The Agony of Victory: When Winning Isn't Enough

ALSO BY STEVE FRIEDMAN

The Gentleman’s Guide to Life;

What Every Guy Should Know

About Living Large, Loving Well,

Feeling Strong, and Looking Good

Loose Balls:

Easy Money, Hard Fouls, Cheap Laughs

& True Love in the NBA

(with Jayson Williams)

Copyright © 2007, 2011 by Steve Friedman

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-492-5

For my mother and father,

Janet Hupert Friedman and Barry Morton Friedman

And in memory of

David Wallace Hupert and Irwin Sonny Friedman

"The real glory is being knocked to your knees

and then coming back. That’s real glory."

—Vince Lombardi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 GOING NOWHERE FAST: Graeme Obree, Cyclist

2 KINGPIN: Pete Weber, Bowler

3 IT’S GONNA SUCK TO BE YOU: The Men and Women of the Hardrock 100, Ultra-marathoners

4 LOST AND FOUND: Gerry Lindgren, Runner

5 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING SCOTT WILLIAMSON: Scott Williamson, Hiker

6 FALLING STAR: Marshall Rogers, Basketball Player

7 UP FROM THE GUTTER: Rudy Kasimakis, Bowler

8 TOUGH: Danelle Ballengee, Runner

9 THE TRAGEDY: Marco Pantani, Cyclist

10 SIXTEEN MINUTES FROM HOME: Willie McCool, Runner

11 LOST IN AMERICA: Steve Vaught, Hiker

12 A MOMENT OF SILENCE: John Moylan, Runner

13 G-D IN HIS CORNER: Dmitriy Salita, Boxer

14 DRIVING LESSONS: Barry Friedman, Golfer

Afterword

Publication History

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m grateful to the athletes who exhibited such generosity and patience with me, even when they had no way of knowing whether they would like the resulting stories. (Some didn’t.) Also, thanks to their friends, families, fans, teammates, coaches, competitors, detractors, and everyone else who put up with my questions and presence.

Thank you to the editors who assigned, edited, improved, and—in some cases—conceived of these stories: John Atwood, Charlie Butler, the late Art Cooper, Jonathan Dorn, Hal Espen, Peter Flax, David Granger, Jon Gluck, Eric Hagerman, Jay Heinrichs, Lisa Henricksson, Stephen Madden, Adam Moss, Barry Murov, Scott Omelianuk, Bill Strickland, Brad Wieners, and David Willey. Thank you to Steve Murphy, majordomo at Rodale, Inc., the publishing juggernaut that owns the magazines in which many of these stories first appeared.

I am indebted to those who read draft after draft of one, many, or all of these stories, offering suggestions and wise counsel when there was absolutely nothing in it for them. Thank you for your kindness, Joe Bargmann, Jeff Colt, Rachael Combe, Carolyn Craig, Scott Dickensheets, Nancy Donaghue, Chris Ducker, Mary Duffy, Mary Kate Frank, Ann Friedman, Don Friedman, Christina Frohock, Ken Fuson, Robbin Gourley, Helen Henry, Anne Kelsh, Kristen Kemp, Lynn Medford, Katharine Medina, Miranda Ryshawy, Nicholas Ryshawy, Jennifer Scruby, Jonathan Thompson, Mary Wible, and Leslie Yazel.

I’m grateful to Megan Williams and Emily Getchell for their translation work, reporting help, and indefatigable good cheer in Italy and Cuba respectively Thank you to agent Faye Bender and publisher/editor/book lovers Jeannette Seaver and Dick Seaver. Thank you, Eddie, Isaac, and Iris, for reminding me what’s important and what’s not.

I am especially grateful to Jeff Leen, who for twenty-seven years has helped and inspired me more than he imagines. Thank you, friend.

INTRODUCTION

The cycling champion couldn’t decide what to order for dinner. He had invented a new kind of bike. He had created a new way of riding. He had revolutionized the sport, inspired millions, and ridden faster than any human ever had. And now, just a few years later, he couldn’t choose between chicken korma and chicken rogan josh.

He blinked. He squinted. He mused aloud about the chicken dishes. He took great gulps from his pint of Diet Coke. Sweat dripped from his nose onto the tablecloth as his wife and two small boys studied the floor.

