The summer after our season at UCLA, Dave and I tried out for the Junior World Team, which trained at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Neither of us had a car, and the only way we could get there was to hitchhike. Over the first hundred miles, we picked up about ten different rides. Then a woman pulled over to the side of the road and when we told her where we were headed, she said she could take us the rest of the way.
After training camp in Colorado Springs, we traveled to Brockport, New York, for the Junior World Team Trials. Dave and I weighed in for the trials at 165 pounds—the first time I had weighed as much as he did.
The team’s head coach, Bill Weick, was a high school coaching legend in Chicago who been head coach of various US international teams and had been on the coaching staff of the 1972 Olympic team. Coach Weick later coached three Olympic teams in the 1980s, including teams for which Dave and I competed. He became one of my favorite coaches and corner men.
Coach knew that Dave could win Junior Worlds at 163, so he told me to try out at the next weight class up, 180.5. I agreed before learning that would mean I’d have to beat Ed Banach to make the team. Ed was a sensational wrestler who had redshirted his freshman year at the powerhouse that was the University of Iowa. In fact, Ed’s older brother, Steve, and his twin brother, Lou, also signed with Iowa. Their coach was Dan Gable, probably still the most-recognized name in all of wrestling. As a wrestler in high school and college, Dan had a 181-1 record, and he won gold at the 1972 Olympics. By the time he had retired from coaching at Iowa in 1997, Dan’s teams had won fifteen national championships and he had coached 152 All-Americans. If Dan signed you to wrestle at Iowa, you were very good.
Finding out I would have to beat Ed drained me psychologically. My body started feeling tired. I think when a person knows he will have to go through an intense experience, his body starts conserving energy by getting tired. I knew I would have to conserve as much energy as I could. For the week or week and a half leading up to the trials, the only time I got out of bed was to eat and practice.
Ed and I wrestled best two-out-of-three matches to make the team. I got up on him 7–0 in the first match and he came back to beat me 12–11. Then he beat me pretty bad in the second match.
Dave easily won at 163, but Coach Weick wanted to see what Dave could do at the next weight up and switched Dave and me. Dave beat Banach handily, and I won at 163, so both of us made the Junior Worlds team. But it bugged me that my brother had beaten Ed and I hadn’t. I looked at the two of us, and there was no comparison in our builds. Physically, I should have been the one beating Ed, but Dave beat him and I couldn’t figure out why.
•
The night before the team was to leave for Mongolia for the Junior Worlds, a group of us went to a bar. I met the most beautiful girl in the world there. Or at least as beautiful as Dave’s girlfriend, Veronica, who had sought Dave out after Dave had defeated her boyfriend, a former World Cup champion, in a local tournament. But the girl in the bar had an ugly friend with her who wouldn’t leave us alone. Dave stepped in and took her off away from us. That’s what I call taking one for the team!
The girl I was with took me to her apartment so we could make out. I couldn’t believe my luck in meeting this girl, but we left for Mongolia and I never saw her again. However, the fact that I had been able to make out with a girl that was as beautiful as Dave’s girlfriend was a real confidence builder for me. Dave had a disarming confidence around girls, especially after the success of his high school wrestling career. It hadn’t been easy for me to talk to girls growing up, but that began to change during my first year of doing the college scene.
The day before we left for the Junior World Team Trials in Brockport, I had learned how much I had progressed. Pat and I went to the swimming pool at the top of the hill above the dorms. With my gymnastics background, I was able to show off some tricks from the three-meter diving board. Then I joined Pat to sunbathe for a little while. After I had gotten comfortable and started soaking in the rays, all the talking around the pool ceased.
I looked up to see that an incredibly gorgeous girl had entered the pool area. She had superthick, straight brown hair all the way down to her lower back, a beautiful face, gigantic breasts, and a perfectly round, rock-hard rear. Everybody stopped to watch her make her way around the pool. She walked toward Pat and me and laid her towel down just a few yards from us. After she stretched out on her towel, the poolside conversations and activities resumed.
“I dare you to go over and talk to her,” Pat said to me.
Why don’t you? I thought to myself.
“Okay,” I said, to Pat and myself.
