'Foxcatcher' is painful, bittersweet for those who lived it

THEY KNEW that the movie would startle them, that three gunshots would crack the tension like lightning and leave a man they all loved lying facedown in the snow on Foxcatcher Farm.

Many of the friends and family of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz had been preparing themselves for that scene, when one of their darkest memories would be illuminated on the big screen in the film "Foxcatcher," and many came to the Prince Theater on Nov. 3 for the Philadelphia premiere.

"The guys were all choking up. I was almost in tears, too," said Dave Stearne, a former athletic trainer who became friends with Dave Schultz at the 800-acre farm in Newtown Square.

Dave's widow, Nancy, witnessed deranged millionaire John E. du Pont murder her husband outside their home on Jan. 26, 1996, and she'd already seen the movie a few times before the Philly premiere last week. She was in town that day, to help promote the film, but had dinner during the premiere, a welcome respite from another round of those surround-sound gunshots.

"It's a dark film. It's very bleak," Schultz said on the morning of the Philly premiere.

For Nancy Schultz and the former wrestlers, coaches and trainers who lived through Foxcatcher, the movie will always be a movie, unable to tell the whole story in 134 minutes.

"This put everybody's lives into a tailspin for a long time," Stearne said of Schultz's death. "You lose one of your best friends, your job and your home all in one fell swoop. It still hurts to think about it."

Team Foxcatcher practiced morning and afternoon, a total of six hours each day with only Sundays off. The movie captures the intensity of that elite environment and the demands of the sport, but only briefly touches on the off-time the athletes spent at one another's homes there, unwinding with their families.

"It was quite heart-wrenching for me to recall those memories during the movie," said Brian Dolph, a Foxcatcher wrestler and current coach at the Pennsylvania Regional Training Center.

Mostly, it made them all miss Dave a little more. He isn't the central character of director Bennett Miller's plot, but Dave Schultz is the soul of the movie, a soft-spoken and affable family man who was also one of the nation's all-time greats in wrestling.

Seeing actor Mark Ruffalo transform into Dave Schultz, playing with his kids, scratching his beard or carrying his arms like a "T-Rex" was sometimes just as emotional as the movie's final moments.

"He was very Zen," Nancy Schultz said of Dave. "Unless you got on the mat with him. Then he would take you out."

Ruffalo, a former wrestler, and Channing Tatum, who plays Dave's younger brother, Mark Schultz, both trained for seven months for their parts, and Foxcatcher alumni said they looked the part, to a point.

"He really seemed to capture Dave's thought process, but I don't think he could have captured how good Dave was," Greg Strobel, Foxcatcher's head coach, said of Ruffalo. "I learned a lot from Dave, technically, and also as a person. He was just fun to be around. He was like a kid, always wanting to learn new things. But from a technical standpoint, he was a savant. He was really, really, good."

Mark Schultz, who won an Olympic gold in 1984 with his brother, is the film's central character, broke and brooding with anger after his crowning achievement left him with a medal and almost nothing else.

The entire Foxcatcher situation, Mark Schultz said in a recent interview with the Daily News, was a direct result of the way amateur athletes, particularly wrestlers, were forced to operate in the United States at the time. It was nearly impossible to train as hard as elite wrestlers in the Soviet Union and Europe, he said, while making a living at the same time.

"I was forced into a situation like this, with du Pont," Mark Schultz said. "When I met him, he was a total mess."

A collegiate swimmer, du Pont had an affinity for wrestling but no knack for it, so he built a state-of-the-art wrestling facility on his grounds and recruited the best America had, to train, all on his dime. It became somehow normal, however, for du Pont's wrestlers to see the chemical heir go off on a rant or walk around his estate and even the wrestling room with a handgun.

"Du Pont bought his way into wrestling," said Dolph, a former NCAA champion.

There haven't been many movies that focus on wrestling, but Mark Schultz, a two-time world champion, said that "Foxcatcher" is the most realistic he's seen, and he credits Bennett Miller for respecting the sport.

"It's a beautiful sport and it's a violent sport and this movie captures that," he said.

Nancy Schultz is hoping that "Foxcatcher" will spark more interest in Dave. A documentary in the works, called "David," will include footage of Schultz's wrestling matches, along with home videos of the family's life at Foxcatcher Farm. Nancy Schultz is hoping that the documentary will be submitted to Sundance.

Foxcatcher, where the family lived from 1989 to 1996, "was a utopia for a long time," she said. "There was always John, but we never thought he was dangerous. The memories are good, except for that last day."