Push Comes to Shove

If trash talk alone were enough to propel a bobsled down an Olympic track at record speed, the United States today would be masters of the sliding world and Chip Minton would be as famous as Eric Heiden.

“To be quite honest,” Minton says, considering the competition at the upcoming Nagano Winter Games, “I think we’re going to start off the year kicking European [butt]--Japanese style.”

Minton is miffed at the Europeans, the Swiss in particular, for “cheating” at a World Cup event last year.

“All three teams got caught cheating with their axles--their axles weren’t right or something,” he says. “[But] I still haven’t got my bronze medal or my watch . . . I’m just glad to get them out of Europe so they can’t hide behind their tactics. I want to go head to head with them. I can’t wait.”

Minton is also miffed at the Jamaican bobsled team, the goofball inspiration for a movie called “Cool Runnings,” an American-made movie in which neither Minton nor any members of the U.S. Olympic bobsled team starred.

“The Jamaican bobsled team is more popular in our country than we are,” Minton grumbles. “That’s probably our own fault because we haven’t been winning gold medals in past Olympics. But we’re going to change all that.

“I want Team Shimer and Team Herberich to be household names. I want a movie about us. I’m tired of the Jamaicans getting all the press--and they come in 25th place.

“It’s time to get on the ice and get it on.”

Yes, it is--and isn’t that what gets American bobsledders in trouble at the Olympic Games?

A member of the 1994 Olympic team that failed to place a sled higher than 14th in Lillehammer, Minton is part of a sorry tradition that dates to 1956, when the United States won its last Olympic bobsledding medal--a bronze in four-man competition.

Over those four-plus decades, the Americans have enlisted race-car engineers to design better and faster sleds, have recruited professional football players such as Herschel Walker and Willie Gault, have tried track and field stars such as Edwin Moses, have predicted the medal drought was about to end any quadrennium now.

And come every Winter Games, the best and brightest American bobsledders appear to be auditioning for post-Olympic careers as Zamboni drivers.

“We have to win a medal,” Minton says. “And if we’re healthy, we’re going to win a medal.

“The guys on our team now are veterans. They’re experienced--we don’t take anything for granted. We’re ready to go. We’re all veterans now and we know what happened in ’94. And we can’t let it happen again.”

Minton is a push-athlete for the U.S. bobsled team, meaning he’s the one in the back who grunts a lot and works like a piano mover in a really big hurry, who probably moonlights as a prison guard or a professional wrestler.

Minton has done both.

Long before he was known as Mr. World Class, The Greatest Athlete of All-Time, on the World Championship Wrestling circuit, Minton worked his way through college as a guard at Central State Prison in Macon, Ga. At 18, he weighed 230 pounds--which equipped him for the job--and, well, flipping hamburger patties evidently wasn’t challenging enough.

“I was point man on the riot team,” Minton says. “I was on the canine unit too. We’d have an escape and I’d have to run through the woods.”

He laughs at that recollection.

“So it was good training for bobsled.”

If somewhat more stressful.

“There were a lot of horror stories,” he says. “I broke helmets. It was an aggressive lifestyle, a dangerous job. That was OK when I was 18, 19, 20, but once I got married and had a little girl, I had to find another line of work.”

Minton found bobsledding through a flier posted in the weight room of the gymnasium where he used to work out.

“I saw this flier on the wall that said they were trying out for the bobsled team,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Sure, yeah, I’m open to anything, a different way of life than this.’ ”

Minton tried out in Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1993, made the cut and “the next thing I know, I was in Calgary, Canada. Being from Macon, I had, like, a sweater. I was in tennis shoes and it was 20 below zero. I was freezing, I was green, I didn’t know what I was doing. Some of the guys loaned me some clothes to wear.

“I had to go with the new drivers. I crashed twice my first week in the sport. It was a rough year and when I went home, I didn’t know if I was going to come back. I’d just had a baby girl with my wife. We had to move out of my house--we moved in with one of her friends because it was the only place we could afford to live.

“I came back the next year and I trained six days a week--rain, snow, sleet, cold, whatever. I came back and made the Olympic team, USA 1 with Jim [Herberich].”

That cameo would help earn Minton a bigger role in television.

“After I came home from the Olympics in ‘94, Ted Turner sent me a fax, suggested I try to become a wrestler because I was just talking trash, like I am now,” Minton says. “So I went to the Power Plant [a training school in Atlanta for wrestlers] and tried out. I drove an hour and a half, got beat up four to five hours a day and went back home.”

At first, Minton wasn’t sure what was worse--failing the audition, or passing it.

“Me being new, I’d have to get in with the veterans and get pounded,” Minton says. “I came home my first week in wrestling with a broken thumb, a concussion and a cracked rib. I laid down on the couch and my wife is looking at me like, ‘This is what you want to do for a living? This is what you did for the last five years.’ ”

Minton is still working his way up the WCW ranks--”I’m on the top in bobsledding, I’m up-and-coming in wrestling”--and, as such, remains in the win-one, lose-one stage of his career.

“I’ve been disqualified a couple times too,” he proudly reports.

For what?

“Chokin’. Throwin’ guys over the ropes by their hair.”

At first glance, professional wrestling and Olympic bobsledding would seem an incongruous mix--tough to head-butt a German with that hard helmet on--but Minton sees an obvious symmetry.

“I think bobsled and wrestling are the two most extreme sports in the world,” Minton says, “and I’m involved in both of them. I’m the only athlete who does that, two extreme sports like that. . . . I’m the only one like me. Ever.”

Besides, the wrestling gig enables Minton to keep his trash-talk chops in peak Olympic condition.

As Mr. World Class, The Greatest Athlete of All-Time, was saying about the European bobsledders, “They don’t understand me some times because I’m outspoken. When I trash-talk, they really get offended. I like that . . .

“But they just got to think about themselves. They got enough to worry about as it is.”