I walked over to where she was sunbathing and either I tuned out everything around me or all the conversations halted again.
“Excuse me,” I said, getting her attention. “My friend dared me to come over here and talk to you. Could you just go along with me, let me sit here for a minute, and act like you like me?”
“Sure,” she said, and visibly invited me to sit next to her so my friend could see.
She gave me more than a minute—we talked for a few hours. She gave me her phone number and asked me to call her. Dave and I left the next day and I never saw her again.
I had already felt like I was beginning to turn a corner in my ability to talk with girls. I’d had some cute girlfriends my freshman year, but nothing like Veronica or the girls I met at the pool and in Brockport.
•
The first thing I noticed upon our arrival in Mongolia was the huge military presence. Everywhere we turned, there was some combination of military trucks, soldiers, portraits of Vladimir Lenin, and the communist hammer and sickle symbol.
Wrestling was huge in Mongolia. Genghis Khan’s army used wrestling, horseback riding, and archery to conquer territories in creating the largest empire in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Through all the centuries since, those three skills had remained valued in Mongolia.
Our team visited an outdoor arena to watch an ancient traditional Mongolian wrestling exhibition at the Naadam festival. The entire field was covered with wrestlers, and they performed a strange dance around a “referee” holding a pole. As the wrestlers circled the pole, they slowly flapped their arms like birds.
Before each match, the two wrestlers would face each other, then slap the insides and outsides of their thighs.
There were no weight classes or time limits for matches. A match ended when one wrestler took down his opponent or forced him to touch his knees, hands, or other body part to the ground. The winners remained in the tournament until the final two wrestlers squared off for the championship.
It was interesting to see what wrestling might have been like centuries earlier. I’m not sure I liked the idea of not having weight classes, though. It had been tough enough going up one class to wrestle Banach at the trials!
The heavyweight on our team angered me. Back then, there was no weight limit on heavyweights. Our big boy didn’t train as much as the rest of us, and when he did practice, he didn’t try as hard as I thought he should. He was big and fat and using his weight to win instead of any skill. He didn’t seem very mature, but then again all of us were under twenty.
But what really pissed me off about this guy was that he would eat and drink in front of the rest of us as we cut weight. The drinking part really annoyed me. When you’re cutting and can’t afford to drink even an ounce of water, it’s cruel for another wrestler to walk near you with a cup in his hand.
He and Dave were the only ones on the team not starving themselves to make weight, and he had packed a suitcase full of food and counted every item every day to make sure one of us hadn’t taken anything.
Near the end of our training camp back in the States, we had taken a psychological test, and the results showed that I was ready, motivated, and in top mental shape. I wasn’t that way in Mongolia, though. I think Coach Weick overtrained us. He ran us like crazy. I felt like I was training for a marathon instead of a wrestling tournament. We ran around a soccer field on steaming hot days more times than I care to remember. I couldn’t have gained weight if I had force-fed myself.
—
By the time the tournament in Mongolia started, I was so physically and mentally drained that I would have preferred to hop back on the plane and go home instead of wrestle.
Still, I won my first match 17–0 against a Korean opponent. It was such a mismatch that it didn’t matter whether I wanted to be there or not. I barely won my next match, then lost the next two and didn’t place.
I was typically starving after tournaments and would go on a hunt for chocolate. The Mongolian chocolate was pretty good, at least when I was able to avoid the occasional worm.
When Dave wrestled a Bulgarian after I was done, I didn’t want to go back to the arena, so I stayed at the hotel and watched the match on television. TV must have been fairly new to the country, because there were only a few black-and-white TVs in the hotel, and the only thing showing on them was wrestling. For Dave’s match, they weren’t showing the score on the screen, so I scored the match in my head. At the end, I had Dave winning 11–3. But the ref raised the Bulgarian’s hand instead. The Bulgarian won 12–11. I couldn’t believe it! Dave also wrestled against the eventual tournament champion, a Russian. It was a close match, but the refs cheated badly and Dave lost.
After the last match, I sat against a wall with Dave, and he was so distraught over losing that he started punching himself in the face. Dave had always been extremely hard on himself when he lost.
