Mark Schultz is a good athlete, but it takes more than being a good athlete to be a good wrestler. It takes mental toughness, and I’m mentally tougher than Mark Schultz.” That’s what Ed Banach was quoted as saying in Amateur Wrestling News’s preview of the national collegiate championship.
When the magazine’s writer interviewed me for the same article and asked how I thought I would fare in the tournament, I said I didn’t know but thought it would be like a footrace and come down to whoever was ahead at the very end.
When I read Banach’s quote, I said to myself, If we meet in the finals, one of us is going to die.
The wrestling room at Iowa State was superhot. I was in there cutting weight, and the room was packed with seemingly everyone competing in the tournament, including the guys at my weight.
I made a point of not looking at anyone. Then a Stanford wrestler sat next to me, all happy and smiling, and tried to make small talk. I didn’t acknowledge him, got up, and kept cutting. There was no time to socialize, and being happy even for a second could have messed up my psyche. I never hated any of my opponents, but because of my low max VO2, I had to generate anger within me and then channel that anger on the mat. Instead of, say, punching my opponent in the face, I would channel that anger into executing a scoring move. That was difficult on a regular basis, and at times it felt as if I were having to create magic during every match to win.
My closest match in the first three matches was an eight-point win in the quarterfinals. My opponent in the semifinals was none other than Perry Hummel. I beat him 2–1.
Ed Banach would be my opponent in the final. He had won three of his four matches by fall and the other by a score of 17–5.
In the fourth final on the last day of the tournament, Andre Metzger won at 142 pounds for the second consecutive year by defeating Iowa’s Lennie Zalesky in their second consecutive NCAA finals matchup. Then in the match just ahead of mine, Dave won his first national championship by getting revenge for his Big 8 finals loss against Sheets.
With the next match on the schedule, I couldn’t take time to celebrate Dave’s win, but I was glad he had earned his own title in his senior year. I can’t imagine what it would be like now if Dave hadn’t won that one.
Right before my match, I was in the back warming up and wondering how it came to pass that someone had created an event as cruel as the NCAA Wrestling Championships. I felt so much pressure in those tournaments that it seemed inhumane. A few mats were rolled up in the corner, and on my way to the competition mat, I sat on those mats and prayed as hard as I could for God to please kill me immediately if I lost. I meant it.
Our match was televised on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, and I believe it was the only match from the finals shown in its entirety. Al Michaels introduced our match as “the bout that everybody has anticipated.” It was, because I had won a championship the year before and with Ed having won titles as a freshman and sophomore at a different weight class from mine, there was already talk about the possibility of his becoming the first person to win four NCAA championships.
I made a stupid move on an attempted throw almost two minutes into the match, and Ed caught me and scored on a takedown and a near fall to put me behind 4–0. Ed’s lead was at 5–2 late in the first period when I tried a move I had never attempted but had watched Ben Peterson, an Olympic champion, pull off in a World Cup. From locked up in an upper-body tie, I lifted Ed off the mat by kneeing him in the inside thigh near his groin, then turned to the side and threw him on his back. I held Ed on his back for two seconds and scored four points to lead 6–5 after the first period. I increased my lead to 10–7 heading into the third and final period, but because I knew I had enough of a riding-time advantage to get the additional point, in effect I led by four points.
I had a 10–8 lead (not counting the anticipated riding-time point) with thirty seconds left. Ed would have to go for a four-point move, and when he went for the big throw with less than twenty seconds to go, I blocked it and scored a five-point move of my own to clinch the championship. I won 16–8.
Normally, I was exhausted after a match. But winning my second consecutive title, and beating Ed Banach to do so, gave me a huge adrenaline surge, and as soon as the horn sounded, I sprang to my feet and performed my trademark backflip. Dave and Andre ran out to the center of the mat to celebrate with me. I jumped into Metzger’s arms and screamed at the top of my lungs toward the ceiling. When the ref raised my hand in victory, I jumped up and down, with the ref still holding my hand up high.