We were at an Indian restaurant in the northwest of Scotland, hard on the Irish Sea, near where the champion was born, in the country that once named him its most intriguing sports personality. I knew about his subsequent failures and debt, his bitter and public feuds with cycling’s sanctioning bodies. I knew he had recently quit drinking. I knew he had tried to kill himself four times. And I knew that, as much as he hungered to achieve athletic greatness again, he knew the disfiguring costs of his ambition. When he chose rogan josh, his wife and boys seemed to start breathing.

Graeme Obree was one of the most tortured men I had ever met. And one of the most heroic. I thought there might be a connection.

Obree’s is just one of the stories included in this book. There’s also the hard-drinking professional bowler who has spent his life trying to exorcise the ghost of his legendary father; the leading scorer in Division I college basketball who blamed his chronic unemployment and arrest for shoplifting on the voices in his head and an animation machine; another cyclist, who saved the Tour de France, restored cycling glory to Italy, enraged Lance Armstrong, then, just a few years later, checked into a hotel room in a seedy coastal village south of Venice and on Valentine’s Day, killed himself. There’s the greatest Orthodox Jewish boxer in the world, if not in history, whom I watched fall twice in the first round of an Atlantic City bout — to an unknown — and transform instantly from an avatar of cultural and religious strength into a young, confused, and motherless immigrant, even as his fans screamed his name and waved Israeli flags. Here also is the eagle scout, astronaut, and cross-country runner whose most stirring feats of heroism live on — contrary to what most people think — not in what he did but how. And here is the most celebrated high school distance runner who ever lived, a man who accomplished long-distance running feats almost half a century ago that still astound, then abandoned his wife and three children in Washington, adopted a false identity, and started selling water-filled insoles from a pushcart on the beaches of Waikiki. He called them Happy Feet.

Here are men (and two women) who despite their inner torment ascended to the absolute peaks of their sports. Or did their success come because of their despair? That’s just one question I tried to answer as I watched them work, and rest, and — as much as they could — play. That’s what I tried to understand as I talked to the others whose lives had been bent — often cruelly — by the fierce need that seemed to drive so many of these men to greatness and just as often destroyed them.

I spent a week in Tucson at a tournament with another bowler, a professional hustler who had made a career out of cheating officially sanctioned pros out of their hard-earned tournament winnings and was now trying to go legit for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate. I pored over maps and photos in Northern California with a convenience-store clerk and tree climber who decided that his life wouldn’t be complete unless he hiked from Mexico to Canada — and back — in one season. I sat bleary-eyed in the chilly predawn darkness at a pancake hut at ninety-three hundred feet with scores of recovering drug addicts, bulimics, and garden-variety obsessives who set out each midsummer to travel 101 miles over six thirteen-thousand-foot mountain peaks and through countless melt-swollen alpine rivers as they competed in the most forbidding ultra marathon in the world; I retraced the doomed Italian cyclist’s final desperate weeks in Cuba, and then, in Italy, found fans who still refused to face the truth about their hero. I gazed into the empty autumn sky with the dutiful company man who for much of his adult life had risen at 4 A.M., run his four miles, showered, and then caught an early morning commuter train into Manhattan … until September 11, 2001. I traveled to the Midwest, to my hometown, so that my father could teach me to play golf. That’s what he thought, anyway. What I wanted was to discover exactly what he had found as a young man on the links those many Wednesday afternoons, and Saturday mornings, and Sunday summer evenings, and why he couldn’t find it at home, where my mother and brother and sister and I waited for him. I wanted to learn whether his passion for golf was a cause or consequence of our family’s falling apart.

These were serious athletes (my father included), engaged in matters of life and death, but just as often they were involved with characters and in — there’s no other word — hijinks as hilarious as they were surreal. There were professional-bowling karaoke nights. There were long-distance hikers known only as Mr. Beer and Hobo Joe and Real Fat (who was really fat). There was Gatorade and kosher cake in the boxer’s hotel room, with his Hasidic handlers and my miniskirted, cross-wearing Catholic girlfriend. There was the excitable cycling writer who once described a particular race as so daunting that it chopped through the ranks of great cyclists like a tsunami across a coconut festooned atoll. There was the Hawaiian magic pillow and the near-miraculous feats the schoolboy-legend-turned-deadbeat-dad inspired in people whom he persuaded to believe in what they could not see. There were, memorably, bowling groupies.

Mostly, though, there were men who were knocked down and who got back up.

