Fighter's Mind, A (2 page)

 

Dan Gable wrestles the Soviet Union’s Rusl Ashuraliev during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. (Courtesy: AP)

—Kenneth Turan

 

 

As I drove through a snowy wasteland to Waterloo, Iowa, I could feel the emptiness stretching away, across Canada, to the North Pole. It was cold, about three degrees without wind chill, and the snow fell dense and light, too cold and windy for it to stick to the windswept road. Thin snakes of curling snow twisted back and forth across the highway. Bodaciously cold. The rental car was cozy, my little cocoon of traveling heaven.

Waterloo is a small industrial town, and my destination was easy to find, right off the highway. The car crunched through the ice in the parking lot, empty save for one other car. I parked near it for warmth.

The Dan Gable International Wrestling Institute and Museum was chilled and clean. It felt deserted, complete with echoing foot-steps. And then a thin, serious young man came out, Kyle Klingman, whom I knew only electronically. He helped run the museum (though he’s since moved on) and he was my link to the greatest living American wrestler, Dan Gable. Interestingly, Kyle is not a wrestler, but he had the burning intensity of
something,
some kind of athlete. I later found out he was an ultrarunner.

I wandered through the museum, catching up on wrestling, pro wrestling history, and all things Gable. Actually, I was pretending to catch up; in reality I knew very little about collegiate or Olympic wrestling, the wealth of names. Signed pictures of Olympians covered the walls. The museum was bigger than I expected, and well organized, although there wasn’t much but photos. The pro wrestling section was small but fascinating, a little-known slice of history. It hadn’t always been dominated by fake, theatrical matches. There was a large picture, a black-and-white framed photo of a stadium in the 1930s, packed with 14,000: folks in suit and tie, ladies in hats, all for a wrestling match. Kyle informed me that into the ’50s some pro wrestlers would actually wrestle for real, in private, to decide who was better, and then they would “work” (fake) the public event, with the real winner prevailing in “the work.” Otherwise, an overly technical match might be boring for the crowd.

I sat in Frank Gotch’s favorite chair. Gotch was the “greatest American wrestler ever,” competing at the turn of the century when professional wrestling was primarily real. Wrestlers traveled the world and competed in bullfight rings in Spain and stadiums in Russia; Gotch was considered an icon in the early days of the twentieth century and wrestled in front of a crowd of 30,000 at Comiskey Park.

Gotch had studied under Farmer Burns, another great American catch-wrestler. These guys were doing submission wrestling with key locks and chokes before the Gracies learned jiu-jitsu. Burns wrote things that sound suspiciously like Eastern philosophy; he advocated the practice of deep, studied breathing, flowing like a river—meditation by another name.

I realized long ago that modern MMA had been deeply shaped by American wrestlers, who had found a professional avenue for their refined and savage arts. I was here at the beating heart of American wrestling to explore the wrestler mentality, with the hands down greatest living American wrestler. Many of the fighters I was interested in, Pat Miletich and Randy Couture, had set out to emulate Dan Gable. So here I was.

Gotch’s leather chair was comfortable, with excellent lower back support. If I’m ever a millionaire I’ll have a furniture maker copy that chair for me. A burly older man came out to say hello. His name was Mike Chapman and he’d read my book. He was an interesting guy, a professional journalist who’d written sixteen books, a combat sport enthusiast who’d practiced wrestling, judo, and sambo, and a historian—he’d just written a book about Achilles.

Mike and Kyle were excited I was interviewing Gable the next day. They had set the whole thing up, as I could never get Gable to respond to a phone call. Kyle and Mike wondered if I was nervous about meeting Gable. I hadn’t been before but now I was getting there.

Dan Gable is nothing less than a living legend. He seemed unbeatable as a young wrestler. He went 183-1 in high school and college, pinning twenty-five consecutive opponents. He won gold at the 1972 Olympics
without getting a single point scored on him
. If you don’t know wrestling it’s very hard to appreciate the surreal quality to that achievement. It’s one thing to win a gold medal; it’s something entirely different to dominate a sport as completely as that. It demonstrates not only greatness but a kind of monstrous determination, a drive to a killer instinct on a completely different level.

As a coach, he won twenty-one consecutive Big Ten titles and nine consecutive NCAA titles (with a total of fifteen) from 1978- 1986, in what is known as the “Gable Era.” Gable wasn’t just great—he was
dominating,
not only as a wrestler, but as a coach, too. And that domination was very famously and publicly born of insanely hard work. Dan Gable trained much, much, much harder than everyone else. He worked out five or six times a day; he ran from class to class with ankle weights strapped on. He’s the definition of driven. For Dan “more is more.” His drive, his fanatical devotion to the blue-collar philosophy that “harder work means better results,” coupled with his unprecedented success has made him a mythical figure in his own time. Hard men gush like teenage girls when they talk about him.

At its heart, wrestling is about intensity and pure conditioning. There is always a body on you, continuously in contact. The whole point is to dominate physically, and there aren’t a lot of ways to rest in a match—basically you’re going the whole time, all six or nine minutes. Wrestling is more tiring than fighting because it’s
pure,
and it’s more exhausting than grappling because it’s so positional. It’s a battle of will, and nothing destroys will like fatigue. Mike Van Arsdale, an Olympic wrestler who fought extensively in MMA, told me how much harder wrestling is, cardiovascularly, than fighting. In wrestling, you’re not going to get punched, you’ll just be dominated. Of course technique and strategy figure in but they are distant stars to strength and conditioning.

