Vision Quest

Sometime during the cold, snowy night between Feb. 14 and 15, Rulon Gardner had a vision.

He and two friends, Trent Simkins and Danny Schwab, had gone snowmobiling in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, near their home in Afton, Wyo. Schwab turned back about 3:30 p.m. to attend his daughter’s basketball game, and he and Gardner got separated. Schwab found his way home but Gardner, unfamiliar with the terrain, drove his snowmobile into a gully and couldn’t escape.

Fixated on following the Salt River because he knew it led home to the Star Valley, he plunged into the freezing water, slipped and fell onto his back during a futile attempt to free the snowmobile. Shivering and wet, wearing several light layers on his upper body, gloves and boots but carrying no matches or survival gear, he trudged to the riverbank and propped himself against a tree to wait for help.

Rescuers came within about 200 yards of him, he thinks, about 2 a.m. He slipped in and out of consciousness, too weak to respond.

“I saw my [long-deceased] brother Ronald sitting there with Jesus, and God was there,” Gardner said. “I didn’t want to be there, so I didn’t go there. I just said, ‘Uh-uh.’ I pulled myself back and withdrew from it. It was like going backward, withdrawing mentally. Your mentality is the key, and I think it was the key that night.”

The indomitable will that had enabled him to subdue the supposedly unbeatable Russian Alexander Karelin and win the Greco-Roman wrestling heavyweight gold medal at the Sydney Olympics kept him alive through his 17-hour ordeal. It also sustained him through the amputation of the middle toe on his right foot and four other surgeries, among them skin grafts to repair damage done when the temperature plunged to 25 degrees below zero and halted the blood flow to his feet.

“After the accident, I didn’t want to take painkillers,” he said. “I didn’t need to take painkillers because my feet were hurt from my stupidity, and I deserved to feel the pain that they felt.”

He is counting on the same resolve to help him meet his next challenge: competing Saturday in Los Angeles for the first time since his accident, knowing he’s not the man or the wrestler he once was.

“Quickness, speed, balance, agility, change of direction, lateral movement -- all of them have been affected adversely and hold me back from being the wrestler I used to be,” he said. “But they’re getting back and improving and becoming the way they used to be. I call it ‘used to could.’ I used to could do this and that, and I will again.”

The physical changes are evident in his ungainly walk and the yellowish skin on his feet. He weighed 290 pounds at Sydney and was at 282 last week on the way to 265, but that’s to meet new weight limits. His shoulders are no less broad and his thighs no less powerful than during his marvelous overtime victory at the Olympics.

And his grin is the same, the aw-shucks smile of a kid who took up sports to escape milking cows and doing chores on his family’s 160-acre dairy farm and discovered an unexpected talent.

Yet, he has been transformed in ways he’s not completely sure of. He will begin to gauge those changes Saturday, when he steps onto the mat at Los Angeles Center Studios to wrestle Billy Pierce in one of 14 matches that will be taped and shopped to TV networks as the pilot of a real wrestling show.

The event is the brainchild of RealPro Wrestling, whose co-founders, former Northwestern University wrestlers Matt Case and Toby Willis, hope to some day start a “real” wrestling league. Who better to launch their effort than Gardner?

“The whole David-and-Goliath story in Sydney was awesome,” said Case, a two-time wrestling All-American. “He’s a great guy, down to earth, a farm-bred country boy who happens to be a great athlete.”

One whose body is no longer whole but whose spirit is unbroken.

“Sure, it’s a little scary,” Gardner said over lunch at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, plowing through a plate heaped with chicken, ribs, pasta, potatoes and vegetables before attacking a small garden of lettuce on another plate.

“As an athlete at a world-class level, you kind of expect yourself to be competing at the top. I won the Olympic Games and the [2001] world championship. Those are two huge successes. Now to come back and say, ‘OK, I went through the accident and now I’m going to be world champion again,’ there’s got to be a first step, and sometimes, the first step is the scariest step.

