He’s Back, and That’s No Baloney : Kenny Monday Takes Care of Business on Wrestling Mat and in the Real World

He looked up on that hot afternoon in Tulsa, Okla., and there they were.

Two-hundred children, lined up at the foot of a former gold-medal wrestler who had just left retirement to qualify for his third Olympics.

Two-hundred children, hands out, hearts hopeful.

Two-hundred children, crowding in front of legendary Kenny Monday, all hoping for a brush with. . . .

A steak and cheese sub. Or perhaps a classic Italian? Hot or cold? White or wheat?

“Dear,” Monday’s wife Sabrina said. “We do not have time to talk. We have sandwiches to make.”’

One week after a stirring victory in the 163-pound class at the Olympic trials, and already reality was falling in big drops on the front of Kenny Monday’s shirt. Make that, apron.

Working at the counter of his Subway sandwich shop, he saw looks not of hero worship, but hunger for hero sandwiches. He received more orders than praise.

And that tingle in his ear was not remnants of the thunderous cheers that have accompanied his emotional comeback after two years out of the sport.

It was Sabrina.

“I said, ‘Dear, come on, make ‘em faster, you’ve lost it.’ ” Sabrina said. “Some people actually wanted to talk about the Olympics. But we didn’t have time.”

Monday, called into active duty because a manager didn’t show up, might have been tempted to run out the front door when the children arrived.

Except that would have landed him at the door of his other store, Monday Morning Expresso, a coffee house in the same university complex.

And they’ve been waiting for him at Monday Morning Expresso.

“You ought to see Kenny with a cloth,” manager Regina Goodwin said. “He can really dust.”

This, then, is not about your average gold-medal Olympian. This is about your average big-dreaming American.

This is about a guy with two jobs who decided last October to take on a third.

A guy who hopes that this third job, to be completed later this month in Atlanta, will make his family happy and pockets fat.

A guy who will then return to those original two jobs, working 18 hours a day running two stores, chasing a notion far bigger than those that Olympic broadcasters will bombard you with for the next month.

Only in movies do 34-year-old wrestlers return from a two-year retirement to right a wrong, or avenge a slight or show the world.

Kenny Monday is too wiped out these days to attend any movies.

“This is not about proving anything,” Monday said. “This is about doing what I think this country was built on. This is about trying to get ahead, trying to take care of my family.”

Most of whom work in one of his two stores. Which means there could be a shortage of employees later this month, a problem Monday is figuring out.

How about, lock the doors and give everyone a couple of days off to watch him win another gold?

“You kidding me?” Monday asked.

*

Kenny Sundae, friends called him.

It was last October. The Olympics were 10 months away. Kenny Monday was hanging around Tulsa eating bagfuls of chocolate chip cookies from his sandwich store, drinking pints of coffee from the other place.

“And getting this serious stomach,” Sabrina said. “I said, ‘Dear, are you ever planning on starting that comeback?’ ”

This strange trip had begun in 1992, when Monday decided to retire shortly before earning a silver medal despite a dislocated elbow in the Barcelona Olympics.

And why not? He already had his gold medal, won four years earlier in Seoul. He had already been a good role model in being the world’s first black to win an Olympic wrestling gold.

“In 1992, I just wanted to get it over with,” he said.

Then he started thinking about Atlanta, about competing in front of his entire family, about using the notoriety of a home-country hero to create more substantial things in the neighborhood.

Such as successful black-owned businesses. And wrestling schools for children who could not afford them.

So he decided to rest for a couple of years while launching some of those plans, then return to glory.

“And I’m saying, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” Olympic teammate Melvin Douglas said. “I’m saying, ‘I believe it when I see it.’ In wrestling, not many guys walk away and come back.”

If his buddies were uncertain, you can guess what the bankers said when Monday came to them for loans to begin his businesses.

“I couldn’t imagine what they were thinking when I said, ‘I want this money, I’ll open these stores, then I have to slip away for a little while to win a gold medal,’ ” Monday said. “But somehow, they had faith.”

As the countdown to the Olympics continued--18 months away, one year away--Sabrina’s faith began to weaken.

