Brothers And Brawlers

It was at Oklahoma that Dave met his wife, Nancy, who straightened out his increasingly dissolute behavior. "I didn't even know how screwed up I was until I looked back on it," says Dave. "I said, 'My God, you maniac.' " There wasn't much Dave—or Mark—hadn't tried.

Nancy, who now teaches gymnastics to young children, first saw her future husband in a phys ed class in the spring of their junior year, 1981. "It was hot out, but he'd show up wearing a parka and his Russian fur hat and sunglasses," she says. "He'd just stand at the back of the class and never say anything. I thought he was kind of weird."

"Those were my cool days," responds Dave. "The girls wanted me then."

"They wanted you arrested. They thought you were a thug."

Nancy gives at least as good as she gets—and probably better. Dave hasn't crossed her since she rendered him unconscious with a choke hold a few months ago. "He said, 'I'm going out,' but I thought he was kidding," she recalls. "Then he kind of went limp and slid off the couch like Jell-O."

Life is never dull at the three-story Schultz home in Palo Alto. Dave and Nancy have the top floor, Mark is one flight down and Phil Schultz, the landlord, lives at ground level. "It's like Russia around here," grumbles Dave. "You can't call someone a slime bag because they're always listening in." Phil, a former actor, college instructor and improvisational comic who now gives spiritual counseling, seems the most low-keyed of the bunch. "It's nice to have these three around," he says.

Topics of discussion around the house vary from Phil's entertainment career (which included small roles in Play It Again, Sam and Hill Street Blues and appearances with his comedy troupe on the Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson shows) to Mark's trip to the junior world championships in Mongolia in 1978 ("I got a staph infection in my earlobe and it ate half the lobe away," he says, exaggerating. "It was Mongolian staph, and you never know what the hell's in that") to Dave's household chores ("I told Nancy I have to get some Playtex gloves so I don't have to go to tournaments with dishpan hands. It's kind of a low status"). Sometimes Dave and Mark discuss their family bloodlines, which run more to intellectualism than athleticism. Their father earned a master's degree from Stanford, where previous generations of their mother's side of the family either taught or studied. Jean's mother, Dorothy Starks, graduated from Stanford Medical School in 1928 at the top of her class, while her father, Willis Rich, was a noted ichthyologist. "My mom [now Jean St. Germain, resident costume designer for the Oregon Shakespearean Festival] was in the top five percent of her undergraduate class at Stanford," says Dave, shaking his head. "Something must have gotten lost in the genes."

Of course, the Schultzes also discuss wrestling. When Dave is asked about the unfortunate concentration in the U.S. of two world champions—himself and Kemp—in a single weight class, he says simply, "Iron sharpens iron." It seems the same verity extends to Dave and Mark Schultz, too. Iron sharpens iron. Brother sharpens brother.