“You can do practice matches and everything else, and those have been going absolutely great in the last few weeks, but there’s a difference between practice and competition. It’s scary, but I have to follow my heart.”

His heart tells him to compete. Not necessarily to win another Olympic gold medal, although that’s among his objectives. It would be a formidable task, however, because to get there he probably would have to beat out U.S. rival Dremiel Byers, the reigning world champion.

Above all, Gardner simply wants to wrestle again, to test himself and the mental focus that saved him that February night.

“He’s not 100% but he’s doing excellent,” said Momir Petkovic, a U.S. Greco-Roman coach and 1976 Olympic middleweight gold medalist for Yugoslavia. “His mind and will and tremendous champion spirit are there. He proved that out in the wildness, and not everybody could survive it. Once more, he proved he is a great, strong, special human being, and he definitely deserves to be the best.”

Gardner’s father, Reed, is glad the baby of his nine children -- who range from 31 to 44 -- can walk on his own two feet. That’s how grim the prognosis was after Rulon was rescued and airlifted to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls, about two hours from Afton.

“Dr. [Timothy] Thurman, at that time, gave us little or no hope to save the feet,” said Reed, 72. “By Monday night [three days later], he discovered [Gardner] had feeling in all 10 toes, and blood circulation, so the doctor said it looked a little better....

“Of course, it was hard on [Gardner]. The insurance didn’t pay for his hospital room, so after a while he had to go to a hotel and go in for visits with the doctor. And for 30 days, he was in and out of a hyperbaric chamber. But seeing what I saw on that first day, it’s almost a miracle that he has recovered the way he has.”

Gardner’s core body temperature was about 80 degrees when he was rescued. Doctors had to cut his left boot down the middle to remove it. The right boot was trickier because he had taken off his left sock after he got out of the water but was too cold to take off his right sock, which froze in the boot. It took a cast saw and five people to remove that boot -- which he has kept, sock and all, with its mate.

He also kept his amputated toe, preserving it in a jar of formaldehyde in his refrigerator.

“Once you start losing body parts, you never know when it’s going to end,” he said, smiling. “You might as well try to keep all the body parts you have. It’s nice and everything, but it just doesn’t want to be on there anymore.

“They didn’t have to tell me. I knew it was dead. I saw it die. Growing up on a farm, you know what’s going on.”

His feet, then, must have wanted to stay attached. Told the first night he might lose them, he refused to listen.

“I said, ‘Thanks, Doc, I’ll see you tomorrow. I don’t need to hear that. I’d rather not. Have a good day and see ya,’ ” Gardner said.

“Survival was what I thought about first, but it did transition to, ‘OK, you have your feet. You don’t know how much you’ll keep, but you’re going to wrestle again. That means you need 10 toes. You need to have everything in order. You need to have everything the way it was, and the only way to do that is to have feet and be in the best physical shape as possible.’ ”

He had several skin grafts, some of the skin harvested from his body and some of it pigskin.

“I could call him ‘pig face’ now and get by with it,” Reed Gardner said.

Rulon also pokes fun at himself, never more than during a speech he made at the National Pork Producers’ convention.

“I was sitting up there in a wheelchair and said, ‘When you walk up to shake my hand, don’t grab my toes and go, “This little piggy went to market,” ’ “ he said. “And then I pointed to my toes and said, ‘Pork -- the other white meat.’ They were not sure how to react, like, ‘This is funny?’

“Hey, if I’m stupid, I’m stupid. I’m the one that made all the mistakes and I’m not going to make anyone else pay for my stupidity.”

His recovery was complicated by his willfulness. Because doctors had inserted three-inch pins in his big toes to straighten them, he couldn’t wear anything but sandals. That left his feet vulnerable when he was riding an ATV four-wheeler on the family farm and his foot slipped, nearly undoing the surgeons’ careful work.

