Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  Bravin was stunned. Every other college in the country with a fencing team wanted him; his choice meant committing four years of his life to a school and a coach, risking his chances of becoming a national champion. Yet this man would not even give him a trial lesson. “All I can offer you,” Tulum added, “is hard work and good weather. Period.”

  In a way their meeting was like a fencing bout, Bravin later figured out. Tulum was pitting his ego against Bravin’s. There was something about that and something about Tulum’s sheer bluntness that Bravin liked. In the end it was a hard decision, so he called his older brother and asked his opinion. Jess told him that fencing was important but that competitive fencing was not forever—he might break a leg on any given day and end his career. Jess told him to make his decision based on the school, not the fencing team or coach. So, while his friend Al Carter went to Penn, Nick Bravin decided to go to Stanford.

  Bravin and Tulum were both driven and willful, and at first the two constantly battled. Bravin did not consider the competition among his teammates good enough, so he would go off to practice at a club in San Francisco. This meant missing practice, which irritated Tulum and his teammates. Tulum threatened to kick him off the team. “We’re better off without you,” Tulum would say.

  Yet Tulum was a very good coach. He was shrewd at knowing how to challenge his young star. One of the first things he did was print up a sign for Bravin: SECOND SUCKS, it said. Not only did Bravin become a better fencer, he became more passionate about fencing. His objective was not merely athletic but in time spiritual as well. He wanted the peace of mind that came with reaching the highest level of his abilities. He wanted to try to be the best at one thing even if he did his best and failed. He was aware of the danger implicit in so singular an ambition, that it demanded an overwhelming amount of sacrifice—exams taken on airplanes to tournaments, fitting in homework while his classmates were having fun. He knew he was giving up part of his youth. But the alternative was worse: to stop just short of true excellence. There were, he thought, altogether too many people who did that, who were haunted for the rest of their lives by the question of how good they might have been had they tried just a little harder. Whatever else, he vowed, that question would not go unanswered in his life.

  Tulum preached that fencing was 50 percent athletic and 50 percent psychological and intellectual, that in addition to the physical talent of a Michael Jordan you needed the strategic ability and the psychological acumen of a Garry Kasparov because you had to stay several moves ahead of your opponent. Attitude was crucial. In fencing, if you think someone is better, he’ll end up being better. For years a kind of national inferiority complex had plagued American fencers. At international meets they saw foreign teams that were so well subsidized they even came with their own cooks. Such wealth and power engendered a certain amount of swagger. The Americans felt like the poor stepchildren of the sport and were beaten all too readily. To draw an American in an international tournament, Bravin noted, was virtually regarded as drawing a bye. He himself had done poorly in the 1992 Olympics. But then he had been only 21, and since fencers reach their peaks in their late 20s and early 30s, he still had a bright future.

  Two years later he was coming into his own and just beginning to beat some of the best fencers in the world. It was at this point that he entered law school, and he found it was hard to be a wolf both at fencing and at his studies. Tulum, of course, had not been happy with the idea of law school—it was a terrible distraction, he thought. “Every day you don’t practice all out,” he said, “is like losing three days: the day you lose by slipping just a little, the day you lose by not getting just a little better, and the day you lose because your opponent gets better.” Bravin had tried to stay in shape, but it was difficult. In 1995 when he arrived in Louisville for the nationals he thought he was fencing well and was confident he would win his fourth national championship. But Tulum thought he had been coasting on his name for a while.

  Now, as Bravin negotiated Rome for his younger colleagues, Cliff Bayer was No. 1. When Bravin was winning his first national championship, Bayer had been only 13, still collecting baseball cards. True, he collected them feverishly, determined to have a better set than any of his friends. The son of a New York City doctor, he walked a neighbor’s dog for $20 a week so he could buy more cards. He also became so skillful at trading cards, his brother, Greg, later remembered, he picked up the nickname Rip-off Cliff. There were complaints from neighboring parents to the senior Bayers that Cliff had snookered their kids.

