The Day After Olympic Gold, Tom Brands Mowed the Lawn

Lex Fridman recorded this conversation almost exactly three years before he published it. He had just watched Iowa wrestle Iowa State at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, and Tom Brands invited him home. Brands is an Olympic and world champion in freestyle, a three-time NCAA champion at Iowa, and, by the time the episode aired in 2021, a fifteen-year head coach who had just won a national title and a third coach-of-the-year award. Fridman was nervous enough that night that he never put on his jacket. He kept the tape because the mix of intensity and kindness made him want to stay in Iowa forever.

Fridman opens with a blunt choice: for an athlete, is the better fuel a love of winning or a hatred of losing? Brands does not hesitate. For him it was hatred of losing. He was not, he says, "a guy that was about pageantry" or about the parade. After he wrestled in Atlanta he rented a three-cylinder Geo, drove home with his wife, and mowed the lawn because it had not been cut in a month. A neighbor drove past and did a double take, as if the man on the mower was supposed to be in Atlanta. He had been. The day before, someone had hung a gold medal around his neck.

He does not sell that as the right approach or the wrong one. It is what worked for him. As kids, he and his twin brother Terry did dream about Olympic gold, and there is a lure to winning. What actually drove the work, though, was a refusal to settle. The thought that kept him up at night was that a loss was not going to happen to him again. That is why, when Dan Gable said finish with three rope climbs and bunny push-ups, Brands did nine, or kept going until he could not. When the coach said four, he did ten or twelve. The older he gets, the rarer he finds that ingredient.

Fridman asks whether the losses still eat at him, or whether they have melted together. Brands says he remembers his career well. He also knows he is judged on a very small portion of his life: minutes of wrestling matches. People think they know him from those minutes, or from a press conference. They do not. He will not say a loss still gnaws at him in the way the question wants. He will say he has learned a great deal from certain opponents.

The match he names is the 1991 U.S. Open against John Smith. He learned positioning. He learned how much parterre matters. In a "certain kind of crazy way," he learned he could go with the best guy in the world even though the score was 14–4. Technical falls then were 15 or 12 points, so he was not tech-falled. That was not a badge of honor. What he took from it was that every point was a takedown, and he had scored four of them on Smith. He learned that his feet had to move constantly, with no break.

Smith, now known as a six-time world and Olympic champion, was a very intense competitor, and Brands felt that firsthand. He did not take a back seat even though the score was lopsided. Afterward he had to get ready for the consolation side of the bracket. He says he learned more from that night than from beating a second-ranked senior as a college junior. You wrestle the best on a stage, the score is ugly, and you find out where you stand. Failure itself does not create value. What you pull out of it does.

Looking back at tens of thousands of hours on the mat, Brands says he would have been more relaxed in training, and probably would not have chased another cycle. In 1996 he thought that when Gable retired he would be the next man in line. He was wrong, and he calls that immature. A more relaxed Tom Brands would have known he was already pretty good and getting better every day, and would have trained a little smarter. Terry actually learned that "less is more" approach going through 2000, or he would have ended up in "the funny farm." Recovery, massage, and stretching are work too. Brands was never good at the fluffy parts.

Fridman forces a choice: one athlete drills a hundred thousand reps of a takedown, the other spends that time live wrestling. Who dominates? Brands wants both. He always preferred live wrestling, even bringing the warmup into the live go. Where he got really good, though, was repetition. He was disciplined enough to know that "the things that you hate to do in this sport are the things that make you the very best." That ingredient, he says again, has grown rarer with age. Fridman restates it, and Brands agrees: if you feel yourself hating something, that is probably the thing you should be doing.

He traces the psychology to a strength coach in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a man named Walt who dressed in white from head to toe, "almost like a nurse." Walt taught Tom and Terry to hate the bar away from them on the last dead rep — hate the curl up, hate the negative down, hate the bench off the chest. Brands had lifted before. He had never known the psychology. The old reason was to look good in a mirror. Walt was about performance. The same movement, done for vanity or for output, produces two different people.

Brands believes in the ten thousand reps wholeheartedly. He also believes you have to do them on your own. "I don't believe in the coach taking you to the promised land." You can talk about it as a coach, but bringing a young wrestler to that understanding is rare, and you never stop trying. Iowa did not have a good performance the night of the recording. The corner's demeanor did not change. Some programs put their heads down when things go badly and rise with the tide when they go well. That is not the philosophy he wants.

