’t healthy. Both were smaller men, jacked to the gills on steroids to make it in a big man’s game. Both had resulting insecurities. Being in the ring with Angle, a man being immediately given what it took them a decade to earn, was only fuel to the fire that drove both men.

  Benoit, especially, became Angle’s most noted rival. The two were magic in the ring and WWE booker Paul Heyman almost never failed to put them together in the kind of long matches fans loved and the wrestlers prided themselves in. Dave Meltzer compared them to Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat, who’d created one of wrestling’s most legendary feuds. It was a lot to live up to. Benoit, his neck hurting him to the point he could barely function, never let injuries stop him. Angle’s health was little better, but as Matthew Randazzo V explained in Ring of Hell, nothing would prevent either man from putting it all on the line, even in an essentially meaningless match of WWE’s SmackDown television show: “Standing in the ring with an athlete of Angle’s quality made Benoit insecure and encouraged him to play a game of in-ring chicken with the Olympian, as if both men had a death wish. Like Benoit, Angle was a suplex specialist; these throws strained the neck of both the wrestler performing the move and the wrestler taking the move. Not to be upstaged, Benoit insisted on topping Angle by performing a German suplex from the second rope. . . . When Angle backflipped from the top of the cage all the way down to the mat, the audience knew that Benoit could never let such a daredevil feat go unanswered. Benoit prepared his tour de force: a diving head butt from the top of the cage, or basically a face-first belly flop onto hard canvas from 12 or 13 feet in the air.”

  Eventually those grueling matches took their toll on Angle. His neck was already in bad shape before he ever started wrestling for the WWE. The hard style he preferred in the ring only wore him down further. He got the bad news about his neck at the worst possible time — weeks before his WrestleMania XIX headliner with the WWE’s new hot amateur wrestling prospect: “The Next Big Thing” Brock Lesnar.

  25

  THE NEXT BIG THING

  Brock Lesnar walked into the arena, muscles bulging, wild eyes daring anyone to take a step towards him, dancing around the spectators and his opposition. He raised his arms into the air, exhorting the crowd to cheer: commonplace for the WWE, the modern home of professional wrestling hijinks. Less so for the staid NCAA tournament, home of tradition-loving, corn-fed athletes, men fearless on the mats and humble off them.

  Lesnar was different. It wasn’t just his cocky attitude and natural charisma. The first thing you noticed was his sheer size. Standing 6'4" and weighing 270 lbs. with less than 10 percent body fat, Brock was a once-in-a-lifetime specimen. His chest was 56 inches, his biceps 21. Even the great Dan Gable, America’s most legendary wrestler and coach, couldn’t help but be impressed. Calling Lesnar’s matches on TV for the Iowa Public Broadcasting Company, Gable quipped, “When Brock Lesnar strips off his warm-ups, he turns more heads than Cindy Crawford in a thong.”

  Even in the age of steroids, Lesnar’s freaky musculature did not go unnoticed. He hadn’t even been a heavyweight until his senior year of high school, putting on 20 pounds almost overnight and eventually outweighing almost anyone who stood across from him on the mats by the time he reached his peak at the 2000 NCAA Championships.

  “All I wanted to do was get big and strong,” says Lesnar. “I was amazed by guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I’d always be doing push-ups and pull-ups at home. On the farm I tried to be a workhorse because I knew if I could cut it on the farm, I could cut it anywhere.”

  When he first arrived at the University of Minnesota, coach J Robinson had him drug tested immediately. There had been whispers of steroid use and Robinson wanted to clear the air. Lesnar passed the test, and every test he would subsequently take in his athletic and wrestling careers, with flying colors.

  Lesnar was just big — but he didn’t wrestle that way. He came up in the sport as a skinny kid, so he had a quickness and skill set rare for a bruiser of his size. He learned to wrestle in his home state of South Dakota. His main opponents were the Madsen brothers, Dan and Jon. The three waged fierce battles for supremacy, attracting throngs of fans to gymnasiums his senior year to watch Brock and Jon Madsen (a future training partner) go at it.

  “For a small town there were 2,000 people in the gym,” Dan Madsen remembered. “One side of the gym was yelling for Brock, and the other was yelling, ‘Go Mad Dog’ for Jon. They were intense matches, snot flying . . . I think wrestling Jon helped Brock develop his skills.”

  Brock never won a high school title, a failure that drove him to continue wrestling. When he arrived at Bismarck State, Lesnar weighed just 210 pounds, making him a very small heavyweight. By the time he left junior college, Brock was enormous, thanks to a new obsession with bodybuilding. But he hadn’t lost the quickness that had made him such a tough competitor in high school. The combination was deadly. Lesnar could shoot in quickly on his opponents, then literally scoop them into the air to win a succession of easy matches.

  A junior national championship at Bismarck State opened the door to almost any NCAA program in the country. One school, however, already had an “in” with the future NCAA champion. Lesnar had impressed Robinson, the long-time Minnesota coach, at the Bison Open, a wrestling tournament that mixed wrestlers from different levels of competition. Lesnar had won the tournament’s heavyweight title, the only non–University of Minnesota wrestler to do so. Robinson immediately introduced himself to Lesnar. He was looking to replace his own heavyweight Shelton Benjamin, who would be graduating that spring, and like everyone else who had witnessed Lesnar wrestle live, Robinson saw tons of potential in the agile bruiser.

  “I’ve been in this 25 years,” Robinson told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “And I’ve never seen a guy built as big and strong and powerful as he is.”

  After sitting out a semester, Lesnar made quite a debut for a team that had finished second in the nation in 1998. At the National Duals in January, he didn’t just beat, he pinned Iowa’s Wes Hand on the Hawkeye’s home turf. Hand was just one of fo
ur wrestlers Lesnar pinned that weekend, catapulting him to the number two ranking in the country.

  Lesnar breezed through the season and into the NCAA tournament. Minnesota did well in the competition, and on the final day pulled within two points of Iowa. The NCAA title was within their grasp. They just needed a single victory to take home the title — Brock Lesnar had to beat Stephen Neal to win the heavyweight championship.

  Neal was in the midst of one of the most dominant runs in modern NCAA history. He had capped an undefeated 1998 with an NCAA title and had yet to taste defeat in 1999. Still, Lesnar gave him all he could handle. A single takedown was the difference. Neal scored one early in the first period and Lesnar couldn’t recover, losing 3–2 in a dull affair. It was a very cautious match, but Neal says that was for good reason.

  BROCK LESNAR WITH THE NJPW GRAND PRIX WORLD TITLE

  © WREALANO@AOL.COM

  “He was just this big, strong, powerful man the wrestling world hadn’t seen,” Neal said. “He was so big and strong, you didn’t want to make a mistake against him.”

  The next season, the legend of Lesnar spread. Fans came out to see him in droves and he became a celebrity in the Twin Cities. The “Minnesota Wrestling Weekly” was a hit on KFAN with Brock as a regular guest on the show. The athletic department even went so far as to release a Brock Lesnar poster called the “Brockfast of Champions” that they gave out at wrestling meets.

  Brock started the season with 22 straight wins, but it was the lone loss that stung the most. A record-setting 13,128 fans packed the Williams Arena to see Lesnar’s Gophers take on the top-ranked Iowa Hawkeyes. The winning team would be the top team in all of college wrestling, and the head-to-head matchup between Lesnar and Hand had its own high stakes. Hand, despite losing twice to Lesnar the previous season, was telling the world he had the big man’s number. Tensions were high as the two set to square off. The action was intense even before the two ever touched as the school’s Minnesota Daily wrote: