A Hold on Life : Everyone Loved Wrestler Dave Schultz, Including His Beaten Opponents and the Man Charged With Killing Him

In amateur wrestling, the Summer Olympics’ ultimate contact sport, no one touched more people than did Dave Schultz.

It seems as if everyone who knew him has a story to tell.

Schultz won the freestyle gold medal at 163 pounds in the 1984 Summer Games at Los Angeles, then lost in the 1988 U.S. trials to Kenny Monday. When Monday won at Seoul, Schultz was the first to rush onto the mat to congratulate him.

Schultz, considered beyond his peak at 36, was amid a remarkably successful comeback, climbing to No. 1 in his weight class in the United States. His No. 1 challenger for a berth on the Olympic team this summer at Atlanta was Rob Koll. Koll’s coach was Dave Schultz.

After a grueling victory in last summer’s world championships, Schultz received a standing ovation. The first on their feet were the Iranian fans, even though Schultz’s victim had been Iranian.

It seems as if everyone who knew him has a testimonial.

“There was just no one like him,” wrestler Ed Giese said. “He touched everybody, even if he just met the person or if he knew them for years. It’s universal.”

From wrestler Bruce Baumgartner: “He was the most unselfish and giving person I have ever known.”

Said Bob Dellinger, former director of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame: “I don’t know anybody who disliked him. Even the guys he beat liked him.”

Therein lies the irony in Schultz’s death. If he had not always been there for those who needed him, perhaps he would have left Foxcatcher Farms in the rolling hills near Philadelphia when friends and family warned him about the increasingly eccentric behavior of John E. du Pont, the 800-acre estate’s owner and amateur wrestling’s most generous benefactor. An heir to the du Pont chemical fortune, he had paid Schultz to coach and wrestle for his Team Foxcatcher since 1987.

According to police reports from Newtown Square, Pa., Nancy Schultz was inside the white, two-story house that she, Dave and their two children, Alexander, 9, and Danielle, 6, shared on the estate on Friday, Jan. 26, when her husband yelled to her from the driveway. He said he had repaired the radio in their Toyota.

Next she heard a shot and a scream. As she reached the door, she heard another shot and told police that she saw du Pont behind the wheel of his silver Lincoln Town Car with a .38-caliber revolver in his hand. She also saw her husband on the ground.

“John, stop it,” she said. Du Pont, she said, fired another shot into Schultz, then turned the gun toward her as she fled into the house. After she heard the car leave, she hurried to her husband’s side, hearing a gurgling noise as she hugged him. He died in her arms.

“Our family is devastated and saddened by Dave’s brutal and unexpected loss,” she said later in a statement. “He was not only a world-class athlete, coach and mentor but a devoted and loving father to our children and husband to me for the past 14 years. Dave will be missed so much by his family, friends and the wrestling community around the world.

“My family must now turn its focus and energy to my children . . . who had a very close relationship with their father and who are struggling to understand how and why this tragedy happened, and how they will possibly fill this void.”

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That also is the challenge facing amateur wrestling as many of its leading officials, coaches and athletes gather today for a memorial service honoring Schultz in Philadelphia’s Palestra. Schultz was not often a winner in that arena in recent years, but he will be today, based on the tributes that his peers already have paid him in the last nine days.

Stan Abel, who coached Dave and his brother Mark (also a gold medalist in freestyle wrestling in 1984) at the University of Oklahoma, called them “the Michelangelos of wrestling.” Iowa State Coach Bobby Douglass called Dave “the renaissance of wrestling.” Giese said: “Dave was wrestling. He was our version of Michael Jordan.”

“I can’t remember another time we’ve lost an athlete of this magnitude in an Olympic year,” U.S. Olympic Committee spokesman Mike Moran said.

Besides his success in the 1984 Olympics, Schultz finished first in the world championships once, second three times and won 10 national titles. The most recent was last year.

“I don’t know if anybody appreciates how hard it was for him to continue winning in that weight class,” said Oklahoma State Coach John Smith, an Olympic freestyle gold medalist in 1988. “It’s easier for the bigger guys because there’s less competition and it’s not as hard to maintain your weight. But at 163 pounds, it just doesn’t happen often for someone his age to have that much success.”

Schultz retired often but never for long.

“Well, heck, what else am I going to do?” he once said in an interview. “What happens to most intelligent people is they retire after they turn 26 or 27. I don’t have to deal with that problem.”

“Why not?” he was asked.

“No intelligence,” he said, laughing.

Not as well built as an average aerobics instructor and balding, the 5-foot-9 Schultz might not have looked as athletic as most of his opponents, but no one in the sport knew more about flexibility, defense and clock management.

Said USA Wrestling Executive Director Jim Scherr, who while still active as an athlete often competed against Schultz: “Technically, he was the best wrestler we’ve produced in the United States ever as far as his knowledge of wrestling.”