At the conclusion of the tournament, I was announced as the championships’ Outstanding Wrestler.
Our team broke the record for points scored in an NCAA championship, but so did Iowa and Iowa State, and we finished third. Isreal Sheppard ended his Oklahoma career that year by placing fourth at 158. I owed a lot to Isreal. He was the one person who allowed me to focus my rage against another human being. It had been practically no holds barred with him in practice, and with no remorse. It was 100 percent pure rage and anger channeled into the science of wrestling. Isreal still probably has no idea how lucky I felt to have trained with him.
After the tournament, Ed came over to me and asked what weight I would be wrestling at the next year.
I told him 177.
“Good,” he replied. “I’m going 190.”
Mike Chapman, editor of the wrestling magazine WIN, ranked my match with Ed as the second-best match in NCAA history, behind only the 1970 NCAA finals when Larry Owings ended Dan Gable’s 181-match winning streak.
I had so much adrenaline flowing through me that on the flight home, when we had a layover in Kansas, I went outside, found a secluded area near the passenger loading zone, and ran wind sprints in front of the terminal.
The following Monday, the OU student newspaper ran a front-page photo of Dave, Andre, and me celebrating at the tournament. We were the Sooners’ three national champions.
Two weeks after the NCAA championship, I was asked to represent our country at the World Cup in Toledo, Ohio. I had planned on taking a break after the NCAAs, but I felt I was in great shape after the season and said I would compete. Gable was the coach, and I couldn’t help but think that he would resent me for beating his guys in the finals two years in a row. But he didn’t. Gable qualified as the “enemy” in my book, but I liked him anyway. I looked at him as someone who respected anyone who was tough, regardless of affiliation.
We were losing to the Russians at the World Cup when my turn came to wrestle Russian champion Vagit Kasibekov. I was making my way up the stairs when Gable said, “Now it’s time for our big guns.” I defeated the Russian 7–2, and all the Americans who followed me at the heavier weights won, too, and we won the World Cup.
And I had won the respect of the legendary Dan Gable.
—
The success of my first two seasons at Oklahoma filled my senior year with the most pressure I’ve ever felt in my life. Being an NCAA Division I wrestler presented enough problems on its own. Going through a Division I wrestling season has to be the most painful, pressure-packed experience in sports.
I didn’t like competition. In fact, it wouldn’t be too strong a statement to say that I hated it. Competition was the worst thing in the world, the most horrible, painful thing I had to suffer through. But I was stuck. I had to compete or I would be miserable for the rest of my life looking back and knowing I didn’t fulfill my potential. I knew I had something special in me, like a God-given gift, when it came to wrestling.
Then add to that I was two-time defending NCAA champion and had been named the Outstanding Wrestler, and I had to deal with more pressure than at times I thought I could handle.
With my success at the 1982 NCAAs, for the first time in my career I believed that I was a pretty good wrestler—excluding the first months after my high school state title when I thought I was pretty good. Dave had taken care of that issue for me by pounding me on the mat all summer. I didn’t need Dave to humble me going into my senior year, but I did need him to walk me through dealing with the pressure.
Dave was the only person who could help when I felt the strain of being a wrestler. He had an uncanny ability to get me to quit worrying about stuff. I’d be stressing about something, and he’d say, “Don’t worry about it.” That was it. Nothing fancier than that. But when Dave told me to stop worrying, I would. If someone else had said the exact same thing, it wouldn’t have worked.
But I didn’t see Dave as much as I had that year. He had married about a month before the 1982 NCAAs and moved into an apartment with his wife, Nancy. We still saw each other in the wrestling room, because Dave was helping as a coach and continuing to work out for freestyle competitions. But I wasn’t able to just hang out with him as I had before, when we were roommates in the dorms.
