In her autobiography, No Mountain High Enough: Raising Lance, Raising Me, she revels in the constant question, “How did a single teenage mom manage to raise a real live superhero?” In the author’s note, before the story unfolds, she warns of her “totally biased, subjective, slanted, rationalized, and confabulated” account. She even says, “Someone else might have a different perspective.” She dared those people to write their own book.
She used pseudonyms for her three ex-husbands: Eddie Gunderson, Terry Armstrong and John Walling. She calls Lance’s father “Eddie Haskell” after the sweet, conniving character in the 1950–’60s television show Leave It to Beaver. The Gundersons were Lance Armstrong’s first family. Eddie Gunderson and Linda Mooneyham married while they were in high school. The baby came seven months later.
The shotgun wedding united two troubled families. Both of Armstrong’s grandfathers had been heavy drinkers whose wives fled with their children after one sodden mishap or another. His paternal grandfather was so mean that he would put kittens in fruit jars to smother them. Armstrong’s father was an alcoholic with as many wives as his mother would have husbands—four.
By the age of twenty, Armstrong had had three different fathers: one biological, one adoptive and one step. (In her book, Linda Armstrong writes of the failures of her love life as having been the result of “stupid, self-undermining, counterintuitive and utterly stinko” choices.) After that, Lance was tossed about in the tumult of a dozen stand-in fathers of his choosing.
As a motivational speaker, Linda has made a living off bromides of her struggles to raise the greatest cyclist the world has ever seen, telling her audience, “We had everything against us,” and “It was about survival.” She talks about how Lance once showed up at a race in the mountains of New Mexico without a long-sleeve shirt and how, while the other racers had fancy gear, he had to borrow her tiny pink windbreaker to stay warm. He broke the course record.
She talks about going “from poverty with no money to personal success” and emphasizes that she played an integral role in her son’s accomplishments. “I really believe that your children are a product of you.”
By her telling, she has been the single constant presence in his life. Early on, she made it clear that she, and only she, would shape her son. The first step in that process began when she removed him from the Gunderson family. Armstrong’s mother has told her side of that story for years. It’s a story that a lifetime later brings Willine Gunderson Harroff, Eddie’s mother, and his sister, Micki Rawlings, to tears.
Linda Armstrong has said she was alone in raising Lance, that others in Lance’s life played only bit parts no matter what they contributed or how long they were involved. She called herself a single mother though she was only without a husband for a year before Lance was sixteen and a half—and even then her first husband’s family said they helped her get by, babysitting while she worked. Over time, the media played up the tragedy and triumph of it all: that one of the greatest athletes in history was a product of a teenage mother who had struggled for survival with no one to lean on but her young son.
Linda’s mythmaking didn’t sit right with the rest of Lance’s family, according to Willine Gunderson.
The Gundersons had their own version of Lance’s childhood to tell. For one thing, they called Lance’s father Sonny. He was a handsome, blue-eyed rebel with shiny brown hair, a mischievous grin and a willingness to help friends steal tape decks from parked cars. He once rode his motorcycle through the back door and into the kitchen of a high school girlfriend’s house, causing her parents to call the police.
In their neighborhood of Wynnewood, a middle-class area of the city—nothing like “the projects of Dallas” proclaimed by the promotional videos for Linda’s public speaking—the Gundersons were neighbors with another family, the Mooneyhams.
Linda Mooneyham was a high school homecoming princess and a star on the school’s drill team. Sonny asked her for a date. Soon enough, they were going steady and cruising around town in his souped-up Pontiac GTO. He had a bad-boy charm that caused him, one night in the winter of 1970, to whisper to Linda, “Make love, not war.” That evening, she got pregnant. When a sixteen-year-old Linda refused to get an abortion, her mother told her to leave the house. Far from being left on her own—with “everything against us”—she found a family that took her in. She lived in Sonny’s house. She became, in effect, an adopted daughter of Willine Gunderson, whom family members called “Mom-o.”
