Remembering Dave Schultz as Sportsman

At the time, it was an extraordinary scene, a fusion of sports and humanity set against an exotic backdrop. A decade later, in the wake of the terrible news from a deceptively idyllic Pennsylvania estate, it is something more. The memory is haunting.

When Alexander Schultz stepped in front of the cameras recently, he was supported by his mother. Nancy Schultz hugged her son and a younger daughter, Danielle, and the occasion moved the three to tears. They were mourning the victim of a murder that exposed the bizarre behavior of a millionaire sportsman and stunned the insular world of amateur wrestling both here and abroad.

It was not the first public appearance of the Schultz boy, nearing his 10th birthday. He made his international debut on July 14, 1986, in the Druzhba Sports Hall, Moscow, in a country still known as the Soviet Union. At the request -- nay, insistence -- of photographers from both the United States and USSR, the 3-month-old infant took a ride to glory in the hands of his father, a champion of the inaugural Goodwill Games and an ambassador of his sport.

“Everyone knows the little Schultz baby,” the smiling mother told me that night. Indeed, the family embodied the spirit of the Games founded and funded by Ted Turner to enhance peace and understanding between the two suspicious superpowers, whose political posturing poisoned the previous two Summer Olympics. Not only did his sport enjoy wider popularity behind the Iron Curtain than in his homeland but, as a result of his personality and sportsmanship, Dave Schultz was a celebrated figure.

Many, if not the majority of, American athletes journeyed to Moscow with apprehension. The U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics in the Soviet capital and the Soviet retaliation four years later at Los Angeles fueled old animosities. Certainly, the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl a few months earlier did little to allay fears. As a result, some lived solely on the packaged and canned food they carried into the country, and those who ventured out invariably complained about what was available in their hotel or at nearby restaurants. Most couldn’t wait to get home. But here was an outstanding athlete, the reigning Olympic titleholder and a man who won the 1983 world championship on Soviet soil at Kiev, who brought along both his wife and baby.

“It’s interesting to hear people who haven’t been here before,” he said. “Wrestling is different because we have been over here so often.”

For Dave Schultz, it was his ninth visit, starting with a tournament in Tblisi in 1977 when he was 18. He had learned to communicate in Russian because he valued his opponents and Russians traditionally were among the best wrestlers in the world. His son, it has been reported since his death on the estate of John du Pont, was named after Aleksandr Medved, the great super-heavyweight from Minsk who won Olympic gold medals in 1968 and 1972. It is altogether appropriate.

“Maybe they respect me and I respect them,” he said that night in Moscow after receiving a special award from the USSR wrestling federation as the foremost American athlete in the freestyle wrestling competition. “You’ve got to understand that sports is important to these people. Winning is important.” What some identified as psychological warfare Schultz chose to dismiss.

While the wrestler professed a measure of comfort with the surroundings, his wife was ebullient. She accompanied her husband overseas as often as possible and made the trip to Kiev three years earlier. Even young Alex was a veteran of international travel. “He went to Budapest (in 1985) when I was three months pregnant,” she said, laughing. “I wanted to see Moscow. I’ve been shopping, looking around. I’ve been on the metro. It’s a nice city.”

But he was wide awake on the night his father decisioned Adlan Varayev of the USSR in the final to emerge as one of three American individual champions in the competition. Varayev was an accomplished wrestler who would win a silver medal at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Schultz, a welterweight, rallied from a 2-0 deficit to score a 4-2 victory that was greeted by applause from the mostly Soviet audience and cries for the man to hold aloft his son, who occupied a front-row seat throughout the meet.

“I enjoyed it,” he conceded later. “I got a little hand for it. But I don’t want to do anything that would bring disgrace to my opponent. I don’t want to show I’m so happy that it would make him feel worse. I don’t want to do anything that will discredit him.”

Those words seem almost quaint in this era. And though they may be un-fashionable, they bear repeating. Apparently, his opponent did not feel slighted. An hour after the match, Varayev brought Schultz a print of the picture taken with the top three finishers on the medal stand. The American thanked him.

“I think the biggest thing I’ve learned from my international experience,” Schultz said, “is that it’s our systems that are different. People are the same everywhere. The system puts restraints on people. But they’re good and bad, generous and selfish everywhere.”

He didn’t ask to be a hero or a spokesman or a role model, duties the media too readily assigns to successful athletes. He defined himself as a competitor. “Without competition,” he said, “we wouldn’t be able to test ourselves.”

Dave Schultz still was testing himself when he was shot, allegedly by his benefactor, in front of the house he shared with his wife and two children at Foxcatcher Farms. Although he would have been 37 by the time of the Olympics this summer, the man had plans to cap a remarkable career in Atlanta. Even at his advanced age, he was the top-ranked American in his weight class and finished fifth in the world championships last summer.

His quest would have been a major story in Atlanta, one big enough to shine a national spotlight on amateur wrestling, if only temporarily. The thousands, perhaps millions, who might have cheered him would have included a 10-year-old son with the reason to appreciate and recall the moment. His loss is shared by so many, but none more than the wife and children he left behind.

USA Wrestling requested a moment of silence at weekend meets in Schultz’ honor. That may have been superfluous. His murder had rendered so many in his sport speechless.