The athletes who do the extra work on their own, he says, are the ones in the lineup and doing well. What holds a lot of people at the next level is a single line: they did everything the coach asked and nothing more. Those athletes can be great to have. They are also stuck. Brands does not want guys looking at their watches and running out of the room when practice ends. He wants people who know what they have to get done. They might leave early. They are not watching the clock. "We are not autocrats."

Is that internal engine something you are born with, or something you develop? Both, he thinks, and it requires enough comfort that a young person can say he needs the day off. Communication, for Brands, means telling an athlete what he has to do to get in contention, then giving boosts when they are earned. He does not have time for lies or for athletes who cheat themselves. The conversation starts the same way every time: neither of us has time to waste, so look in the mirror. If you are accountable, you are already on the way to solving the problem. He names a succession of Iowa administrators — Fred Mims, Gene Taylor, Barbara Burke — and praises Burke as the best of them because she is direct and she solves problems.

Iowa wrestling is known for mental toughness, and Fridman asks how you train it. Brands's answer is a situation, not a speech. You put people in something they are willing to walk into and do not think they can make it through. They go through it. Then those walls are down. Some of that is physical exhaustion, the reps on the ropes. Some of it is understanding why you are doing it, and that understanding may not arrive for months. Until then there is blind faith. He has a heavyweight in the room who has been asking questions for four and a half months, does not fully understand, does the work anyway, and is getting better every day.

Toughness is also repetition, an open mind, and accountability that cuts two ways: you own it when something does not go your way, and you get tough in the moment that will make or break you. Brands's own career was defined by a couple of minutes on the mat. That is how people will talk about you, he tells athletes, so you might as well have them talking about how untouched you are.

Fridman brings up work-life balance and overtraining. Brands treats peaking and burnout as frames of mind. Burnout is what happens when you let things get to a point you could have arrested with a better frame. He does think you can overtrain — if you have a lot of distractions, if you are looking at your watch and running out of the room. In that frame of mind, hard work will not produce excellence. You have to actually accomplish what you need to accomplish. When you are in that mindset, the clock is irrelevant. "There's no place for a clock in the wrestling room," except maybe the one that times a match.

That is why he tells student-athletes not to schedule a class that runs right up to practice, and not to take a night class that starts at 5:30. Take the 6:30 or the 7:00. Walk into the room with nothing else on you. Nothing is eternal except death, he says. Some guys come in already wigging out about an hour and twenty-five minutes, or an hour and forty-five. You have to be willing to go as long as it takes.

Wrestlers are among the toughest people in sports, Fridman says, and weight cutting is still what breaks them. Brands treats it as discipline during an uncomfortable stretch that feels long and is not. Once you shrink the body down, hydration is the line. If you are a little hungry but hydrated, the feeling of energy depletion goes away when you break a sweat. He has practiced that. You come in yawning, starting to shrink, and if you are dehydrated you are dead in the water.

He thinks coaching science and communication have gotten better, but the bottom line is still energy to implement it. A new or undisciplined kid has to be taken by the hand until the discipline is his. Making weight is not the point. It is part of the warmup, part of the process of getting ready to wrestle. The whole thing, he says, is a lifestyle.

When did he first believe he would win Olympic gold? He got addicted to wrestling very fast. He started late, but looking back he had been wrestling his whole life with his twin. When Tom and Terry fought, it was wrestling, and it was to maim. If the other person is trying to maim you, you had better be tough, because if you roll over and expect a belly scratch you will lose your head. There was no alpha twin. Terry used to describe it as each of them grabbing a steering wheel and fighting over the car.

In fifth grade he started researching the Olympics, put the idea in his head, and said something about being an Olympic champion. Somebody made fun of him. He got into a fight on the playground. The adults who pulled him in were smart enough not to rake him over the coals; they found out what the fight was about. He was distraught, crying. It was not because he got beat up, or bloodied, or punched. "It was because they stomped on my dream and they doubted me." He fought for that.

The lesson became a staff rule. There will be a lot of doubters. The coaching staff has to be lockstep in the hallway and in the offices. When you deviate, that is heresy. Everybody has to be on board that you are going to be number one. When the program puts a public foot forward, there is a decision, they are unified, and there is no backbiting. Iowa has not always had that. The Hawkeye Wrestling Club used to have detractors, guys who would get rolled up in ankle laces and not care. Brandon Sorensen got rolled up by James Green the night before this taping, and Brands does not have a problem with it, because it meant a lot to Sorensen. He did not roll over. He did not quit on the consolation side of the bracket.