Willine was a single mother with an ex-husband always late on child support payments, when he sent them at all. For forty-three years, she worked at Dallas’s First National Bank. Her sense of family was so strong, she says, that she insisted her two daughters and Sonny go to church together three times a week. She never criticized her absent ex-husband because she wanted her children to make up their own minds about him. She and Linda became as close as best friends during Linda’s pregnancy.
On Linda’s seventeenth birthday, she and seventeen-year-old Sonny were married in a Baptist church packed with fellow high schoolers, some no doubt noticing the bride’s baby bump beneath her flowing, pleated white dress. That was February 1971. The boy arrived in September.
He was named after Lance Rentzel, the Dallas Cowboys star wide receiver who the year before was arrested for exposing himself to a ten-year-old girl. At the window of the maternity ward, his father saw that the newborn’s head was misshapen: too long, too narrow. His mother, a petite woman, delivered him at 9 pounds, 12 ounces.
“What’s wrong with his head?” his father asked, as tears rolled down his cheeks.
“It’ll get better,” one of his sisters said. “It’ll be fine, I know it will.”
Linda took a part-time job at a grocery store. Sonny worked at a bakery and delivered newspapers, but fatherhood didn’t bring with it a sudden maturity. As a minor, he had made frequent appearances in juvenile court. In 1974, when his son was two and a half, and he and Linda had already divorced, Sonny Gunderson spent his first night in jail as an adult. He had been arrested for breaking into a car.
Their marriage lasted for just over two years. Linda would claim in her book that Sonny had been so rough with her that her neck and arms were bruised. Years later, the ex-husband admitted that he had slapped her, but only once.
Gunderson told his family that he spent months after the divorce in a zombie-like state. He wanted to fix what he had broken, but had no idea how. He often sat across the street from his son’s day care center and watched the boy play on the playground. He couldn’t pay the child support, or wouldn’t. He ignored the demand notes as they piled up in his mailbox, accusingly.
To his father’s family, Armstrong was Lance Edward Gunderson. They still saw him at Christmases and other family gatherings, where he played with his cousins. They still have photos of him, yellowed and fading. His grandmother has a 4x4-inch photo album made for her by Armstrong’s mother. Linda signed the album with her boy’s name, “To Mom-o Willine. Love, Lance.”
Willine “Mom-o” Gunderson is Armstrong’s paternal grandmother. In nearly every photo of her with the infant Lance, she is kissing him, her eyes closed, the kind of moment a grandmother wants to last forever. Her son is partly to blame for how short-lived it really was.
Whenever he saw Lance, Gunderson acted like a kid himself. While his mother and two sisters watched, he gave the boy rides on his ten-speed bike and motorcycle. Inevitably, some outings ended with acrimony. Lance once came home with a quarter-sized burn on his calf where it had rubbed against the motorcycle’s exhaust pipe. Another time, he suffered a bloody toe when his foot became tangled in the spokes of a bicycle. Linda blamed Sonny for his neglect and chastised Willine for allowing the boy to get hurt while in her care.
Willine told the young mother, “You can’t keep him in a golden cage his whole life.”
Linda snapped back, “I’m the one that knows what’s best for him.”
“She was maternal,” Willine says, �
�but she was so young, she didn’t understand that babies love more than one person in their life. She didn’t want him to love anybody but her. But babies love anybody that will love them. That doesn’t take from the love that they have for their mother.”
When Linda filed for divorce—on February 15, 1973—she just couldn’t stand Sonny anymore. She married Terry Armstrong, a salesman, in May 1974, a year after her divorce papers were signed. Though Sonny couldn’t know it at the time, his life with Lance would soon be over.
The Armstrongs would eventually move away, ending any contact with the Gundersons, and Terry officially adopted Lance as his son. Linda said in her autobiography that Willine agreed it was best for Lance to never see the Gundersons again. But whenever someone suggests as much to Willine her mouth drops open. “Ooh, no, no,” she says.