  Bayer, like Bravin, took up fencing because his older brother had done it. He had become impatient with baseball—he thought his teammates did not play as hard as he did. In fencing he found a sport where there was no one to blame but himself when things went wrong. His first coach, Miklos Bartha, a Hungarian émigré now in his 70s, was a distinguished figure in New York fencing circles. Bayer’s father, Dr. Michael Bayer, remembers when Bartha told him his son would make a champion: “I looked out and saw nothing, but Miklos had a practiced eye and he knew what made a great athlete—the willpower and the instinct. He could look at a little boy of nine and see it all: the character, the inner toughness, and the drive.” Like Bravin, Bayer did not enjoy the drudgery of the early training—the repetitious drills of advance and retreat, the dancing classes with swords. But he rose to competition, often beating older and seemingly more talented boys with the intensity of his will.

  The first time he saw Bayer at a tournament, when Bayer was only 15, Tulum was struck by the boy’s courage and instinct for combat. “That child has a heart the size of his chest,” thought Tulum, “the heart of a champion.” Bayer himself did not think he was a natural for the sport, but he knew his desire was so strong that he could turn his weaknesses into strengths. “Some people know instinctively why it is important for them to be the best,” says Dave Micahnik, the University of Pennsylvania coach who successfully recruited Bayer for next fall. “Cliff is that way—it is vital that he be the best.”

  On occasion the pressure of school and fencing was almost too much for someone so young. Once, he fenced at the Junior World Cup in Giengen, Germany, with melancholy results. To get there he had to take an international flight to Stuttgart, a train to Heidenheim, and then a bus to Giengen. He was tired upon arrival, which affected his concentration, and he fenced poorly, not even making the top 32. Then he had to retrace his steps, lugging all his gear, trying to do his homework on the train, in order to rush back to school in New York. Unable to get a decent night’s sleep on the plane, he wondered whether it was all worth it and thought about quitting.

  But he knew he was getting better. In 1994, while still a high-school junior at Riverdale Country Day School in New York City, he came in third at the U.S. national championships. It was a stunning achievement. He was amused by the response of the older fencers to his success: “Who’s this upstart kid who’s doing so well, they were thinking, and I was thinking, Third, that’s not good enough, I can do better. I can win this whole thing.”

  By the time of his high-school graduation, at age 17, he was already ranked No. 3 in the country. He defeated Zaddick Longenbach, an Olympian in 1992, at a senior-circuit tournament in New Jersey. Both Longenbach and Bayer had worked out at Salle Santelli and the Metropolis Fencing Club in New York City, and Longenbach had been beating Bayer since Bayer was nine. Bayer’s older brother, Greg, a former captain of the Princeton fencing team, had watched the match and was startled by what he saw. For the first time, he realized, his brother’s physical abilities had caught up with his competitive instincts. Bayer himself felt he was ready to take on Bravin in Louisville.

  In the first round of the 1995 nationals, Bayer was nervous. Yefim Litvan, his coach, sensed it immediately. “Relax,” he said. “Just have fun here.” That helped and as he relaxed he began to see his opponents’ moves more clearly. He made the semifinals and thus qualified for the Senior World Championships and the World University Games.

/>   The semifinal match with Longenbach was intense. For a while it was touch for touch. Bayer had never seen Longenbach so focused in a bout. But Bayer won, 15–13. That meant he would face Bravin in the final.

  In 1994, Bravin had beaten Bayer, 15–11, at the nationals, but Bayer was not intimidated. His hero was the great Italian fencer Stefano Cerioni, the 1988 Olympic gold medalist, who was known as the most aggressive of fencers, a man who approached every match as if it were a street fight. Bayer wanted no part of a silver medal. He and his friend Sean McClain had their own saying: “Silver sucks.” Now Bayer was sure that he could beat Bravin—after all, Bravin had not been much older when he had won his first national.