Dave’s having finished his college eligibility made a difference, too. Being fully devoted to freestyle with no dual meets to compete in, he no longer had to worry about making weight as often. He only had to cut once every couple of months before big meets. We lost that bond college wrestlers share over the constant demands to make weight. Then with him being married and not sharing a dorm room with me, we lost much of what we’d had in common at OU. I felt as if our lives had suddenly jerked off the same path and into different directions.
Andre Metzger, our other national champion in 1982, had also been a senior the season before. No other wrestler on the team could relate to the pressure to defend that I faced. Dave did his best to help when we did have time to talk, and Andre had become an assistant coach, too, so he was still around. But unless someone is actually going through the same pressure at the same time, it just isn’t the same.
With our team losing two national champions, Coach Abel needed me to be a big winner for the team. The most points a wrestler could score for his team was six, with a pin, forfeit, injury default, or a disqualification. But I wasn’t a big pinner. I would estimate that only about 10 percent of my wins in college came by pin. I felt overburdened from the pressure I was placing on myself to match my individual accomplishments from the previous two years. And now the coach and team needed me to be even better than I had been before!
For my own sake, I had to go out as a winner. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than winning two national championships and then not winning my senior year. Given the choice, I would have opted to have not won the previous two years if it would have guaranteed a title as a senior. One title in my final chance would have meant more than two earlier ones.
To this day, I have recurring nightmares about my senior year. The details vary, but the way they play out tends to go something like this: I’m having to defend my back-to-back titles, it’s two weeks out from the NCAAs, and I’ve forgotten to work out and am trying to figure out how to win without being in shape. I consider stabbing myself in the leg or crashing my car on purpose to get out of the tournament.
In some of my nightmares, I am at the tournament weighing in to wrestle the next day and I’m coming off an injury that has me out of shape. I have probably had that particular nightmare at least fifty times.
Every time I wake up from such a nightmare, I thank God it was only a dream.
Port Robertson was a former wrestling coach who worked in the OU athletic department as an administrator. I didn’t know what his official title was, but to me he was “Lord of Discipline” and “Ruler of the Jock Dorms.” Port liked me, and when I found out that a single room had opened in the dorm, I asked Port if I could have it. He gave it to me.
I spent every night after practice alone in my room. It was depressing. I had tried to stick to myself before, but I became more introverted that year. I bought a cheap black-and-white TV for my room to have as my company. I rarely talked to anyone in the dorm. I’ve never felt more alone and isolated than I did that year, and it was self-inflicted.
—
I started the season strong, including beating every opponent badly in a Las Vegas tournament, but I soon complicated my situation during an interview with one of Oklahoma’s statewide TV stations.
I did few interviews in my time at OU, and I really hadn’t wanted to do any that year for sure. But the reporter was the daughter of a Sooners alum who had paid Dave and me to drive an RV to Dallas so he and his drinking buddies would have a place to hang out and drink the weekend of the annual Oklahoma-Texas football game. I agreed to the interview only to return the favor for the reporter’s father.
I sat down for the interview and the cameraman placed his camera on a table. I hadn’t seen him push any buttons, so I assumed the interview hadn’t started. The reporter’s first question was about how I liked OU. Another bad assumption on my part: I assumed she was just making some preinterview chitchat.
“I wish I would have gone somewhere like Iowa where the coach cared more about his athletes,” I told her.
After I said that, the cameraman picked up his camera and turned the lights on. The interview lasted about forty-five minutes. The only part that made the news that night was what I had said about Coach Abel in what I believed to be an off-the-record comment.
I wasn’t being totally serious with what I said about Coach. Part of it was me speaking out of my depression and prolonged frustration.
Coach Abel was in the middle of a difficult divorce and wrapped in his own little world at the time. The biggest impact I saw from his divorce process was that he wasn’t able to spend the time I thought he needed to be spending with me, especially in light of how lonely I already felt.
I had no idea how consuming a divorce could be. Since then, I’ve had two myself and have discovered just how much one can dominate your time and distract from your regular activities.
