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Baumgartner is in many ways the ultimate practitioner of the simple life. He gardens, specializing in asparagus and potatoes, bakes his own batches of Christmas cookies, builds furniture and toys, collects everything from stamps and model trains to Russian dolls and Olympic pins, shares the cooking and cleaning chores with Linda, and boasts of endless, painstaking repair and paint jobs that keep the 75-year-old farmhouse in impeccable condition. He has even been known to watch a little pro wrestling on TV in his spare time, exulting when former opponent and ex-University of Oklahoma wrestler Steve Williams, also known as Dr. Death, appears: "I killed Dr. Death!"
Despite the violence and brute power involved in his sport, Baumgartner presents a remarkably placid, almost shy front to the world away from the wrestling mat. "He's always homesick," confides Linda. "He misses his bed and of course his refrigerator." Whenever she picks him up at the airport, she brings along a plate of chocolate-chip cookies for him.
One of the NCAA's top scholar-athletes, Baumgartner had a 3.77 grade-point average at Indiana State, and has talked about going for a Ph.D. in industrial arts so that he can teach in college. He has found great satisfaction in teaching and motivating kids on his surprisingly good Edinboro team--which last year ranked an impressive 11th in the NCAA. "Winning is a great feeling for me," Baumgartner said last year, "but what is more important as a coach is when you take a kid with marginal grades and you help him make good grades and get a good degree. You help make him respectable. That's the biggest enjoyment I get from coaching--helping a kid become a successful person in life."
Baumgartner has to count his riches in nonmaterial things, for he is certainly not accumulating any kind of wealth from wrestling. If he had to live solely on his income from the sport (mostly from a U.S.A. Wrestling stipend and speaking fees), he says, "it would be very hard to have a family and an adult life-style." His coaching salary boosts that income considerably, but he is still well below six figures. As he once said, "We don't need much. Besides, it could be worse: I could have been an archer."
It must be remembered, however, that almost all American wrestlers, Baumgartner included, were blessed in recent years with one almost bottomless source of material support, a boon that precious few other minor-sport athletes have enjoyed. For the wrestlers, it was the magnificent training facility and generous financing donated by the demented Pennsylvania millionaire John du Pont, now awaiting trial for the January 1996 murder of Dave Schultz, an inspirational mainstay of the American team. Baumgartner, along with everyone else in U.S. wrestling, is struggling to recover from the trauma of it all. "There is no way to measure how great Dave's loss is. He gave us leadership you can't replace," says Baumgartner. "There is also no way to measure the loss of John du Pont. Without him, we would not have a national team. We'd never have beaten the Russians. We had our world training camp there for the past six years. Basically, Mr. Du Pont started it all. Anyone who went to the Olympics out of the background he provided had a lead on the rest of the world."