  As the two prepared to fence, the air was electric. Bravin knew that he was now the hunted and that it was much harder than being the hunter. He knew also that the physical gap with Bayer had narrowed. He sized up the younger man and found he was altogether too much like he himself used to be, with little respect for existing hierarchies. Bravin remembered his second N.C.A.A. championship, in 1992. He had been ranked 24th, which annoyed him greatly, because in his own mind he deserved to be the favorite that year. He had responded by winning.

  They both were fencing well. Bravin took an 11–8 lead. He was pleased and felt certain he would get a fourth national title. He began to think that Bayer too believed that the old order would hold, that Bravin was the champion and would continue to be so. Here he made his mistake. He relaxed and became overconfident. Certain he had established his superiority, he became less focused, less aggressive. Watching the match, Dave Micahnik saw Bayer go to the end of the strip after Bravin won a point, slap himself on the leg in anger, and let out a roar, as if he were waking up from some long hibernation. Then he came back and stormed past Bravin to win the bout, 15–12.

  Yefim Litvan now believed that Bayer would become an Olympic medalist, but perhaps in 2000—this year, 1996, would be one in which to gain international experience. But Bayer, with the fearlessness of the young, thought otherwise, that there was no reason to enter a match thinking of it only as experience for the future.

  In defeat Bravin realized he had probably lost something of his edge and certainly something of his mystique. He decided to take a year off from law school to work on his fencing and get ready for the Olympics. He needed to find out whether he still had the hunger, whether he could still be the hunter.

  ICE BREAKERS

  From Condé Nast Sports for Women, February 1998

  All last fall and winter, and then into the summer, she gave up almost everything. She took leave from her senior year at Harvard, putting aside the mundane but sweet pleasures of life that any bright, attractive college student is entitled to. Instead, on days when the Boston winter was unspeakably gray and depressing, when her body still ached from the last workout and she most demonstrably did not want to do full-body pull-ups and squats and hoist free weights, Allison Jaime Mleczko, 22 (A.J. to her family and friends), gathered herself and went to the varsity weight room at Boston University. There, four times a week, along with about a dozen other talented and dedicated young women who hoped to become members of the first U.S. Olympic women’s hockey team, she put in a grueling three hours under the watchful eye of Michael Boyle, a BU strength and conditioning coach. Her body was so depleted by the intensity of these workouts that she quickly realized she had to give up any attempt to hold down a part-time job.

  For Mleczko (pronounced muh-LESS-ko) and some of the other women, these workouts were exhilarating. The access to the weight rooms most of them had received at their own colleges had always been marginal, and they had been treated, more often than not, as amiable but not entirely serious stepchildren. But at BU they were the charges of one of the most gifted trainers in collegiate sports; more, the weight room pulsed with a sense of seriousness and excellence. Working alongside them were not just some of the college’s best athletes but also, in the spring and summer, a group of highly accomplished NHL and NFL players, already budding millionaires, who were training with Boyle to get in shape for the seasons ahead.

  In Mleczko’s case, the tour of the weight room began with considerable humiliation. At five feet eleven inches, she was one of the biggest women trying out for the team, a formidable prep school and college hockey star who had usually dominated the women’s leagues, using her height for extra leverage. Over the years she had come to think of herself as strong. Yet now that she and her colleagues were on the verge of competing on the international level—where every player is strong and in superior condition—for the right to go to the Olympics in Nagano, Mleczko discovered that she was surprisingly weak. The new women’s Olympic hockey coach, Ben Smith, already had Mleczko pegged: a good deal of size, a good deal of talent, a dominating player on a relatively weak college team. Not nearly as much strength as she would need to play to her true potential. Moreover, he thought, she was still very young, a player who wasn’t yet aware of the great gift she had for the game, and who needed to assert herself more on the ice. The question was whether she was willing to go through the torturous procedure that would raise her strength and therefore her ability to the next stage.