My comment, predictably, created a firestorm. Alumni started calling Coach Abel to ask what was going on under his watch, and some were telling him they were going to stop donating money to his program.
Coach dragged me into his office the next day. “What the hell is wrong with you?! Is that the way you want it?!”
I was so into not displaying any weakness—and I also was a little ticked at him because I wrongly thought he was neglecting me—that I responded, “Yeah.”
Our relationship grew cold instantly. I rarely talked to Coach after that.
My attitude and wrestling started going downhill. I began sporadically showing up in the wrestling room. I went back home to Oregon over Christmas and missed the Midlands tournament and three duals. My biggest threat to winning the national championship—at least as far as other wrestlers went—was Duane Goldman of Iowa. Goldman was a freshman, so we hadn’t wrestled each other before, and I didn’t want him to have any idea what to expect from me until we met in the NCAAs, if that was to be the case.
The team didn’t matter to me. I was out for myself and felt that I was protecting my title, not fighting for another one. In my mind, I had nothing to gain and everything—and I mean everything—to lose.
I won the Big 8 championship in qualifying for my fourth NCAA tournament, in Oklahoma City that year. I came down with strep throat just as the tournament started. A media photographer took a picture of me warming up with my tongue sticking out, and my tongue was white, it was so dry.
I struggled in my first-round match, defeating unseeded Scott Giacobbe of Old Dominion University 8–5. In the second round, I faced number-twelve seed Bob Harr of Penn State. In the first round, I got him in the Schultz front headlock and choked him out, turned him over, and pinned him. But the refs only gave me a takedown. Harr woke up mad and spent the rest of the match attacking like crazy. I beat him 11–6 but had to deal with a pissed-off wrestler the entire match. The third round produced my only “easy” win, with a 15–4 defeat of unseeded Jeff Turner from Lehigh University.
I drew Ohio State’s Ed Potokar in the semifinals. I was 25-0 that season with my reduced schedule. Ed had broken the Ohio State record for victories in a season with his 49-1 record. Winning our semifinal match would have given him fifty wins.
I led Potokar 4–2 in the third period, and both of his points had come for my being penalized for stalling by referee Pat Lovell. I was on top of Potokar with sixteen seconds to go and all I had to do was ride him out and I would be in the finals. But then Lovell hit me with another stalling call, giving Ed two points and tying the score at 4.
Lovell had been a heavyweight wrestler before becoming a ref. He was from the San Francisco Bay Area, like me, and we were friends. We’d even had lunch together at his home. Now I’ll never forget Pat because of that last stalling call that tied the match. I’m not saying his call was wrong; I’m just saying I’ll never forget it.
Pat’s call stopped the match so we could go back to the center of the mat. Potokar was jumping up and down, superpumped. I, on the other hand, was almost scared out of my mind. We were tied and my opponent had yet to score a technical point. If Potokar managed to pull off an escape from the bottom, he would beat me 5–4 and my senior year and my life would be ruined.
When Pat blew the whistle to resume the match, Potokar exploded from the bottom. He was riding all the momentum of the late call that had tied the match. I was riding a bucking bronco.
Finally, Potokar stood up, broke my grip, and spun behind me. But right before the ref could call a two-point reversal, I did something I had never done: I squatted like a frog and dove straight backward, like a back dive off a diving board, hoping to grab hold of something. I hooked a finger into the loop of Potokar’s shoelace, clawed my way up his leg, and held on like my life depended on maintaining that grip. The final seconds ticked off the clock and we went into overtime.
Potokar still couldn’t manage a technical point in overtime, and with no stalling calls against me, I outscored him 6–0 in overtime to advance.
—
Goldman, the second seed and freshman sensation, defeated Perry Hummel in the other semifinal. Thanks to my Christmas in Oregon, I hadn’t wrestled against Goldman, and that gave me an advantage going into the finals, in my opinion. The more often wrestlers face each other, the closer their matches tend to become. If I had wrestled Goldman previously, I think a certain amount of my aura could have been diminished merely by his getting onto the mat with me.