That’s another thing I learned from Dave—take your losses hard.
I had observed something similar from Korean wrestlers at the end of my freshman year at UCLA when Dave and I had been asked to compete against a Korean cultural exchange team at a high school in Los Angeles.
I wrestled first and got pinned by the same headlock that had caused me problems since I first started the sport. I asked the Korean coach for a rematch and defeated the same opponent 20–1. Our team went on to win the dual.
I walked through the door of the locker room and heard screaming and banging. The Koreans’ captain was beating the crap out of his teammates with a kendo sword and ordering them to bash their heads against the lockers. Some were bleeding, and I think all of them were crying and yelling as though they had dishonored themselves by losing.
Standing there watching and feeling their wrestlers’ deep sense of honor and pride, I immediately gained respect for the Koreans.
That’s what they should be doing, I thought. That’s what I would be doing.
At UCLA, I had determined that I would never again take losing in stride. I wanted to make losing the worst experience possible. I’d hit myself, bang my head against a wall, cry, scream, rip clothes apart, destroy nearby innocent objects, or whatever else I felt like doing. I figured that if I made losing the worst experience ever, I would never make that same mistake again. Good wrestlers must eliminate mistakes.
Then I would enter a period of almost depression that could last for a couple of weeks. I would become deeply introspective and try to determine why I lost so I could identify the mistake(s) I needed to eliminate. Then I would redouble my commitment and effort.
Losing flat-out sucked, and I made the time after a loss suck, too.
I learned far more from my losses than from my victories, because losses exposed mistakes I never wanted to make again.
Once eliminated from the Mongolia tournament, I started hanging out with the Korean wrestlers. They were friendly guys, and our teams would often go to the mess tent for meals together. I noticed early on several Korean wrestlers holding each other’s hands. After I got to know the Koreans, some of them would run up to me, grab my hand, and hold it. I tried making hand motions and speaking in broken English to inform them that American men didn’t do that. My message never got through, though, and they’d just smile, say something in Korean, shake their heads, and continue holding my hand.
One time I was sitting on a bench and the entire team came over. Those who could squeeze onto the bench near me took a seat. The two guys on either side of me had their arms around me. Their 105-pounder, who wound up winning his class, plopped down in my lap. I just accepted it as part of their culture. Or least I hoped it was part of their culture.
It saddened me to leave the Koreans at the end of our trip. I’m not sure why I got along so well with them, but they were fun to hang around despite the language barrier and were good people. I gave some of my jeans and US team gear to them, mostly to the one I had defeated 17–0 in my first match. He cried when we said good-bye to each other.
Our journey home began by taking the train from Mongolia northwest to Novosibirsk, Siberia, in Russia. I had gotten an ear infection from a cauliflower ear and my glands swelled up. We had no antibiotics with us, but I was able to trade a pair of jeans to the Russians in exchange for a couple of bottles of vodka to kill the pain.
•
Junior Worlds was my first international tournament, and even though I hadn’t placed or wrestled particularly well, it was an amazing experience.
When we arrived back at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Dave and I hadn’t showered for four days. Once we’d started traveling home, there was no place to clean up. Our only clothes were our unlaundered workout gear. Needless to say, our gear was dirty and smelly. On top of all that, I was sick. The two of us drew some strange looks walking through the terminal.
Dave turned to me and said, “If you’re going to do this kind of stuff for a living, you’ve got to embrace adversity.”
—
Dave and I had been trying to figure out what school we could leave UCLA for, and during our trip to the Junior Worlds, Dave told me we were going to the University of Oklahoma. I had no idea that’s where he had wanted to go.
Oklahoma, although not as storied a program as its archrival, Oklahoma State University, still featured one of the nation’s elite teams. The Sooners had won seven national championships, and at the time, only Oklahoma State had won more. The year before, Oklahoma had finished second at the Big 8 Conference tournament, behind Iowa State University and just ahead of OSU. The Sooners then placed fourth at the national tournament with four players honored as All-Americans. None of those four—Roger Frizzell, Andre Metzger, Isreal Sheppard, and Steve Williams—had graduated, so all would be returning for the 1981 season.