That is also where hatred of losing still trumps love of winning: he wanted to shove it back at the people who doubted him. He says only a handful of programs — Oklahoma State, Ohio State, Penn State, and Iowa — try to win a national title every year. Other teams get up, then call it a down year. Iowa fights for first no matter what. They had not won in eight years at the time, he admits, but he argues the results were better than anyone's except Penn State's because of mentality and because the people are aligned: Ryan Morningstar, Bobby Telford, Terry Brands, the medical team, strength coach Quinn Holland. There will not be an ascension in that hallway. Everybody is in together.

Fridman asks him to walk through the day he went for 62 kilograms in Atlanta: what he ate, what he drank, what he thought. Brands says it really does not matter. He had a routine he could still run through on the spot. The core was a lot of very positive self-talk and visualization, learned at a young age in a developmental camp with Terry. That is how he relaxed before matches his whole life. Before the final he went back to his room with his relaxation material and was able to relax because he had prepared for it.

Fridman has talked to a lot of Olympic champions and calls Brands's bracket the hardest he has seen: three world champions just to reach the final. Brands does not talk about that, he says, and nobody else does either, except in their own careers. "Now you're making my head big." Then he grants it. He had a road. You see the draw, and it is a two-day tournament, so psychology matters as much as physical shape. You have to sleep the night after weigh-in, sleep again after the morning semifinal, then go back and rest because the final is at some later hour. The visualization and self-talk are the routine that makes those hours usable.

Was there doubt? Fear? Brands borrows from Jack Dempsey, whom he had just quoted to one of his own athletes. Dempsey talked about fear of losing as the thing that made him try to take an opponent's head off. Brands is fine with that. Fear of competition, fear of screwing up, fear of not feeling good — no. The little fear is useful: somebody out there will revel in your misery if you fail, and you are not going to let that happen.

The identical twins spent a lifetime on the mat. Tom won gold; Terry won bronze. Fridman asks how Brands thinks about that thin, almost tragic line. You come to peace, Brands says, that when it was over you did the best you could. That is the case with Terry. Internationally, Terry's credentials are better: two world titles to Tom's one, an Olympic bronze against Tom's gold. None of that is what matters. What matters is how you look back. Brands admits there were tournaments where he left things undone. Terry never came back from 2000, because he retired.

Those experiences, he argues, made Terry a better coach. 1995 made Tom a better coach, because looking back he can see things that unraveled that year that he could have controlled. You cannot control an injury. You can control how you react to it. Bronze, he says carefully, sucks. He is proud of his brother anyway. Terry put some demons to rest by becoming an Olympic medalist, even if he will never admit it. "The consolation medal sucks, but there is a consolation that he won the consolation." Fridman notes it is a tough medal to win. Brands does not argue.

Iowa had just lost three matches in which Brands felt his guys outwrestled the other man for six and a half minutes, one of them into overtime. If they move forward with the right perspective, he is confident they will be better. Great wrestlers can use their imagination on a win they are not satisfied with and go forward as if it were a loss. The rare, mature ingredient is getting better from success the way you would from a defeat, without beating yourself up. That is a balance.

Fridman presses the phrase Brands has used: winning is everything. Outside wrestling, that idea is uncomfortable, because it means most people lose. Brands will not defend it as a universal law. He thinks of Kudukhov, and of Sargis's face after losing in London — some of the greatest freestyle wrestlers in the history of the sport. Being at peace with results, treating the journey as the point, relaxes some champions and makes them tick. Not everybody. If "winning is everything" makes you uptight, go the other route. You have to find what works for you. That takes a lot of work. "If you're lazy, forget it."

How does anger enter the room? Brands says there is a line you go up to and cannot cross. Sportsmanship is everything. You can get dinged for points, thrown out of tournaments, kicked out for flagrant misconduct so the other team gets the points and you sit the next meet. The NCAA sends a serious message. The honorable version is to be a tough guy inside the rules of the sport, which is "more honorable than cold-cocking somebody and knocking them out." The guys who get tough outside the rules are what you want in an opponent. It means they are frustrated.

A lot of people know Brands from the passion they see in the corner. He tells Fridman to break bread in his kitchen and then decide how big a jackass he is. Spend a month in the program and see what kind of people they are. There is a stigma, he says, because other programs are threatened. "There's nobody else that threatens the sport of wrestling like we do." He offers Virginia Tech as evidence: in twenty-two months he recruited the number-one class and turned the administration 180 degrees, because the staff was serious and not idiots. He thought he would stay twenty years. Looking back, he was a fool. It became a stepping stone quickly.