These are not stories primarily about fame, or glory, though fame and glory are fiercely sought. They are neither celebrations of today’s glib and smiling professional gladiators and corporate pitchmen, nor screeds against the toxic braggarts whose combination of villainy and strength attract even as it repels. These are tales of athletes who seek mastery over one thing without realizing that what they’re really trying to master is something deep and unrecognizable within themselves.

Here are lonely people in lonely pursuits. Champions and would-be champions who work at their solitary crafts — cycling and running, boxing and bowling, hiking and golfing — away from the comfort and safety of teammates and agents and public-relations managers, far outside the protective and distorting circle of the spotlight.

Here are men and women driven neither by the will to win nor by the love of competition but by an existential terror most can’t even acknowledge — a burning need to prove themselves and all too often a corrosive certainty that they are beyond redemption. Consequently, no amount of victory or athletic achievement brings them lasting happiness, and their only moments of real peace occur at those instants when they realize the futility of their struggles. The human experience, in other words. Counted in seconds and miles, scrawled on scorecards, etched in the ravaged souls of ruined champions.

1

GOING NOWHERE FAST:

GRAEME OBREE, CYCLIST

CHOOSING IS AN ORDEAL. C HICKEN KORMA VERSUS CHICKEN rogan josh should not matter so much. To the ravaged cyclist, though, it is a matter of life and death. He needs to be vigilant. How can he afford not to be? Ten years ago, just a short bike ride from here, the racer peered through a chilly, driving rain and glimpsed the future of his sport in a blinding instant, and what he saw brought him fame and riches and love. And then, for ten years, the mad vision tortured him.

He can’t afford such prescience anymore. He can’t survive the agonies it exacts. His doctors have warned him. His wife has pleaded with him. Even his former competitors and detractors, the ones he spent years challenging and vanquishing and mocking, with the hubris only a Prometheus on pedals could summon, even they wish him nothing but peace because they have witnessed the disfiguring price of revelation.

He was an inventor and visionary and champion who twice stood atop the cycling world by riding farther in one hour than anyone ever had, and today he needs to forget all that. He needs to concentrate on the moment. The doctors have told him that. Otherwise, what happened last Christmas might happen again. He couldn’t bear doing that to his family. He needs to calm down, to take care of himself. He needs to order dinner.

But how can he? Korma versus rogan josh is just one of the agonizing choices facing him tonight. His eight-year-old son wants Kashmiri naan, and, though there will be plenty to share with his ten-year-old brother, the eight-year-old isn’t much of a sharer. The older boy deserves his own bread, and it should be a different flavor, to make him feel special. Garlic bread! That might be the answer. How does the older boy feel about garlic bread? He doesn’t feel so great about it, but he really doesn’t feel great about sharing with his little brother. The older boy is dyslexic, like the cyclist was when he was a child, and he is clumsy, too, just like his father. The cyclist wants to protect his firstborn. He wishes someone had protected him when he was young. He will take a chance. Garlic bread.

The decision has cost the cyclist. He is blinking, squinting, grinding his jaw. It is September, chilly and damp in this coastal Scottish village, even inside the restaurant. But he is sweating. First his brow moistens, then beads appear on his broad forehead, and before long — even as he gulps at his pint of Diet Coke — the sweat is dripping down his aquiline nose and onto the table.

His eyes are grayish blue, and he squints and blinks and clenches his jaw during times of stress, like ordering dinner, or when he hears a question that causes him pain, like one about last Christmas. He is olive-skinned, dark-haired, six feet tall and 190 pounds, with broad shoulders and heavy, muscled thighs. In racing close-ups, his high cheekbones and angular jaw combine with an unusually full lower lip to exude lupine menace. He has gained six pounds in the past few months, though, taking the edges from his face, softening him. Combined with the nervous tics, the effect is prey rather than predator. He is self-conscious about his recent paunch.

The bread arrives and the boys are squabbling and the first pint of Diet Coke is gone and the sweat continues to drip from the racer’s nose onto his appetizers, which he has ordered with enormous, excruciating difficulty.

Oh, for God’s sake, his wife says, doing a brave imitation of a laugh. Wipe your brow.

The racer laughs, too, a small, helpless sound.

It’s a mark of health, you know, he says. Sweating like that.