Maybe he wasn’t thinking that way, but I was, and it gave me a psychological boost going back to the hotel the eve of our final.
Frankly, I needed every edge I could get because a memory of the NCAAs from my freshman year at UCLA kept haunting me. Mike Land was a senior at Iowa State and a defending national champion. In the 1979 finals, he faced a freshman from Lehigh named Darryl Burley. Land had won eighty-four consecutive matches, but in his last time on the mat in college, he lost to the freshman.
Now here I was, the senior defending champion everyone expected to win going up against a freshman in the finals.
So much for a good night’s sleep.
A couple of hours before the finals started, I was sitting in my hotel room with Clinton Burke, our 134-pounder and the only other Sooner who would be wrestling for a championship. There was a knock on the door and Clinton opened it. We were only a half hour’s drive from Norman, and all these friends of Clinton’s came streaming into our room, laughing and drinking and smoking.
I’m sitting there on my bed thinking, These people are going to kill us mentally.
It was way too early to celebrate. Or be happy even. Being happy could ruin my mental state as I prepared for the match. Clinton seemed to have no intention of asking his friends to leave, so I grabbed my gear and headed to the arena much earlier than I had wanted to.
The commentator from Wide World of Sports was going around interviewing all the finalists at the arena. For me, that was no time to be talking. I gave one-word answers to his first three questions. Visibly frustrated, he said, “This is impossible. I can’t do it.” I got up and walked away to be by myself, just as I preferred.
Right before the first final, Clinton seemed to realize the enormity of wrestling in the finals. I could see him in the corner of the warm-up room looking all emotional. I wasn’t sure, but it looked as though he was crying. Andre walked over to Clinton and told him he had to snap out of it. I couldn’t be a part of that scene and stayed away from them. Clinton lost his match by two points. That left me as OU’s only hope for a championship in 1983.
Coach Abel and Coach Humphrey had warned me about stalling. They said the refs thought I had been stalling too much in the tournament and had met and decided to show me no mercy in the finals. Then in the final moments before my match, Dave told me that the refs were going to be watching me very closely for stalling and wouldn’t cut me any slack.
Jeez, did anyone else in the arena want to warn me about stalling?
From the moment Goldman and I met on the mat, I could sense he had already decided I was supposed to win. It’s difficult to put into words, but there was something in his eyes and body language that gave it away.
Goldman’s escape attempts seemed halfhearted, and he was easier to hold down than anyone I had beaten coming through the bracket. My only concern came from all those stalling warnings. I was called three times—the first as a warning and the next two for one point each. I didn’t think Goldman would score on me otherwise, but locked in a close match and knowing the refs were paying extra attention to me, I was worried that a repeat of the semifinals match against Potokar would happen. It didn’t, though, and with four minutes of riding time, I won 4–2 and for the third consecutive year defeated an Iowa Hawkeye to win the NCAA championship.
One year after taking part in one of the most exciting matches in college wrestling history, I had just won the most boring match of that year’s finals. But I didn’t care, because I had won. I had pulled off my biggest escape as a wrestler—the escape from the pressure and expectations that had weighed heavily on my chest for a full year.
I stood there with my arms outstretched like a bird. I finally felt released, unlatched from my burdens, free to fly away and leave behind all the junk that had accumulated to make my senior season pure hell.
Then I did something I’d done rarely during the season: I smiled.
I thanked God repeatedly.
Before taking the mat and winning my second championship, I had prayed that God would take my life if I lost. Now, one year later, and only six years after taking up the sport of wrestling, I stood there, soaking in the glory of being cheered as a three-time NCAA champion.
God could have taken my life right then and there, too, if he wanted and I would have died a happy person. There hadn’t been many times in my life when I could have said that.