Willine last had direct contact with Linda and her family when Lance was five or six. She had gone to his maternal grandmother’s house with Christmas gifts for him. “Linda told me not to take anything more from you,” the grandmother told Willine. “What little stuff you give him is not worth the trouble Linda has with Lance after he has had some contact with you.”
Shaking with distress, Willine quietly said, almost to herself, “You’ve got no right to tear a family apart,” and walked away with the presents in her hands and tears in her eyes.
For years after Lance was gone, Willine and Micki kept his picture inside oval gold lockets that hung around their necks. In his grandmother’s locket, he is an infant, maybe ten months old, wearing a fire-engine-red romper. In his aunt’s, a toddler with a goofy smile.
To this day, Willine is haunted by the last time she saw Lance. She was babysitting him, and he was about four. His mother swung by to pick him up, and found him under the Gundersons’ dining room table. The grandmother remembers the boy saying, happily, “I’m just going to live under here. I won’t take up too much room. I’m just going to live under this table.” But his mother grabbed Lance by the arm and led him through the front door, the boy crying as they went. She slammed the door. The grandmother never saw the boy again.
The Gundersons had no idea that the Armstrongs were living in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas, and had no money to hire a lawyer or investigator to find him. The Gundersons held out hope that Armstrong would come looking for them someday, maybe when he had children of his own. At their church—Four Mile Lutheran, which his relatives helped found and build east of Dallas 165 years ago—the congregation for years had prayed for Armstrong every Sunday.
The Gundersons wrote to Armstrong occasionally, but he never answered. They rarely called Linda’s family, and when they tried they heard only the click of a phone being put back into its cradle.
Linda’s brother, Alan, felt sorry for Sonny and was the Gundersons’ only source of information about the boy. He once came over to Sonny’s place and gave him a school picture of Armstrong, a color 8x10. The Gundersons inspected Lance’s face closely, the first time they had seen it in more than five years.
He had the same deep blue eyes as his father, and the same high cheekbones. They wondered if he possessed other family traits: Would Lance be hard and stubborn? Did he have problems with authority? Did he see the world in extremes? Did he hold grudges?
Armstrong’s grandmother is now nearly ninety. When she turned eighty, she moved in with Micki, who resides in one of Dallas’s most exclusive neighborhoods, among mansions and estates with guardhouses. Her husband, Mike Rawlings, was elected mayor in 2011.
Willine’s thick brown hair has turned snowy white. Her once rod-straight posture has become permanently bent. She uses a walker and needs thick glasses and bright lights to see. Her hearing is going, too, but her mind is sharp. Next to her bed she has photos of six of her seven grandchildren and six of her eleven great-grandchildren—but not a single photo of Lance Armstrong at any age, nor photos of any of his five children. It’s as if Lance Armstrong had never existed in her family.
CHAPTER 2
The last name is all that remains of Terry Armstrong. Just as she had erased Eddie Gunderson, Linda removed Terry. Divorce records show they were married fourteen years, until Lance was nearly seventeen. Linda, meanwhile, continues to represent herself as a single mother who raised her son alone.
In her career as a motivational speaker—that pays her as much as $20,000 a pop—there is hardly a word about Terry’s involvement in Lance’s life. (Some newspapers have quoted her saying the marriage lasted only until Lance was thirteen. She declined to be interviewed for this book.) In her autobiography, she never uses Terry’s name. She calls him “the Salesman” or “Sales.” The best allowance she makes for him is that “Sales coached Lance’s Little League team, he did do that. He gets some credit for effort there, but I’m not sure how much he enjoyed it. Lance wasn’t the budding baseball star Sales would have liked him to be.”
In truth, Terry Armstrong could not have been more different from Eddie Gunderson. One had been the cool bad boy in the Pontiac GTO spending late nights at R&B clubs rather than with his wife and newborn child. The other was the twenty-two-year-old son of a minister, a churchgoer with a steady job and an eagerness to be a father.