Jim Humphrey was an assistant coach at Oklahoma and one of the coaches on our Junior World team. Dave told Jim we were transferring to OU.
After our trip to Junior Worlds, Oklahoma head coach Stan Abel came to Palo Alto to recruit us. I wondered why he went through the hassle considering that Dave had already told his assistant that we were coming.
Stan and I met in my bedroom, and he launched into his standard recruiting pitch. He sounded like a car salesman making a speech he had repeated hundreds of times. Since I was the brother of Dave Schultz, I didn’t really think that was necessary, but he continued.
For a moment after he had left, I thought, Maybe I shouldn’t go there. But Stan turned out to be a good coach.
News of our decision didn’t go over well at UCLA. We went back to pack all our belongings in the used Subaru we’d recently purchased and then went to say good-bye to Brady Hall. Dave and Brady decided to get in one more workout against each other before we left.
Brady got an overhook on Dave’s arm and cranked Dave’s shoulder hard. After practice, Dave and Brady drove back to Brady’s house.
Dave actually cried during the ride as he told Brady, “You tried to hurt me.”
“You’re damned right I tried to hurt you,” Brady said. “Look at what you’ve done. I knew this was going to happen. That’s why I didn’t want you to come out here in the first place. You came out here and now you’re leaving and taking Mark with you. I’m pissed!”
For once, I was glad to be Dave’s younger and less responsible brother. Brady never held me responsible for leaving UCLA. It had never occurred to me that Brady would be mad. The program was in such chaos that I thought it was only natural that wrestlers would want out. Stability is the most important factor in success, and we were leaving the instability and disarray of UCLA so Dave and I could have a better opportunity to wrestle under the stability and tradition of OU’s program.
All I had with me when we moved to Oklahoma was two bags of clothes. On the way, we stopped at California State University, Bakersfield, where a friend of ours, Joe Seay, was the coach. Joe tried to talk us into ending our trip right there and wrestling for him. Joe was building one of the best teams in the country and his offer was enticing, but the wrestling room was the smallest I had seen, with room for only one mat. I couldn’t imagine how an entire team trained in there.
Dave and I talked about Joe’s offer in our car and because we were fun-loving brothers, we decided to continue our discussion in a phone booth from which we would call the Oklahoma coaches if we changed our minds about going there. After we had weighed the pros and cons, Dave said, “Let’s flip a coin. Heads we go to OU; tails we stay here.”
The coin came up heads, but I think we would have driven on to Oklahoma even if it had been tails.
“I’m going to do a lot of sitting at OU,” I told Dave during the drive. That was my way of saying I was going to need to conserve every last ounce of energy to make it as a wrestler there.
I knew Dave would win at Oklahoma, but I was uncertain how I would do. I was starting only my fourth year of wrestling and we were joining one of the nation’s top recruiting classes.
Winning an NCAA team championship at UCLA would have been miraculous. At Oklahoma, championships were expected.
To survive in the OU wrestling room, I’d have to do a heckuva lot more than merely step it up a notch. I would have to sacrifice my life and train as hard as my body, mind, and soul would permit me. The greatest enemy I would face there was sitting in the passenger seat of our old Subaru and, to be honest, I didn’t have a real good scouting report on myself. I still hadn’t figured out who I was.
Failure was not an option. Yet on the other hand, I had no idea if I would be able to out-train, outsmart, outperform, and outsuffer everyone in my weight when the pressure was on and everything I was willing to sacrifice—my name, my reputation, my self-image, my flimsily positive attitude, my life—was on the line.
I adopted a philosophy of “do or die” heading into Oklahoma. I’d be doing everything and anything to conserve energy for my most focused attempt at becoming the greatest fighter on the planet. I would have to conserve energy if there was any chance of that happening.
But, still, I had serious doubts.
Was it even possible for me to be the best? Could I follow through on my commitment to withstand everything without knowing what “everything” consisted of?
I didn’t know the answer to any of those questions. I also didn’t know that Oklahoma would become my personal hell on earth.
The first time I saw Norman, Oklahoma, was when we drove into town to start school there. I had visited Stillwater, the home of Oklahoma State, on a recruiting trip my senior year of high school, but that was in the spring. Summer in Oklahoma was a whole different story.
