In the beginning, super-heavyweight wrestler Bruce Baumgartner was a certifiable mediocrity. He never finished better than third in the New Jersey state high school wrestling competition, and such U.S. college wrestling meccas as Oklahoma State and Iowa didn't give him a look. He went to Indiana State University and grappled in relative obscurity until his senior year, when he exploded in a burst of 44 straight wins and ended up with the National Collegiate Athletic Association title. That was 1982, and he hasn't lost to an American since, having won 14 consecutive national championships along the way.
Now, a relative ancient at 35, he is about to go for a record no wrestler of any nationality has ever achieved--medals in four different Olympic Games. Baumgartner took gold in '84 and '92 and silver in '88, and for the record he also won medals at no fewer than nine world championships over the years, including golds in '86, '93 and just last August, which makes him the No. 1 serious super-heavyweight wrestler on the planet at the moment. (Pumped-up comics from WrestleMania need not apply.)
Can he do it again? Aged though they are, all his systems seem to be go: "I'm stronger than ever. I'm training smarter than ever. I know when to rest and when to fight. My shoulder's not the greatest, and my knees are pretty bad, but mentally I'm the best I've been." A torn rotator cuff in his left shoulder required surgery a year ago, and the knees are simply wearing down after decades of responding to commands for violent activity from a 286-lb., 6-ft. 2-in. titan. However, it was only last April, in a critical U.S.-Russian team face-off in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, that Baumgartner's imperfect joints functioned perfectly as he handily pinned the one opponent who has been his constant nemesis in recent years--Andrei Shumilin of Russia, who had taken him in three straight matches in recent years. (Shumilin skipped the '95 championships, which Bruce won.)
"I felt real good about what I'm doing after that match," says Baumgartner. "But being an old wrestler is a little like being an old car: the more you drive it, the more goes wrong with it." The junkyard may inevitably await, but in the meantime Baumgartner is driving himself these days as if he were a spanking-new Mercedes just out of the showroom--but no, the automotive analogy doesn't work. There is nothing even remotely slick or streamlined about Bruce Baumgartner's life. He and his wife Linda live with their two young sons in bucolic Pennsylvania in a gray farmhouse on 16 acres that lie between Punxsutawney--well known as the center of the universe on Groundhog Day--and Edinboro, a three-stoplight town whose major industry is Edinboro University (enrollment: 7,000), where Baumgartner has coached wrestling for the past 12 years.
He met Linda at Indiana State in 1980, when he had a bad ankle and she was a student trainer. "It was love at first taping," she recalls. On their first date, he ate ice cream while she, dieting, had oatmeal. They shook hands good night. Two years later, they were married, and they have toasted the anniversary of that first date ever since with ice cream and oatmeal.