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Tom Brands Sr. owned a body shop in Sheldon, a northern Iowa farming community. He drank heavily when the twins were young and was given to black-cloud silences and sudden lashings of anger. "The old man used to tear the house down when he was drunk," says Tom, whose parents divorced when he and Terry were 11. "Basically, we're clones of him." Now, Tom Sr. is a recovering alcoholic, and his sons say they've never touched liquor. "If we drank," explains Terry, "we really would become savages."
The twins were introduced to wrestling by a Sheldon hog farmer named Randy Feekes. Coolly appraising the runty 12-year-olds, he said, "You're going to be too small for basketball, so I'll show you a couple of wrestling moves. Work on them, and I'll be back next week." By the time Feekes reappeared, the brothers had the moves down cold. Their off-mat excesses became the stuff of Sheldon folklore. At eight they hurled a fire extinguisher through the windshield of a garbage truck. When they were in high school, reported Olympian magazine two years ago, one of their fights "... resulted in a shampoo bottle being imbedded in a wall." Terry scoffs at the tale. "That reporter misunderstood us," he says. "Actually I chucked Tom into a wall of our bedroom. When I pulled him out, all that was left was a huge hole in the shape of his head and shoulders. I guess that's where the 'shampoo' came from."
On one of the rare occasions the twins practiced against each other at Iowa, Terry slugged Tom in the face, opening a gash that required four stitches. Another time Tom reported to practice with a pronounced limp. "His excuse was that he and Terry had been in a scuffle," says coach Dan Gable, "and that Terry had thrown him off a cliff." A 1972 Olympic gold medalist whose 182-1 high school and collegiate record is as close to perfection as any wrestler's has ever come, Gable saw something of himself in the Brands brothers. He still recalls Terry's reaction after being defeated in the state finals as a senior in high school. "When Terry walked by me, he muttered something," Gable says. Which was? "Losing sucks!" Tom, of course, had been barred from the tournament. The allegations troubled Gable, whose older sister was raped and murdered when he was a teenager. "I looked into the matter," Gable says. "There were no charges against him, so obviously it was all something to try to hurt the kid." Meaning Tom. Desire is what impressed Gable about Terry and Tom. Asked to describe his practice ethic, Tom says, "To work hard is what's expected. To train like a madman is to exceed all limitations." For three years the Brandses trained on and off at the Pennsylvania estate of John du Pont, the delusional millionaire accused of killing Olympic gold medalist Dave Schultz on Jan. 26. The brothers joined du Pont's Team Foxcatcher in 1993 and became fast friends with Schultz, their childhood hero. Perhaps only the Brandses could say they noticed nothing unusual about du Pont's behavior. Like du Pont, Tom and Terry have a soft spot for firearms. Between them they have about four dozen shotguns, rifles and revolvers. "I liked John," says Terry. "He was an all right guy. He wasn't crazy or weird, maybe just a little eccentric. And by eccentric I mean he had more money than anyone I'd ever met. In my worst nightmare, I never thought he would kill anybody." "On the other hand," says Tom, "if it turns out du Pont did kill Schultz, they should string him up from a tree, like in the Old West." Tom and Terry's High Noon approach to wrestling - they never back down and they challenge an opponent to the point of humiliation - draws complaints from rivals and their coaches. "They've got to understand," Terry says, "we're just breaking the other guy mentally." Mentally, neither Brands was much of a student. "Our college classes were 50 minutes long," says Tom, with a heavy sigh. "We'd go crazy at minute 35." "Unless the subject was interesting," says Terry, "like black-powder rifles." Which class was that? "There wasn't one. That was the problem." Technique, the twins can study endlessly. "They don't have a lot of overall skills," says Gable, for whom both work as assistants. "They do know a lot of wrestling." Tom likens their sharp, low-level attacking style to an alligator's. "A gator's got some pretty sharp jaws," he says. "When it's hungry, it spins and crashes and detaches body parts. That may not sound pretty, but its only goal is to kill, survive and eat. I wrestle that way. Basically, I throw a guy down, beat on his head and rub his face in the mat." Losing is something else. At last summer's world championships in Atlanta, Tom lost to wrestlers from Korea and Belarus and had to settle for the bronze medal. "I was so angry that I bolted out the back door of the arena," he says. "I didn't want to deal with anybody. I sat in my hotel room awhile, couldn't sleep, and went out at 2 a.m. for something to eat. Couldn't eat, either. I finally got to bed at three. Tired as I was, all I could do was stare at the ceiling. I don't know what a hangover is, but when I woke up, I felt like I had one."
Gable scoffs at all this. "Some people handle losing better than Tom and Terry," he says with considerable understatement. "When you start accepting losses graciously, when it doesn't tear your guts out to lose, there's no meaning." He gives a dry smile. "And without meaning, where's the incentive to win?"
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