  Back in the summer of 1996, as he began laying the groundwork for this year’s Olympic team, Smith told Mleczko and the other candidates that he would not and could not make their career decisions for them. He knew all too well the kind of financial sacrifices he was about to suggest to them, since if they did what he advised they would not be able to hold jobs. But if they wanted to make the Olympic team, he said, they would be well advised to spend the entire year working out under Michael Boyle’s strict supervision.

  Thus in Mleczko’s case the ultimate challenge had been offered to a passionate and committed athlete. But the first day of weight training under Boyle was devastating. She couldn’t do a single pull-up or a squat worthy of his demands. She bench-pressed only 65 pounds, far too little for a player of her size. Size clearly did not equal strength; if anything, her size now worked against her. Because she was taller and heavier than almost all of her teammates, it was harder to do pull-ups. She reached a point that Boyle knew all too well, where many a gifted male athlete decides that the price for doing what has always come so naturally has gone up too much. But she did not tell Boyle that she was going home; nor, he noted, did she do what many athletes often do at this point: ignore the weaknesses and reinforce the strengths. Instead she asked, “What do I do next?”

  She stayed with the program. For the first two months there was little in the way of reward and a great deal of pain. When she picked up the bar to do the bench press, she often had to take off the weights that the other women were using. But by the third month the workouts became, if not exactly fun, more acceptable, because she could see results, not just in the weight room but, more importantly, on the ice when she skated. What kept her going in the hard times, she later decided, were two things: First there was her dream of becoming an Olympic hockey player, of getting a chance to play at such an exalted level, a chance so many women who had gone before her had never had; secondly there was the support of her teammates, all of whom hoped to be a part of history on this first Olympic team.

  By the summer, she could do three sets of eight reps on the bench press at 105 pounds, no mean feat, and three sets of five pull-ups. By then Boyle would needle her, saying, “A.J., I really wish I had a video of you when you first started—I’d use it as a before-and-after commercial for the program.” To Smith, her improvement was equally impressive, a test not just of strength but of something perhaps more important—character—because he knew how easy it was for someone who had led a charmed athletic life to unravel after running into an obstacle like this.

  What also helped keep her going was the attention of Boyle, a coach who could easily have been using his time in other ways but who seemed gender-blind. Boyle took the female athletes as seriously as he did some of his more celebrated male athletes. He had come aboard at the request of coach Smith, who wa
s a pal. In the beginning, he had regarded the assignment as a lark, but working with these women had turned into one of the most enjoyable things he had ever done. In the world of sports, both he and Smith decided, they had found something of a sanctuary, a place where there was a sense of excellence and dedication but none of the countervailing egotism, born of the intense new materialism of sport that is so destructive to the concept of team. No one was spoiled. No one had an attitude problem. “Coaches who haven’t coached women before,” Boyle said recently, “don’t know what they’re missing. It’s very different from coaching men—with some of the men these days it’s like pulling teeth to get them to do certain things, and on some days they make you feel more like a dentist than a coach.”

  What Smith and Boyle were watching in these athletes was the unleashing of an immensely powerful force that came with the removal of a ceiling that had for so long suppressed the dreams and possibilities of young women. Here were all these talented and dedicated athletes, who had worked so hard for so long and had excelled at every level, but had always known there was a limit to their dreams and expectations that would not have existed if they were men. They had all been the best in junior high, in high school and in college; had they been men, they would have been superstars, brazenly recruited by colleges and courted by agents and pro teams. (In Mleczko’s case both her talent and the likely elusiveness of her dream had been underlined by a sentence in her ninth-grade yearbook that predicted she would be the first woman to play in the NHL.) All these young women were acutely aware that the Olympic spotlight had a unique capacity to illuminate the importance of women’s sports. Ordinary American sports fans, a preponderance of them male, who would never bother to watch women’s rowing or volleyball or softball, would do so if the United States was competing against some feared rival—the Russians, or the Chinese, or, as in this case, the Canadians. That had happened in the summer of 1996 in Atlanta with the women’s softball, soccer and basketball teams; this year it might well happen with women’s ice hockey.