For the next few weeks, Andy stayed in the apartment, wondering if it was possible to die of shame. Whenever he thought about going outside, usually after he’d been pacing for a few hours and was desperate for fresh air and open space, he would hear the words Everything I’ve got, I earned and decide it wasn’t worth it. Valerie, his personal assistant of five years, gave her notice, saying that she’d loved working for him but she couldn’t handle the volume of calls and e-mails, not to mention the questions from her friends and family about whether she’d known what was going on. His calls to his agent went straight to voice mail; his publicist handed him off to a different firm, one that handled oil companies who’d dumped thousands of gallons into the ocean and right-wing senators who’d been paying off their same-sex, underage lovers.
If he’d earned his previous life—the endorsement deals, the perks, the famous friends—then surely he’d earned this one, too. He’d earned the barista at Starbucks who’d refused to take his order, the waitress who’d turned on her heel when Andy and his old friend Miles Stratton sat down for lunch to discuss his finances in light of what Miles called “these new developments.” He’d earned the ten-year-old girl who’d mailed him a poster depicting his Olympic win with a note that read You used to be my hero but you aren’t anymore.
Still in his bubble of numbed disbelief, Andy went to the hearings, the meetings, the conferences with the publicists and the ones with the lawyers. He sat at long tables in offices on high floors with stunning views of Central Park and tried to pay attention as attorneys for the USATF and the runners who were being called the Athens Nine tried to work out a deal. Eventually, they decided that if Andy and his teammates would testify about how they’d gotten the drugs and who else they knew was using, they could keep the medals and the prizes they’d won up to 2006 . . . but none of them would be able to run competitively ever again.
The sneaker company that had underwritten his running life since college sent a certified letter explaining that, given his current circumstances, they could no longer continue their association. They wished him well. So did the watch company he’d done ads for, and the sports drink he’d endorsed. He moved his stuff out of his place in Oregon, downsized from two bedrooms in Carnegie Hill to a studio in a not-great neighborhood in Brooklyn. Those moves, plus his savings, gave him a nest egg he could live off for a while. He would need to do something eventually, but for now, there was vodka and premium cable for binge-watching old shows. He’d learned to avoid live TV after flipping through the channels and seeing a late-night wit urging the public, “Give blood. Our Olympic runners might need extra.”
He ate delivery pizza or Chinese food, bagels for breakfast, bags of pretzels in between, for once not caring about calories or carbs or sodium or nutrients or any of it. He’d wash it all down with PowerUp, the sports drink that he’d spike with vodka after the sun went down. He had cases and cases of the stuff—he’d been the face of PowerUp, and part of his deal included free drinks for life. Only now, he noted with sour amusement, they sent him boxes full of discontinued flavors, something called Red Rage that tasted like fermented cough syrup, and Blue Crush, which tasted like chalk.
For the first time in a long time, Andy was faced with empty days to fill, hours and hours when he had nowhere to be and nothing to do. The Sports Illustrated with his face on the cover was in one of the boxes he’d brought over, along with his tax returns and copies of the contracts he’d signed. In the years since it had been published, he’d never been able to bring himself to read Bob Rieper’s profile. One day he found it, flipped it open to the page with his picture, and began scanning the text for his father’s name.
At fifty-one, Andrew Landis Senior bears little resemblance to his son, or to the teenage basketball star that he was once. Tall and lanky in his youth, he is stooped now, heavier through the chest and belly, with rounded shoulders and a mostly bald head. His walk is a head-down, shoulders-hunched shuffle. The only trace of the son that Landis Senior and his wife, Lori, named after him are his feet, size fourteen, big as flippers in heavy brown work boots. “I was always fast,” Landis Senior says.
After getting out of prison he moved to an SRO hotel. His tiny, windowless room in a no-name neighborhood in Philadelphia has the feel of a cell, the single bed neatly made, books and magazines arranged in perfect stacks, posters and pictures taped to his cinder-block wall. The posters and pictures are all of his son; the magazines all feature stories about him. In a scrapbook, Landis has newspaper clippings charting Andy Landis’s history as a runner, beginning in high school. Over the years, Landis Senior says, friends sent them to him in prison. He is proud of his son, but has, he says, no desire to get in touch. “It’s too many men who come out of the woodwork when their children make something of themselves,” he said, mentioning Shaquille O’Neal’s father, who’d abandoned his son as a six-month-old baby, who’d disappeared into addiction, then prison, only to finally come forward, brandishing a birth certificate, looking to be taken into O’Neal’s fold after his son became a star.