Giese, who also lived on the du Pont estate, said that Schultz spent hours watching videotapes of his matches and studying his competitors.

“He always had a notebook with him and he would write down the technique and the things he needed to do.”

As he progressed into the world’s elite, he often traveled to the former Soviet republics to compete against their most accomplished wrestlers and seek knowledge from the sport’s best minds. He taught himself Russian. If not fluent himself, he could at least communicate about the sport in several other languages, including Persian and Turkish.

“He knew all of the different languages so he could speak to the athletes,” wrestler Kurt Angle said. “He spoke Russian so he could learn their ways and be able to beat them. His best asset was that he was very clever in that manner.”

But his aptitude for languages also helped him forge friendships throughout the world. He named his son after Aleksandr Medved, the super-heavyweight from Minsk who won gold medals in 1968 and ’72.

“When you saw Dave at a tournament, he would sit with every team from every country and talk to everybody,” USA spokesman Gary Abbott said.

More remarkable, other wrestlers said, was that he was willing to share his vast knowledge.

“He showed me a skill in 1986 before we left for the Goodwill Games involving the leg lace attack,” Smith said. “That skill stuck with me until the last match I had in ’92. He made you listen and understand.”

Smith said that Schultz took something from all the great wrestling countries, along with what he learned from his own personal experience, and created a style for Team Foxcatcher, which had so much success that other coaches in the United States began to copy it.

“He was the single most important person in the ‘80s for freestyle wrestling,” Smith said. “He really took us to the next level.”

One wrestler who has benefited is Koll, invited by Schultz to join Team Foxcatcher, even though they were competing for the same Olympic berth. Schultz then coached him.

“People would ask, ‘What are you doing? Why are you letting him play those mind games?’ ” said Koll, who coaches at Cornell University. “Well, maybe he was playing mind games. That was Dave. But he also was teaching me the best technique I’d ever been around. I think that he sincerely felt that if he didn’t beat me that at least the country should still have the best representative possible at 163 pounds.”

Schultz was no saint on the mat. In the 1984 Summer Olympics, an extra judge was assigned to scrutinize the Schultz brothers after Mark broke an opponent’s elbow in the 180-pound category and Dave injured an opponent’s knee. They were accused of “excessive brutality.” Brushing off the criticism, Dave said, “What are they trying to do, turn this into a sissy sport?”

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Off the mat, friends described Schultz as a free spirit. Koll said Schultz’s personality was like the clothes he wore.

“Unconventional,” Koll said, adding that it was not unusual to see Schultz in combat boots and a beanie cap with a pompon at the top.

“We were driving to the World Cup in Chattanooga in ‘93, and Dave got all excited by a sign he saw on the side of the highway and pulled over,” Koll said. “It was advertising bungee jumping and hang gliding. If he saw something, he’d do it. So there he was bungee jumping and hang gliding the afternoon away. It’s not something normally I would have done, but he talked me into it.

“A few more miles down the road, he pulled over again because he saw a sign for pickled toad’s feet or something like that. He said, ‘You might never be in Chattanooga again, so you’d better try it.’ And we did. His philosophy was that you only have one life. I used to joke with him, ‘The way you’re doing it, yours is going to be shorter than most.’ ”

Koll said that Schultz was attracted to Foxcatcher because du Pont also had varied interests and independent ideas and did not confine the athletes on his estate in either area. They became close friends, Schultz often inviting du Pont to his house for dinner.

But the relationship began to change in the last couple of years, when, du Pont friends and relatives said, the wealthy heir began to show signs of paranoia. Schultz told friends du Pont accused the wrestler of spying on him, of coming through the walls like a ghost in the bedroom of his mansion.

Schultz joked about it, refusing to take seriously warnings from other wrestlers and even his father that du Pont might be dangerous. One wrestler, Dan Chaid, has filed a suit in federal court, alleging that du Pont drove him off the property with a machine gun.

“He’s unstable, he’s eccentric, yes,” Schultz told one friend. “But he wouldn’t shoot anybody.”

Joy Leutner, a triathlete from Hermosa Beach who lived on the estate in the past, said that du Pont at one point had a drinking problem that the athletes, including Schultz, helped him overcome. She said that she believed Schultz would not have abandoned du Pont if the wrestler felt his friend was slipping back into a destructive pattern. It has been reported since the shooting that du Pont was drinking again.

“Out of everyone, Dave was the one who really believed that he could help Mr. du Pont,” a former Foxcatcher coach, Greg Strobel, told Sports Illustrated. “Dave would never say anything bad about him, even though all the other wrestlers did. Dave was probably the best person du Pont ever came into contact with in his whole life. And du Pont killed him.”