The very first day of practice, the entire team was led out to a duck pond behind the “jock dorms.” We lined up and raced around a beaten-path course. Oh, my goodness! I thought I was running on the surface of the sun.
—
We both majored in exercise science, because those classes would take the least time away from wrestling. Dave and I took as many of the same classes as we could so if one of us was off wrestling or sick, the other could take notes and share them. Dave worked hard to overcome the academic challenge of having dyslexia. I finished with a 3.0 GPA at Oklahoma, and Dave’s was actually higher than mine, but we squandered the educational opportunities we had. We both went to school to wrestle, not get an education. That was a huge mistake on our parts.
I almost could have passed for a deaf mute at OU. I didn’t talk unless it was absolutely necessary or, on limited occasions, to make someone laugh. With my dad being a comedian, I thought if there was one best use for talking, it would be to make people laugh.
However, I never joked around with other wrestlers in my weight class. When you’re on the wrestling mat, you have to turn into a selfish, greedy bastard and torture your opponent until either you or the final horn makes him give up. I learned real fast in the sport not to give away any friendship or trust to anyone in or around your weight. With wrestlers not around your weight—who you knew didn’t have the potential to become “enemies” on your own team—it was acceptable to develop friendships. Actually, it was preferred, because you wanted greatness around you. You wanted others’ greatness to rub off on you. If someone was great in wrestling, you had to respect him or you were disrespecting the very thing that you wanted to become.
But for anyone in or around my weight class, forget about it.
I worked hard at making myself as unapproachable as possible. I tried to always say less than the person I was talking to. When I did have to speak, it was at a low volume. I avoided nonwrestlers as much as I could, too, except for female students I wanted to get to know, of course. I frequently wore sunglasses and earphones so no one knew if I was watching them or could hear them. I looked down most of the time. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was thinking or feeling.
I needed every advantage I could get with the quality of wrestlers around me at Oklahoma, and that included creating an aura of intimidation. I couldn’t afford to show my human side, because as soon as others began to understand me, that aura of intimidation would start deteriorating. That hurt me in my relationships, especially with the opposite sex. But everything had to be sacrificed if I was to win.
The wrestlers lived on the same floor of the dorm, but I didn’t think I could afford to show mercy, friendship, or trust. In the wrestling room, those would be used against me every time.
Dave was different. He became a merciless barbarian on the mat, but one step off the mat, he turned back into an angel. Later in his career, he learned to speak Russian so that he could communicate directly with the Russians and better understand how the world’s top wrestlers thought. The Russian wrestlers and fans respected that to the point that at the Tbilisi tournament in Soviet Georgia, he could sit in the stands and talk to fans in Russian, go down to the mat and torture his next opponent, and then change clothes and go back up to the stands and continue visiting with the fans.
Now, outside of wrestling season, it was a different story for me. I partied like crazy when we weren’t in season, but from November through the third weekend of March, there was no such things as “outside of wrestling.” My whole world was wrestling, even when I left the room.
Because we had transferred, Dave and I had to sit out of competition our first year with the Sooners. I’ve seen some athletes during my long tenure in the sport turn that sit-out year into a year off, almost a vacation. Not me. I didn’t think I would have been good enough to make the team consistently that year, so I determined to turn my redshirt year into an advantage.
Coaches Abel and Humphrey were a great combination. Coach Abel didn’t get too deeply involved in the technical side of wrestling. He had been a two-time NCAA champion, but that was when technique wasn’t as important as conditioning. Coach Humphrey, who was still competing as a wrestler, knew technique well and handled more of that side of coaching.
Competition for spots on the OU roster would be tough, and Coach Abel’s strategy for piecing together a team was pretty cutthroat. He recruited a ton of talented guys, packed the room with them, and then let them beat on each other until the toughest came out on top. He was also smart with the scholarship money the NCAA allowed. He had all of us out-of-state wrestlers obtain Oklahoma driver’s licenses and register to vote in Cleveland County so that we met the criteria for being Oklahoma residents and qualified for the less-expensive in-state tuition. Then he had us fill out requests for federal Pell Grants and made sure we put down a zero for earned income for the previous year. (That was accurate, but it was important enough for him to make sure we followed directions.) The Pell Grants covered the amount of the in-state tuition, and that freed up our scholarships for the new batch of incoming recruits. I wouldn’t have had to wrestle to pay for school after my first year at OU.