A wholesale food salesman who hawked barbecued meats and corn dogs to schools and businesses, he had met Linda Mooneyham Gunderson at a car dealership and was smitten with the cute, spunky brunette. He looked like the kind of guy who could buy a car with cash, which was its own sort of handsome. They started going steady and it fast-tracked into a marriage proposal. With Linda, Terry married into the role he had always wanted: father to a son. With Terry, Linda had found a solid, stable provider.
According to divorce records, and Terry himself, the two were married for most of the boy’s formative years—ages two through sixteen. In that time, Lance learned how to compete in his trademark way: as an irritable, cocky bruiser.
Both father and son were driven by an intensity that often turned to ruthlessness. Lance saw it when Terry coached his football teams and advised him in his early efforts in bike racing. Terry could be demanding, especially when his son didn’t meet his expectations.
At the boy’s first BMX bike race, Lance fell and started crying. Terry marched over to the fallen child and said, “That’s it, we’re going.” Then he grabbed Lance’s bike. “We’re done. No kid with my name’s gonna quit.” Properly admonished, or frightened, Lance got back on his bike and competed in another race. Terry thought it was proof of his son’s toughness.
When Lance was seven and then eight, he played for the Oilers, a team in a YMCA tackle football league in Garland, Texas. Terry Armstrong was one of the coaches. At the team’s first practice, Terry gathered the players and the fathers around him.
“Let me tell y’all about this football team we’re gonna have here,” he said. “If your kid’s not any good, he ain’t playing. This is not just a show-up-and-run-around situation. We’re going to win.”
Against the league’s rules, he videotaped other teams’ workouts and held after-school practices in the privacy of his backyard to gain an edge. His idea of a bedtime story for Lance was an old copy of a Vince Lombardi fire-and-brimstone speech about winners and losers. Once, when he believed Lance had loafed through a football game’s fourth quarter, he didn’t talk to him for a week. Lance would come to the dinner table, and he’d say, “You’re just a loser—you didn’t put the effort out.” Meanwhile, his team of eight-year-olds went undefeated through eleven games.
Terry and Linda never were a perfect match. Neither claims to have ever been madly in love, or even that love was the foundation for their union. Neither Linda Armstrong in her book, nor Terry Armstrong in interviews, can remember any details of their wedding.
Several of Lance’s pals say that his mother was more of a friend to him than a parent. They remember Lance once asking her to get dolled up so she could ride around in the limo he had rented for his prom, making it quite an uncomfortable trio—Lance, his prom date and his mot
her. Lance’s friends and some of his former coaches say Linda was a permissive parent who indulged her son’s every wish. (Example: He drove himself alone to his driver’s license test.)
So, according to Terry Armstrong, he became the disciplinarian by default. When Lance disobeyed or mouthed off—both frequent occurrences—Terry had a routine. He waited for Linda to come home. He armed himself with his fraternity paddle before telling Lance, “Grab your ankles!” Then he used the paddle against the growing young man’s rear end.
If Lance didn’t clean his room—not so much as a sock out of place, per the protocol of Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, where Terry had been wrapped in a blanket and viciously beaten by other cadets—Terry administered two licks. Talk back? Two licks. Years later, Lance described those spankings as traumatic, saying that the pain was more emotional than physical.
Terry and Linda often fought about Lance’s schoolwork. Terry remembers, “I would say, ‘You can’t go outside until you get your homework done,’ and she would say, ‘Well, he’s my son and I make the rules.’ I would ask for his report card, and she would say, ‘I’ll handle it, he’s my son.’ ”
One perhaps inevitable result of the parental disagreements was that Lance became an angry, aggressive child. Classmates from middle school said he was a classic bully, “picking on people that were vulnerable and harassing them on a daily basis.” He always seemed to be fighting something or someone.
As he entered high school, Armstrong remained an outsider, a short, slight kid with Brillo Pad hair and a cowlick that could not be conquered by comb or brush. He was arrogant in sports, but less confident socially—at least partly because he had stopped playing football. It was Texas, after all, where football sopped up everyone’s attention.
Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Page 2