Bicycling’s giants strap on heart-rate monitors and hire coaches who measure maximal oxygen uptakes and calibrate recovery times to the millisecond. They travel with nutritionists. Graeme Obree ate sardines and chili con carne, vegetables and marmalade sandwiches (A pretty good diet, I’d say), and boasted that he trained by the feel factor, which involved riding when I feel like it. The heroes of the sport — Lemond and Armstrong notwithstanding—grow up in biking strongholds like Italy and Switzerland and France, and they ride state-of-the-art machines that cost as much as $500,000, products of sophisticated engineering and corporate investments.

Obree lived in Irvine, Scotland, a grim little town in a green, hilly district hard on the Irish Sea, a spot so provincial that even other Scots deride it as a backwater. When he was twenty-eight years old, broke, in debt, and on welfare, he announced that he was going to break one of bicycling’s most prestigious and time-honored races. He said he would do it on a bicycle he had built himself, for two hundred dollars (not including the man hours, naturally)

What followed over the next few years — world hour records in 1993 and 1994, world pursuit championships in 1993 and 1995, domination of time trialing in the midnineties — infuriated bicycling’s image-conscious racing aristocracy as much as it inspired the sport’s assorted couch potatoes, dreamers, and wheel-happy Walter Mittys. Obree’s bike was as ungainly as it was original, his riding style as awkward as it was effective. He was funny and, on it, funny looking. He was also something of a loudmouth, often complaining about rampant blood doping in professional biking years before the highly publicized French and Italian drug investigations of 1998 and beyond proved him right.

After his first and most shocking world championship, in 1993, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) conducted a telephone poll and named Obree Scotland’s most intriguing sports personality. That’s when bicycling’s bureaucrats set out to destroy him. Or he began to destroy himself. He’s still not sure.

He was a clumsy child, falling into streams, knocking into walls, cracking his head open so often that the blood poured out every other week. He broke his nose more times than he can remember.

His brother, Gordon, older by fourteen months, was the smart one. His little sister, Yvonne, not as gifted academically as Gordon, was tougher than either brother. Graeme was dyslexic, and sensitive, a less-than-ideal combination for a middle child and the son of a cop. The Obrees lived in Newmilns, population five thousand, just down the road from Irvine. As the cop’s kid, Obree was filth, or son of the filth. Every day he’d be in a fight. And when he got hauled into the principal’s office, I’d get the belt, because I was the common factor.

He was terrible at sports, terrible in the classroom. He liked building things, though, and would have enjoyed metalwork class if it hadn’t provided the central gathering place for his huskiest tormentors. He stood with his back against a wall, a chisel in his hand, and he fashioned a trowel and half a plant-holder bracket. It took him a year.

I hated school, he says. I hated Newmilns, I hated most of my childhood.

His parents didn’t believe in pampering.

Yvonne started working at sixteen, his mother, Marcia says, "and she cried and said she didn’t want to go to school because of the bullying…. Even me, as a policeman’s wife, I was ostracized. So it wasn’t just Graeme."

As far as we’re concerned, he was just a normal boy, says John, his father. He had trouble reading, yes, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was dyslexic…. We just thought he was lazy about reading.

He wished his parents loved him more. Sometimes he wished he were dead.

I have no idea how I managed to pass as normal in school, writes Kay Redfield Jamison in An Unquiet Mind, her memoir of manic depression, except that other people are generally caught up in their own lives and seldom notice despair in others if those despairing make an effort to disguise the pain. I made not just an effort, but an enormous effort not to be noticed. I knew something was dreadfully wrong, but I had no idea what, and I had been brought up to believe that you kept your problems to yourself.

Graeme discovered bicycling as an adolescent, was racing by fifteen, on a burgundy prewar Gianelli. Pedaling as hard as he could, he could almost forget that he didn’t have any friends, that his parents always seemed disappointed with him. At seventeen he won his first race, the eighteen-mile Ayr-to-Girvan time trial. He won the junior prize and the overall prize and, because he had never won before, the handicap prize. His total haul: fifty pounds, (approximately one hundred dollars). Why wasn’t he happy?

This was Scotland, and this was Newmilns, and his father was a cop, so no one talked too much about loneliness, or self-esteem, or emotional problems. It was adolescent angst. Teenage moodiness. He was high-strung. Maybe the knocks on the head? So he pedaled harder and faster. He got a job in the local bike shop in Irvine. He went on longer training rides (always alone — he never liked riding with others), and he entered more races. He went faster, won more races, but he could never go fast enough, could never win what he wanted.

