HE’S DIGGING IN : Baumgartner Shooting for Second Gold Medal, but It’s Getting Harder to Pull Him Off the Farm

The surprise that comes with Bruce Baumgartner, the 265-pound wrestler, is how thoroughly domesticated he is. Keep this in mind, come the Olympics, when you see him pummel the Soviet, or whatever human heft he is matched with. He’d rather be tending his garden in Edinboro, Pa.

Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. The attraction of a second gold medal being what it is, Baumgartner’s attention may be fully engaged come those Olympics. He does not deny the Games’ special motivation.

But when he was approached recently after the first day of Olympic camp in Colorado Springs, Colo., his mind was on some melons he might never taste.

He was slumped beside a wall, his size all the more impressive at rest.

“The peas and beans I’ve had,” he was saying, his fatigue giving way to agitation. “But I’ll probably miss all the eggplant (getting a little steamed). And I’m going to miss the first melon (voice rising) and that (really irritates) me.”

OK, Bruce. It’s the Olympics. The Soviet is smirking at you from across the mat. Now, think melon. Think squash family. Oooh, Bruce beets him again!

It’s hard to say where Baumgartner, 27, feels more comfortable, in the 23-foot canvas circle or his 30 x 60 plot back home. Over the years, he has achieved his greatest success on the mats, no question.

He won the freestyle super-heavyweight gold in 1984 and then beat the Soviet, David Gobedijichivili, in the 1986 World Championships. More recently, he avenged a 1983 Pan American Games loss to Candido Mesa by beating the Cuban’s brother, Domingo, in the 1987 games.

He is expected, ultimately, to meet either Gobedijichivili or Soviet teammate Aslan Khadartsev for the gold. He has beaten both, although Khadartsev, a two-time world champion, had beaten the slow-starting Baumgartner in an early round of the 1987 World Cup.

Still, there have been great wrestlers before. As far as double-gold winners go, even Baumgartner is blase. “Obviously, my goal is to win it,” he said, “but it’s something that’s been done before and will be done again.”

Freestyle teammate Mark Schultz also will be trying to add to his 1984 gold. No big deal, except for the fact that a medal this year, the first year since 1976 that the United States meets the U.S.S.R., might mean a little more.

The last U.S. wrestler to win two golds was George Mehnert, who did it in 1904 and 1908. Of course, only Americans competed in 1904, so that might mean a little less.

What makes Baumgartner interesting is this contrast between his brute strength and semi-violent avocation, and his placid personality. Reconcile the vision of this man going for another’s legs, twisting him into shapes a pipe cleaner wouldn’t allow, with the gentleman farmer back in the quiet of the Pennsylvania hills, tending his 16-acre spread, running his model train set or organizing the doll collection he has accumulated on his global trips, or looking through his stamps.

According to his wife, Linda, Bruce is sort of a cartoon husband, his domestic qualities so oversized as to be comic. Besides frequently sending her flowers, he is a dedicated homebody, puttering about the farmhouse and putting his industrial arts skills to work at every corner. He makes furniture and toys.

“He’s always homesick,” she said. “He likes his bed, and of course, his refrigerator.”

But this garden. This garden has become somewhat famous in wrestling circles. He’s not exactly the greengrocer, bringing his teammates bags of tomatoes, but he is surely the only wrestler, perhaps the only Olympian, who knows his way around a hoe. Every day he’s out, tending especially to his asparagus and potatoes.

He gets help, of course. “I had to do the weeding while he was at camp,” Linda reported. Why gardening, is something of a mystery. He didn’t grow up rural. New Jersey may be the Garden State, but the only garden he knew belonged to his grandparents. “They had a few tomatoes,” he said.

Nevertheless, when it came time to settle down with Linda, they went searching “for a farmhouse with a little barn, close to town, but still far enough away.” The Baumgartners even found land that included a trout stream in the back yard.

Linda has said that the garden helps lighten the food bill, which has sometimes rivaled the rent. But Bruce hints that its purpose is more recreational. “You can waste a lot of time on it,” he said, “although the asparagus is nice.”

He seemed particularly homesick when he said that.

But then Baumgartner is always homesick. That’s the other part of his domestication. After all these years of marriage--”six years, two months and two days”--the big lug is still in love.