What Gable brought to the table—what made him different—was his fanatical drive. It allowed him to push a dominating, tireless, relentless pace in practice and in matches. “Fanatical” is a clichéd concept in sports, but for Gable it seems like one of the only appropriate descriptions. He pushed so hard no one could keep up. He brought a whole new level of conditioning to the sport. He improved constantly, he studied diligently, he refined his game. Through example, Gable brought all that intensity along with him into his coaching career, and it paid off: his teams dominated and annihilated the competition for most of his career.

 

I drove back down to Iowa City the next morning for my interview with the great man, through a complete white-out blizzard. Seven inches fell in a couple of hours. My friends and family would have been scared if they could have seen it. Only three or four
really
close calls. Who needs coffee when you’ve got adrenaline? But I wasn’t going to miss my interview, not now. Gable would have driven through the snow.

The Gable homestead is a beautiful place, twenty-odd acres in the country. Most of Iowa is flat but where Gable lives there are rolling hills, timber, a sense of wilderness. I parked and walked across the snow to his office, a cabin he had built out back of the house. He had a fire glowing in the iron-and-glass woodstove. I was jealous—it would make a great writing studio, with a big full bathroom, a sauna, and a small gym.

By now I
was
a little intimidated to meet the man. For wrestlers, Dan Gable is Jesus and Buddha. Douglas Looney, in
Sports Illustrated,
had called him “America’s Ultimate Winner.” Wrestlers will say he’s the Greatest American Athlete in History and they will be fighting serious—wild-eyed—when they say it. Wrestlers carry Dan Gable in their hearts. I didn’t know what to expect, and I wondered if he’d be annoyed by some snot-nosed nonwrestler asking questions.

The man himself is just that, just a man dealing with his legend. Dan is of medium size and build, still thick in the shoulders and hands, his hair gone thinning and nearly bald, big glasses, light Irish complexion. He’s in his fifties and has had to pay the price for his unrelenting workout routines and wrestling schedules, with dozens of minor and major surgeries, hip replacements.

He shook my hand and launched into a quick, decisive interrogation. Who was I, where was I from, what was I doing, where did I live now? I had the sense that Gable was holding me up to the light like a jeweler, examining me carefully with those big eyes behind his thick glasses. He needed information to assess me, and he got it quickly and without stopping—he was intense and it was no act. In fact, there was almost an air of apology to it, as if he was aware that some consider him too intense, but he couldn’t do anything about it.

He gave me a tour of his house, showed me some things he’d won, the Gold Medal. We ambled back to his office, woodstove ticking warmly, and sat down. Dan launched into the interview, without me asking a question. In fact, I think I managed one question during the whole interview. He told me what was what, and I hoped my tape recorder was working.

Dan wanted to be clear. “Here’s where I come from,” he said with no prelude. “I’m a little fanatical. I’m on the extreme. If we had a thousand athletes and ranked them, and number one is the most disciplined and extreme, well, I’d be ranked right up there. I never changed my career, and my whole life was preparation for my profession.”

Dan started in at the YMCA at four years old and mentions that he was already a little fanatical. He swam as a kid and won local meets; he played every sport that little kids play and then he found wrestling. “I had a mom and dad who were intent on making this kid special, on giving him good advice. I heard good things from everyone around me.” It was “do as I say, not as I do,” but “their credibility stayed high because it was a blue-collar town, everything was pretty routine—smoking and drinking and family fights.” Frank Gifford wrote a book in 1976 about courage, in which he profiled Dan Gable. Gifford recounts how Dan’s mother, when she found out that Dan was nervous about an upcoming wrestling match (at age twelve), said loudly to him that she would take away his wrestling shoes and get him some ballet slippers. She was apparently famous for comments like that.

In junior high, Dan went from the Y into school athletics. He had great success in other sports—he was the quarterback on an undefeated football team—but “wrestling was an unbelievable commodity in Waterloo at that particular time, so I was closest to that.” There were some big name coaches in town, and kids were winning state championships. Dan fondly recounts how his eighth-grade math teacher (who was also a wrestling coach) got him on the right track with his academics. “But my academics was my wrestling—my other academics were an education for me, sure, but I wasn’t going to have to use any of that. Not like I was going to use my wrestling. I had my major going from the beginning.”

We sat companionably in front of the fire but I rarely got a word in. Dan has a terrible earnestness, a ferocity of concentration that swells into an almost frightening intensity and then fades back to normal. It warms my heart to realize that his interview is like his wrestling: it’s relentless. His voice is rough, coughing and growling.

As a kid he was something of a terror, with dozens of tales of “Dennis the Menace”-type shenanigans—chasing cats up trees and over the roof, feuding and battling with his parents and the world around him. In an interview with ESPN, Dan laconically said to the interviewer, “When I was a little kid, if I came in here I’d be looking to tear the place apart.” Gifford wrote, in his purple prose, “When Dan was a boy he was well on his way to becoming a Class A monster . . . his language was blue and his misdeeds violent.”

In high school, during his sophomore summer, while Dan and his parents were away on a fishing trip, Dan’s older and only sister, Diane, was raped and murdered at the family home. A lot is made out of this tragedy, how it drove Dan, but I suspect that Dan’s character was already firmly in place. The terrible, unthinkable horror simply revealed a little more of his iron nature. Dan took it personally. He kept his parents from selling the house and moved into Diane’s room. He’d already lost his sister, and he decided he wouldn’t lose his house. He fed the event to the hunger inside him.

Between his tenth-grade year and all the way through college, Dan won 181 wrestling matches. He was considered unbeatable. And then, in 1970, for his last match ever in college, for his third NCAA title, the unthinkable: Dan lost to Larry Owings, a good, tough sophomore from the University of Washington. Gable went on to a pinnacle of greatness, but thirty-eight years later he is still thinking about Owings.