“One time in August, I just cornered him and said, ‘You are going to Atlanta, aren’t you?’ ” she recalled. “He looked at me and said, ‘No,’ and walked away. I followed him around saying, ‘Really? Really?’

“He finally smiled and I said, ‘Well, then that’s not a sure no!’ ”

It turns out, Monday was simply delaying what he knew would be the inevitable hurt.

In October, he announced to his wife that his comeback would begin the next week . . . at the vaunted Sunkist Kids Wrestling Club in Phoenix.

He would be leaving his Sabrina and infant daughter Sydnee, not to mention his businesses, until his push for Atlanta was complete.

“I said, ‘First you don’t want to train. Now you want to train in . . . Phoenix?’ ” Sabrina recalled. “I said, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ ”

As a top salesman for a cosmetics company--she even drives one of those pink Cadillacs--Sabrina did only what Monday expects of himself.

The seemingly impossible.

First came the 19-hour drive from Tulsa to Phoenix in a rented U-haul with Monday’s jeep in tow. Sabrina and the baby had accompanied him, yet Monday refused to pull over for anything but gas and food.

“When we did that thing nonstop, I knew he was serious again,” Sabrina said.

Then, after Sabrina and the baby returned home, came the rigors of daily life.

While Monday worked eight hours a day in Phoenix in hopes of losing 40 pounds--that is not a misprint--she cared for the baby and ran the two newly opened stores in Tulsa.

With the exception of Monday’s occasional trips home to sling lettuce.

“The sacrifices we all have made have been tremendous,” Monday said. “But that is what anybody in this country does in trying to be successful.”

He will be surrounded by many trappings in Atlanta, but Monday said he will never forget a bike and a boom box.

Those first weeks in Phoenix, he spent three hours a day riding a stationary bike in the courtyard of his tiny apartment complex. There were no computers on the bike, no television in his sight, nothing but the bike and a nearby boom box that inspired him with rhythm and blues.

“That sort of seclusion was what I needed,” he said.

That, and a daily whipping from Douglas, who has always been heavier (198 pounds), but never better.

“I had a ball with Kenny. He was so out of shape, I’d be throwing him around saying, ‘This is for all the times you’ve beaten me up!’ ” Douglas said. “It was funny.”

Not to Monday. It became even less funny the night he returned home to hear his daughter, now 2, chirping into his answering machine, “Daddy, go for the gold.”

All he could think of was, when did she learn how to say that?

“There are so many things I’ve missed, so much I’ve got to make up for,” he said.

Monday was also especially devastated on Jan. 26 with the shooting death of longtime 163-pound rival Dave Schultz.

Contrary to popular opinion, Monday did not come out of retirement because he liked wresting Schultz. “Dave had nothing to do with it,” said Monday, who was not particularly close to Schultz, despite many matches.

What really affected Monday were memories of a November meeting of the athletes’ advisory committee of USA Wrestling. The topic was odd wrestling benefactor John du Pont, who eventually allegedly killed Schultz.

“This guy is crazy, and it is going to blow up in your face,” Monday told the committee.

Yet the committee took no action. Schultz even argued with Monday about it.

At Schultz’s funeral, his wife Nancy hugged Monday and said, “You tried to tell them.”

Now one of Monday’s tasks, as co-captain of the Olympic wrestling team with Bruce Baumgartner, is to design a singlet that somehow keeps Schultz’s memory alive. Look for a black stripe of some sort.

“I spoke up,” said Monday, who never received money from du Pont. “In hindsight, those who didn’t have to live with it.”

There was no hindsight needed for Monday’s decision to return after his performance at the Olympic trials in Spokane, Wash.

Monday stormed out against 25-year-old Pat Smith with such power that he scored two points in the first 10 seconds.

After Monday scored a 7-0 victory in the first of their best-of-three series, Smith was penalized a point for fleeing the mat in the first minute of the second match. Monday won, 5-1, for a sweep and his third consecutive Olympic berth.

After spending most of the matches juggling Sydnee in one arm and waving her other arm, Sabrina made this announcement:

“If you’re looking for pleasure in Atlanta, you’ve come to the wrong party. We’re bringing the pain.”

Kenny Monday, coffee grinder, sandwich artist, husband, father and full-time dreamer, smiled. How right she was.