He is building a health club in Logan, which will be called Rulon Gardner L.A. Workouts.

He hopes it will be the first of several such ventures. He is part owner of American Trails Adventures, which makes accessories for four-wheel drive vehicles, and he invested in a wireless Internet company.

He is part owner of Granite Energy Inc., which owns hundreds of oil wells in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. He is building an 11,000-square-foot house in east Layton, which he had planned to live in but will soon put up for sale.

Other lucrative deals have fallen into his lap, but he has not been so eager to embrace them.

The World Wrestling Federation — then known by its initials as the WWF, and now called World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE — offered him $1.5 million a year shortly after he returned to the United States from Sydney. Gardner turned it down. He had a formal meeting with pro wrestling huckster Vince MaMahon but rebuffed his offers.

"Life is not about money," he says. "You can make money any way you want if you lower your standards. I don't believe in hurting people, even if it's fake. I don't want to portray that image."

As he speaks, Gardner's cell phone rings with another offer to fight, this one a match against Russia's Fedor Emelianenko in a mixed martial arts bout that would consist of, in Gardner's words, "full contact and pretty much no rules." Only eye-gouging, head-butting, biting and shots to the groin are specifically banned.

"Fedor has no weaknesses," says Gardner. "I watched him beat the hell out of a guy. (Mike) Tyson is a chump compared to Fedor."

Gardner has received several similar calls coaxing him to take the fight against Fedor. The money is good — $500,000 just to get in the ring — but Gardner says he probably won't accept because the object is to injure.

He did accept one fight. Four months after tearfully retiring from wrestling following his bronze-medal performance at the 2004 Summer Games, he competed in a mixed martial arts fight in Tokyo against Olympic judo champion Hidehiko Yoshida.

"I did it because it was champ against champ," says Gardner.

After the bout, he conceded that as he met Yoshida at center ring before their match, he wondered if it was too late to back out. For a man who says he has never been in an altercation, it was a frightening experience. It wasn't until after he received threats on his life after his Olympic triumph that he took six weeks of training in self-defense, which probably helped him defeat Yoshida in what aficionados considered a major upset. He reportedly collected $200,000 for his pains.

"After that fight, he told his mother he wouldn't do that anymore," says Reed Gardner.