Even looking toward the next year, I knew that my main competition on the OU roster was Israel Sheppard, a chiseled 158-pounder who was tougher than nails. (Isreal’s name was often misspelled as “Israel.” I spelled his name wrong a bunch of times until the wrestling coach’s secretary corrected me, and then I made sure I wrote it correctly every time.)
When I met Isreal, he was confident and brash and didn’t mind attracting the attention of the coaches. Coach Abel seemed really pleased with Isreal at my weight. I knew my only option, as one of my mottos stated, was “kill or be killed.”
Workouts with Isreal were superintense. The OU wrestling room wasn’t as nice as would be expected of such an established program. There were three padded pillars in the center of the room, but one of the pillars was partially unpadded, leaving a small spot of bare wood exposed. Once, I tried to slam Isreal’s head into that unpadded area but missed.
Isreal wore his hair in cornrows that felt like steel wool. When we wrestled, his cornrows would rub my face. Sometimes his hair would rub against my face so much that I’d flinch in the shower when water hit the raw spots. One day I noticed that the foam on top of the left side of my headgear was wearing away and the aluminum metal underneath the pad was barely poking through. That piece of aluminum was almost like a blade. The next time Isreal shot for my legs, I blocked him with my head and noticed that the bare aluminum had slightly cut him. I had found my answer to his cornrows. He didn’t seem to braid his hair in cornrows as frequently after that.
I held an interesting view toward Isreal at the time. I cared nothing about him, because he was an enemy, yet he was one of the most valuable people in my life, because I could practice brutal moves against him without a shred of remorse. Going up against Isreal in practice as much as I did clearly helped me develop into a better wrestler.
Sometimes in our workouts, the team would work only on takedowns. I made up my mind that no matter who I was wrestling, I would never be the first one to say “I’m done.” I also determined that regardless of who got the takedown, I would be first back to the center of the mat ready to start the next round. When I could get two or three guys to say “I’m done” in one day, I knew my strategies were working.
A constant part of Coach Abel’s conditioning drills was running the stadium stairs at Owen Field, the football stadium. One day after we had run to the top, just to prove to the other wrestlers—and myself—that I wasn’t scared of anything, I climbed over the edge of the top of the stadium with one arm dangling over the wall. When I knew that everyone else on the team had seen me, I climbed back over. Then, of course, some of the others had to prove they could do it, too.
Practices were so intense that afterward, we looked as if we were competitors in some strange, clothed water sport. We’d be drenched head to toe in sweat as if we had jumped into a pool. We could see big wet spots on all the mats when we were done, and invariably a fog floated above the room. When we left, our shoes squished as we walked.
But I wanted more. Well, I didn’t really want more, but I needed more. After practice, I would do pushups, V-ups, body lifts, wall sits, and frog hops. I’d secretly get in one extra workout every day. I assumed my opponents, who were actually my teammates, wouldn’t understand why I didn’t get as tired during practice as they did, and that would destroy their confidence when they faced me.
Each of my days was divided into two parts: before and after practice. Before practice, I was all serious, dreading practice. I probably looked as if I were headed to the gallows. After practice, I was happy and relaxed, relieved practice was over.
One huge advantage I knew I held over Isreal that season was that he was having to cut weight and under the pressure of competition. I wasn’t. I worked that, especially not having to endure cutting, as much as I could. When I felt as if I was gaining a slight edge on Isreal, I would use that edge to try to knock him down a little further and pick up another slight edge on him. I had a year before I’d have to earn a spot over him, and I was willing to persistently gain on him inch by inch.
As the season progressed, I felt that I was beginning to get the upper hand against Isreal, and from the way Coach Abel treated me, I believed he was taking notice.
Isreal placed third in the NCAA championships at 158. Fortunately, Coach Abel had plans other than pitting Isreal and me against each other at the same weight.