In 1985, when he was twenty years old, three years after Obree won his first race, after considerable success on the local racing circuit, after he’d managed to parlay his winnings into ownership of the bike shop, his father came home from work early one afternoon and found his son sucking on the pipe to a canister of welding gas.

He assured us it was an accident, John Obree says, and he seemed to be perfectly all right afterwards. I tried to get him to seek medical attention, but he seemed to be all right. I did talk to my own GP about it, though. What did he say? There’s nothing much he could say. He said to keep an eye on things. But everything seemed to be normal.

This was normalcy: hopelessness, terror, a crushing fatigue that sent Obree to his bedroom, where he would wait — sometimes weeks and months — for the miraculous moment when the blackness lifted to be replaced with a delight and otherworldly energy that made the horror show almost worth it. During the bad times, he couldn’t get out from under the covers. In the good times, though, he never slept more than two or three hours a night. He hatched business schemes then. He figured out a new position in which to race, a modified ski tuck. He started reading Victorian novels — he was fond of Anne Bronte — biology texts, essays, dozens of books at a time (he never finished any). He met a local girl, got married, won scores of time trials with his weird crouch position. He twice set the British record for distance in an hour. He also sold his bike shop and joined with an investor to start his own bike business.

For seven years he endured the bad times and reveled in the good. By 1992, when he was twenty-six years old, it was mostly bad. His investor had pulled out and the business had failed. Obree was broke, in debt, and his wife was pregnant. Many weeks he and his wife, Anne, now living in Irvine, had to scrabble through the kitchen drawers looking for coins with which to buy bread. He was taking government-sponsored typing and filing lessons — welfare — so he could become a receptionist.

He watched on television that summer as an Englishman named Chris Boardman rode his bike to a first-place finish in the four-kilometer pursuit at the Barcelona Olympics. Obree knew Boardman, had raced him many times (Boardman was one of the few who usually defeated Obree, but not always, and not by much). And now Boardman had a gold medal. What did Obree have? Debt. Disappointed parents. An obscure place in local biking history, reserved for provincial oddballs who crouched when they pedaled.

Everything was bleak, he says. Pointless.

He didn’t want to spend his life in his bedroom. How would he ever find peace? A new business scheme? Another riding position? Or was the answer within? The vision came to him on a chilly Saturday afternoon when he was sitting in the Irvine bike shop, where he still occasionally worked, alone. A cold, horizontal rain was blowing in from the Irish Sea, beating against the storefront window.

A slow reader, a lazy student, Obree nevertheless possessed an instinctive grasp of physics. He knew there were only two ways to increase his speed. He could boost his power output or he could reduce resistance. But he was already pedaling as hard as he could. And nothing was more aerodynamic than his ski tuck. He stared into space, then at his bike. He kept staring at the bike.

What if he adjusted the handlebars? And what if he moved the seat closer to the front of the frame? And what if he rode with his arms not just tucked but completely folded in to his body, so that air flowed more easily around his torso? He would have to learn to keep his entire body rigid, but that would increase his pedal power. And he would have to train his muscles, and he would need … but what if… ? In a flash, he could see the outlines of salvation. The answer wasn’t within. It was there, in front of him.

It took him three months to build the thing. He used pieces of scrap metal from the bike shop, bearings he dug out of a washing machine.

In one of his first races, a ten-miler in Port Glasgow, he circled the roundabout at the halfway mark, where the race marshal stood with a local cop.

The cop had never seen anything like it before. He thought he was watching a handicapped racer trying to keep up with the others. Look at that poor guy, the cop said. Somebody’s gone and built a special bike for him.

Don’t worry about that boy, the marshal said. I think he’s going to win this thing.

The marshal knew more than the cop. He didn’t know nearly as much as Obree.

It had been late afternoon when he finished building the frame, and he had planned to carry it home, where he would paint it and tinker with it and think about how he was going to ride it. Instead, on a whim, he slapped some wheels on, carried it outside, and took off on a familiar ten-mile training route. First, out of curiosity, he punched his stop watch.

It was dusk. He didn’t carry a spare tube. He wore a long-sleeved shirt with pockets in back and long tights, not racing gear.

When he finished the ride, he looked at his watch. Nineteen minutes, thirty seconds. It was the fastest he’d ever covered the route.

"I thought, ‘Man, this feels so right.’

I thought, ‘This is magic.’

Few agreed.