He sends Linda, whom he met while getting his ankles taped at Indiana State, flowers once a week.

“So what if I send flowers,” he said. “Or do part of the cleaning and half of the cooking. Or if I set her pictures out in my room (on the road). I’m proud of the way I treat my wife.”

Even though Linda called him a teddy bear in print once and confided that he had served her breakfast in bed, Bruce has survived the image. When you’re 265-plus pounds and can move a little bit, such razzing might be akin to rigging your own noose.

His wife, who had to wait three days before Bruce finally asked her name and nearly three years before he requested her hand--”Your storybook courtship,” she said--is equally sweet. Just as Bruce will have a bouquet for her when she picks him up at the airport, so will she have a plate of chocolate chip cookies for him.

Actually, his family life, or rather the completion of it, is what may someday threaten his career, which seemingly could go on forever. According to Baumgartner, a wrestler can enjoy a nice plateau from about 21 to 30.

“Even at 30, you got a decent shot at being competitive,” he said. “Wrestling’s a combination of speed, strength and conditioning, so when you get to an age when one thing falters, you can make up for it with another. Maybe as you get older, you can compensate with strength.”

Realistically, then, he could compete in another Olympics. But competition takes a peculiar toll on Baumgartner.

“It gets lonely, being away from my wife,” he said. “I remember in ‘84, I didn’t think I’d be around for ’88. And now I don’t know if I’ll wrestle past ’88. I don’t even think success will be a factor in whether I continue.”

He said he is better now at combining “sport with real life,” but there is still something, or somebody, missing.

“I’d like to have children,” he said. “I’ve been married six years and I’d like to start a family. But I can’t see having a child and running around (training). When I have a child, I want to put all that other stuff behind. It would be bad enough, coming home from work, after some long hours, to bounce Junior on my knee. You don’t want to have to get right up to work out.”

This familial instinct will surely doom his wrestling career. It’s clear he’s getting impatient to harvest more than melons, although he’s done some strange arithmetic on family planning.

“We want anywhere from one to three kids,” he said. “She wants three and I want two. We may compromise.”

Medical science awaits this family unit.

Linda, who had thought the family planning would begin in 1984, now expects it to commence after the 1989 World Championships. And whether it’s to have two or three children does not matter, as long as they are boys.

“I don’t want girls,” she said. “They might look like him. All we need is a woman shotputter.”

Do not doubt, though, that Baumgartner will get what he wants. He doesn’t strike you as aggressive or ambitious, but he has somehow come a long way without any great head start.

In particular, he is not regarded as a natural talent. He was not a worldbeater in high school, where he lost nearly all his early matches. He finally made the top three in his weight class in the state, but that hardly qualified him for wrestling’s nirvanas, Oklahoma State or Iowa. Instead he went to Indiana State, which had Larry Bird and Linda. He made quiet progress, though. He was 20-10 as a freshman, in a conference that didn’t remind anyone of the Big Eight. But he improved to 23-2 and 42-2 and then, in his senior year, went 44-0 and won the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. title.

Since his junior year, when he lost in the NCAA finals, he has not lost to another American. And for the sheer number of titles he has accumulated, he has come to be known as the greatest wrestler, certainly the greatest heavyweight, the United States has ever had. For all of Dan Gable’s fame--and he is this country’s most famous wrestler-coach--he never achieved Baumgartner’s success.

His dominance in the United States has counted for little, though. Outside of Edinboro, he has little name recognition. Yet, in the kind of contradiction only amateur athletics can endure, he may be most famous wrestler in the world.

The Soviets had dominated this weight class for 2 1/2 decades, winning every world title. Baumgartner’s emergence, among countries where Hulk Hogan does not compete for world championships, is taken very seriously. He is the Mike Tyson of his sport.

He is poorly rewarded for his success, though. USA Wrestling, the federation in this country, hopes and intends for Baumgartner to cash in on any success he might enjoy. But for the moment, Baumgartner makes his living as an assistant coach at Edinboro State, something he doesn’t intend to do forever.

“Maybe four or five more years,” he said. “And then I’ll get out of it.”

And do what? he is asked.

“Become an old man,” he said.

One pictures him sitting on the farmhouse porch, deploying his 2 1/2 boys among the rows of beans, melons and tomatoes. It fits, it’s just that one doesn’t picture it soon.