relish the chance to document my fall: John Hanrahan, Penn State’s winningest wrestler, collapsed on the mat last night after the university paid tribute to him. He was found to have cocaine in his system.
What the hell had I done?
I had to shake it off. I had to. I had made a mistake that I could not undo, but the addiction would only score a point tonight, not win the match. This was not the night that my house of cards would collapse, revealing my addiction and my double life. The conference tournament was next week, and I would not make the same mistake again. Ever again. Ever.
I took my opponent down, turned him on his back, and finally felt at ease, winning 11–1, a major decision covered by the local paper. At the conclusion of the event, they brought me to center mat again and presented me with the Ridge Riley Outstanding Wrestler Award.
As I looked at that story the next morning, just three days shy of my twenty-second birthday, I resolved to stay clean. I still had the control to keep myself pure for the rest of the season, and I blazed through the conference tournament, winning it once again. I then went into two weeks of intensive training for my final NCAA Nationals. My sense of mission recovered, I rolled past my first test in the NCAA tournament against a dirty head-butting wrestler from Nebraska I had lost to earlier that year. I then took a hard-fought battle against a guy from Old Dominion in match two.
Things were going as planned as day one concluded, and I rested up for the quarterfinals. The following morning, I found myself flying through the air with my opponent from Navy. As our combined weight hit the mat, the point of total impact was my right thumb. It snapped. I had never felt such pain. My body was ringing with it.
This was not how it was supposed to be. This was not how champs went down. This was not how I went out. I refused to stop. I fell behind in the score and vowed between periods that I would never get my thumb fixed if I was unable to come back and win this bout.
Use the thumb, Hanrahan. You’re down by five points, and if you don’t come back and win this match, you can never get this fixed.
I lost.
But I refused to bow out. The second day at the NCAAs is known as “The Blood Round,” because that’s what you see as everyone fights tooth and nail to survive. Anyone left standing after The Blood Round earns a chance to wrestle on day three, a guaranteed place on the podium, and coveted NCAA All-American status. I stayed in despite my immobilized thumb and limited use of my right hand. I took out my next opponent from Wisconsin and then beat one of Dan Gable’s guys from Iowa, earning my spot in day three. I lost a tough one to an All-American from New Mexico, but came back to beat an opponent from Yale to finish my college career with a win, fifth place on the podium, and All-American status once again.
As I climbed the podium, I heard the announcer introduce me as completing my collegiate career with the Most Wins in Penn State’s history with 105 wins.
But I was disappointed—both that I never got to face Schultz in the finals, and that I would never be enshrined in Rec Hall at Penn State as a National Champion. I would never be one of the exalted few—big pictures of the biggest stars that ring the top of the wrestling complex walls. Every time I entered the Hall from that day forward, I would be reminded of my failure. Mine is one of the commemorative plaques beneath them, celebrating Penn State All-Americans over a century of wrestling.
But I was more than disappointed. I was over. My four years competing for Penn State were done. The next Olympics were two years away. There was no going back. No undoing past mistakes and avenging past losses. No daily anchor of wrestling to keep the drugs away.
Wrestling gave me more than just a sense of power and control. From second grade on, it had given me the approval that I never got anywhere else. I hid my drug use from people, not only because I did not want to taint the sport I loved, but because I couldn’t bear to taint what others thought of me.
If I was addicted to anything besides wrestling and drugs, it was the praise. I wanted people to see me as the best and strongest version of myself—the winner I usually was, even in defeat. Wrestling was my stage. At the end of every performance, there was a judgment—from the referee, but also everyone else. I didn’t and still don’t know why I did cocaine before my last match at Penn State. But I do know the reason for my self-imposed panic attack: I would be exposed as a fraud to everyone. I would wonder what they thought of me, like I always did, but this time I would be exposed as an addict unworthy of their praise and applause.
Now what? I loved and still longed for the feeling I got on the mat and for the high I got from cocaine. In my last match, drugs and wrestling had come together. Where did that leave me?
The terrible answer came the summer my collegiate career ended, when I freebased cocaine for the first time with a few friends holed up in a seedy DC apartment. The drug sped through my body. It overtook me. I crawled into the bathroom. My ears were ringing. I splashed cold water on my face, and the sound of the water made my ears hurt. I threw up. I wound up awake for days, looking for more, and when there was none, I crawled around on the floor, fishing around in the shag carpet, picking at every little white piece and hoping it would burn like a rock of cocaine.
I never got my thumb fixed, nor anything else in my life that was broken. I was crawling around on the floor looking for rock because I was broken. I was making more money than I ever had in my life and was sure nothing would be the same again. I was right in more ways than one.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
After I made the team my freshman year, Coach sent me down to Mac’s Haberdashery in Happy Valley to get fitted for my varsity blazer. The morning I was there, a photographer snapped shots of a Penn State sweater Mac was advertising in the Daily Collegian. Mac looked at me and said, Hey, you’re a good-lookin’ fella. Will you do me a favor and try this on? I’d never posed for a picture outside of school, but reluctantly said okay. I was too shy to say no. Mac found me a sweater in my size and we headed outside the shop on College Avenue, where the photographer took shots as I leaned against a tree. The next day at practice, the full-page ad was up in the wrestling room: “The Look is Penn State,” with a picture of me in the sweater, smiling.
My debut as a fashion model. I also thought it would be my finale. I was wrong. Just when I was leaving the wrestling stage, the book of my life opened to the modeling page.
The night my eye was cut by the underclassman that knifed his finger into my eye socket, I was worried I would miss my next match at Lehigh’s Stabler Arena in Allentown. Thankfully, the doctor at the hospital cleared me, excusing me from my test that morning and sending me on my way with an eye patch and a Go beat Lehigh! My match was an uneventful, 17–4 thrashing of my opponent. Meanwhile, one hundred miles away in New York City, it was the beginning of something more eventful than I could possibly imagine. Our match was televised. A guy named Scott Copeland happened to be smoking a joint and looking for something to watch on TV, when he stopped on the broadcast just as I was about to start wrestling and my name appeared on screen: John Hanrahan, Falls Church, Virginia.
Scott immediately picked up the phone, called directory assistance, got my parents’ number, and spoke with my father, who put him in touch with me. He told me I jumped off the screen, but not for my wrestling skills. He knew little about wrestling. He was a fashion agent in New York City who had discovered several top models and wanted to represent me. Something about me just stood out.
Honestly, I figured he was a pervert. A lot of athletes got calls for “modeling,” which turned out to be propositions for sleazy soft-core porn magazines like Blueboy. It sounded crazy that a wrestler with a broken nose and a face that had been sewn back together in eight different places would attract the attention of anyone working in high fashion. Then I looked up the guys he said he discovered and represented—guys on the cover of GQ, and even the face of the hot new Calvin Klein campaign. He was the real deal.
I called Scott back, and he asked when I could come to New York City. His instincts were right about my looks. Everyone liked that I wasn’t just another cookie-cutter model. He said he’d shown Bruce Weber the pictures I had sent up, and Bruce wanted to shoot me as a wrestler for