Has he ever been carried off the mat the way Gable talked about? Brands says he was once misquoted on Gable's line, and he does not know if anyone besides Gable has actually done that. He has been in a nirvana where he could go all day and you would have to shoot him to stop him. The balance is that you are not going hard while holding your breath. You are relaxed, like a man who has his opponent cornered. The cornered man is the dangerous one, so you stay fluid. Offense is in and out and smooth, not a grunt to the leg. Fridman says he sounds like a Russian wrestler. Brands says in a certain light they are the best.

Fridman zooms out: wrestling is older than folkstyle, freestyle, or Greco, with cave drawings from fifteen thousand years ago. Brands does see it as bigger. Iowa was raising twenty million dollars for a facility he wanted to be the best on the planet, filled with the best wrestlers. The donors are doing it for the university, but for him it is also about the value of the sport. Blind people do not play football; they wrestle. They can wrestle because it is a feel sport — no ball, two people. He has wrestled with his eyes shut and been effective. The demons you are overcoming are not limited by whether you can see. They are inside. You have to overcome them from within.

The current Iowa room has a good young group and more buzz than it has had in quite some time. The staff's job is to stay relaxed and focused and not get caught up in it. Spencer Lee is a catalyst, and he still has to get better; so do the others. Brands wants independence, accountability, and the ability to get better every day under duress without knowing you are getting better. The great thing about wrestling for Gable, he says, was that "you were getting better and you didn't know you were getting better." Then one day in the practice room you hit something you have been working on, and it is automatic. Success multiplies.

Fridman asks what Brands goes to the Bible for. Strength, love, the same things other people talk about — and the things you cannot control. You turn them over. "The biggest thing for me is I gotta turn over the things that I can't control" to that power. That is why he is not in the funny farm. The job is still deadly serious. Young wrestlers come to Iowa to be the best they can be and to hit goals they set when they were young, the way he did. They chose Iowa, so the staff has to deliver. Because of that peace with God, the motivation stays pure. It is not for ego. They are not, he says, corrupt people, liars, or cheaters. Fridman says first and foremost he is a good person. Brands adds: and they are serious about wrestling.

Family, in his telling, is a wide word. His wife, when he asked for her number, told him it was in the phone book. Her version is that she did not want him to have to remember it. His version is that she was blowing him off. The current parents — Lee, Mirin, Costello, Warner, the transfer Lugo — are part of a different parental culture. The staff does not talk to parents to get along with them. They talk so a mother or father understands where their son is, and can help him be accountable. That is problem-solving. Coaches, wives, and children are family too. At Thanksgiving they fed forty wrestlers plus the staff and their families: seventy people in the house.

Family also means the administration. Athletic director Gary Barta, Brands says, gives them everything they need and has an open mind for the sport. Wrestling is important in Iowa, which is a no-brainer unless you are not a wrestling person. The commitment is there because they do it the right way. If they were doofuses, it would not be. He runs the roll: Morningstar, Telford, Ben Burhau before him, the doctors, athletic trainer Jesse Donovarth, Terry, managers Mariah Stickley and Elise Owens, his own daughter, the Hawkeye Wrestling Club, four women in the club. One thing he has learned is that you have to have that. If you do not, you address it quickly. Get the outlier problem on the table. If it does not work out, it does not work out.

Fridman's last question is a 2014 swim "meet" against Terry that the video says Tom won. Brands says not really. He did not practice. He researched the rules. In swimming, if you flinch on the block it is a false start; you cannot twitch a finger. Terry was leaning forward as the gun went off. Brands yelled false start; Terry could not hear him and was already in the water, "like a bat out of nowhere." It was down and back, a hard thing for a man with no body fat. Terry burned a lot of energy, reached the far wall, and could not find his brother. They stopped him, brought him back, and went again. Tom won that one.

Then they timed it. They timed the race Tom won, Terry's first length, and Terry's actual race once he hit the wall. Terry beat him on all of it. Brands offers that as a picture of an honest, accountable person. Getting into the swim trunks, he adds, was impressive enough on its own. They are tight.

Outside wrestling, is there something Terry still has on him that he needs to avenge? That is past, Brands says. Then he mentions Uno. The family runs Uno world championships. Terry has a title. Tom does not. Morningstar has two, which is unprecedented. There are only four trophies out there, and Terry has one of them. An Olympic champion, world champion, three-time NCAA champion, and longtime head coach is still keeping score at the kitchen table. Fridman closes with Marcus Aurelius: the art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.