He called Thurman, who told Gardner’s brother Russell to check if the pins were straight. Russell found a pair Vise-Grip pliers, pulled out a pin and reported it was unbent. Thurman told him to push it back in.

Without painkillers.

“After the four-wheel incident,” Reed said, “Russell went and picked up the keys for the four-wheeler, snowmobile and wave runner to keep him from doing something more. Russell is bigger and tougher than Karelin, so he can boss Rulon around.”

Gardner returned to the mat in July to conduct some clinics, but he wore socks and couldn’t demonstrate moves. He returned to the Olympic training center to work out in late August.

“One of the things that was real hard for him was, the world championships were in Moscow this year and he couldn’t be there,” Reed Gardner said. “Byers won the gold, and that hurt Rulon’s ego.”

It was more an injury to his pride, perhaps, because he doesn’t want anyone to think he became complacent after his improbable victory at Sydney.

The kid from Wyoming, who never had $20 in his pocket, got rich, his $70,000 in debts wiped out by endorsement deals and speaking fees. He was a fixture on the talk-show circuit, hobnobbing with Jay Leno and called a “cutie patootie” by Rosie O’Donnell. Letters arrived at the farm by the basketful -- “Not the bills and three or four catalogs we used to get,” Reed Gardner said.

But Rulon remained true to himself and his sport. He got a kick out of the adulation but rejected a lucrative offer to join the WWE “because the youth of America need good role models, and some of the things on the WWE aren’t things that I agree with.... Some of the things they do to women [are] degrading.”

He continued to compete and won the 2001 world title, rallying from a 3-0 deficit in the quarterfinal to pin rising Russian star Yuri Patrikeev.

That went virtually unnoticed outside the wrestling world, but not among his peers.

“He showed his real character and his real heart in the world championship, when he won it and he was wrestling all the best wrestlers all tournament,” Petkovic said.

He was planning to defend that title until the snowmobile accident. Now, he intends to win it back.

“I love to challenge myself,” he said. “I had a learning disability growing up. I was a slow learner. Some of my teachers told me I was the worst student they’ve ever had, that I had no discipline, no devotion. A lot of those things come with time....

“You can give me all the money in the world. I have no problem taking it. But I don’t want to be famous. I just want to be me and to be able to follow my dreams and have a family and be a wrestler for the rest of my days, as long as I can. After the accident, I got an opportunity to do that.”

Family, however, will wait. Divorced last year, Gardner is dating Tausha Simkins, the sister of his friend Trent. She’s the current Miss Rodeo Wyoming and aspiring Miss Rodeo America. They’ve seen each other twice in the last two months.

“Sure, I could have a relationship and maybe lose wrestling,” he said. “Things have to be sacrificed.”

Although he asked opponents to be considerate of his feet when he resumed training, he no longer seeks favors. Last week at the training center, he and Petkovic went at it relentlessly. Gardner repeatedly pushed off his right foot and lifted Petkovic off his feet, depositing him outside the circle painted on the mat.

“Put in the story he is abusing the coach,” Petkovic said. “Every time he got to the point of being frustrated, he just wants to go after you, ‘Let’s do it again.’ ”

Said Gardner: “I have 2% control over what this body does. The rest is what the Lord has blessed me with.... It’s not the most physically attractive body in the world, but it does what I need it to.”

And now he needs it to get him through the first match of the rest of his wrestling life.

“He’s under a microscope right now,” Reed Gardner said. “Everyone out there will be watching. Anyone would have fears, but the fellow he’s wrestling, Billy Pierce, is a good fellow, a good family man, and I’m sure he won’t tromp on Rulon’s toes.”

If he does, Gardner will endure, knowing he has survived worse.

“I’m coming back to do the best that I can,” he said, “and if I’m fifth in the U.S., that’s fine. So be it, if that’s the best I can do.

“I’m at a point in my career where I know what I can and can’t do. I put myself in a situation where, hopefully, I can win the gold medal and be the best. If not, I did everything, and it’s nobody else’s fault but mine.”