never saw the boy again.
The Gundersons had no idea that the Armstrongs were living in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas, and had no money to hire a lawyer or investigator to find him. The Gundersons held out hope that Armstrong would come looking for them someday, maybe when he had children of his own. At their church—Four Mile Lutheran, which his relatives helped found and build east of Dallas 165 years ago—the congregation for years had prayed for Armstrong every Sunday.
The Gundersons wrote to Armstrong occasionally, but he never answered. They rarely called Linda’s family, and when they tried they heard only the click of a phone being put back into its cradle.
Linda’s brother, Alan, felt sorry for Sonny and was the Gundersons’ only source of information about the boy. He once came over to Sonny’s place and gave him a school picture of Armstrong, a color 8x10. The Gundersons inspected Lance’s face closely, the first time they had seen it in more than five years.
He had the same deep blue eyes as his father, and the same high cheekbones. They wondered if he possessed other family traits: Would Lance be hard and stubborn? Did he have problems with authority? Did he see the world in extremes? Did he hold grudges?
Armstrong’s grandmother is now nearly ninety. When she turned eighty, she moved in with Micki, who resides in one of Dallas’s most exclusive neighborhoods, among mansions and estates with guardhouses. Her husband, Mike Rawlings, was elected mayor in 2011.
Willine’s thick brown hair has turned snowy white. Her once rod-straight posture has become permanently bent. She uses a walker and needs thick glasses and bright lights to see. Her hearing is going, too, but her mind is sharp. Next to her bed she has photos of six of her seven grandchildren and six of her eleven great-grandchildren—but not a single photo of Lance Armstrong at any age, nor photos of any of his five children. It’s as if Lance Armstrong had never existed in her family.
CHAPTER 2
T he last name is all that remains of Terry Armstrong. Just as she had erased Eddie Gunderson, Linda removed Terry. Divorce records show they were married fourteen years, until Lance was nearly seventeen. Linda, meanwhile, continues to represent herself as a single mother who raised her son alone.
In her career as a motivational speaker—that pays her as much as $20,000 a pop—there is hardly a word about Terry’s involvement in Lance’s life. (Some newspapers have quoted her saying the marriage lasted only until Lance was thirteen. She declined to be interviewed for this book.) In her autobiography, she never uses Terry’s name. She calls him “the Salesman” or “Sales.” The best allowance she makes for him is that “Sales coached Lance’s Little League team, he did do that. He gets some credit for effort there, but I’m not sure how much he enjoyed it. Lance wasn’t the budding baseball star Sales would have liked him to be.”
In truth, Terry Armstrong could not have been more different from Eddie Gunderson. One had been the cool bad boy in the Pontiac GTO spending late nights at R&B clubs rather than with his wife and newborn child. The other was the twenty-two-year-old son of a minister, a churchgoer with a steady job and an eagerness to be a father.
A wholesale food salesman who hawked barbecued meats and corn dogs to schools and businesses, he had met Linda Mooneyham Gunderson at a car dealership and was smitten with the cute, spunky brunette. He looked like the kind of guy who could buy a car with cash, which was its own sort of handsome. They started going steady and it fast-tracked into a marriage proposal. With Linda, Terry married into the role he had always wanted: father to a son. With Terry, Linda had found a solid, stable provider.
According to divorce records, and Terry himself, the two were married for most of the boy’s formative years—ages two through sixteen. In that time, Lance learned how to