Fighter's Mind, A Read online

  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.

  “No matter what you do, you never forget certain things. People think that loss is over and done with?” He snorts derisively. “That’s never over, that goes to my grave with me . . .” he trails off, then continues, mellower, wiser. “Even though I have kind of figured it out, I know how I should have won that match. But that’s not the most important factor. The most important thing is: Could I have won that match and gone on to the levels I reached in the Olympics and coaching?” Here Dan is haunted, his thoughts far away. “I should have been able to do that, but I haven’t convinced myself I could have.”

  These things plague him even now. He has a further, secret confession to make. “Here’s something I realized in the last two months: I’ve been disappointed in my athletic career by a few things. Beyond losing that Owings match, I was always somewhat disappointed in the way I won the world championships and the Olympic games. Even though I was unscored on, in the last two minutes of that match I coasted.”

  Dan is incredulous, having a hard time believing it himself. Yes, it’s true. The shame of it, coasting.

  “I have been trying to figure out why I coasted to victory, because as a coach I don’t preach that. I always say when you get up, build-build-build on your lead.” He sighs, disturbed deeply by his own allegations.

  “It goes back to this Owings match, when I didn’t wrestle a good match. I was distracted, hearing things around me in the stands. I fought my way back into
the match, came from behind, and pulled ahead. I was ahead by two points with thirty seconds left. But me, winning by two points? C’mon, I win by fifteen points or a pin!” The disgust rises in his voice. “I pin people! It wasn’t good enough to win, I had to pin him. So I went for the pin again. However”—and Dan grows wise again—“I didn’t read the match. I didn’t read the history of it. Twice before I’d tried to pin him and he’d escaped both times. I’d use arm bars and he had real loose shoulders and he could gumby out of there. It was just natural for me to try to dominate.” He growls, exasperated, “Yeah, coaching was involved but it was just my way. I went for the fall. He had the opportunity to score and he did by escaping. There was the referee’s call but I lost that match. What did that match do for me? CHOOM!” He makes his arm take off like a rocket. “It shot me up. I improved in the year following that loss as much as I had in the previous seven years.

  “But now, here’s the point. In the finals of the World, in ’71, the last period, I’m up by five points, and the athlete I’m competing against stops wrestling. Now it could have been a false thing, trying to lull me, but I had been really working on my mentality since the Owings match. When you’re beating somebody, you keep adding on. But now, when he shut down, I shut down, too. I coasted to victory. The only way he could win was if I gave him the opportunity to pin me. So I didn’t give it to him. At the time I couldn’t say why. When I wondered at it afterward, and analyzed it, me being overly aggressive was the only way I could lose. That Owings match taught me to do what I had to do to ENSURE victory.”

  Dan is not sure if he’s happy with this version of history. He shakes his head and talks about “taking a knee” in football—taking the safe way out, to protect a victory—and he gets very angry with himself, with the world. “Taking a knee is NOT MY WAY! It’s not my way! That’s what I preach, that’s what I demand, that aggressiveness.”

  There’s part of the price Gable pays for being such an intense perfectionist—he’s somewhat dissatisfied with one of the most perfect performances in the history of sports.

  When Dan started coaching at the University of Iowa he was introduced to a whole new slew of problems. He was just the assistant coach, and although it was competitive, the University of Iowa was not a wrestling powerhouse. Iowa State (where Dan had gone), Oklahoma State, those were the big dogs.

  “I had athletes with the same talent I’d been around my whole life, and I figured they’d be as good. In the competitions we started with the easier teams, and I saw tremendous performances. So I told the head coach to raise his expectations, because his were much lower than mine. I told him he wasn’t seeing it. He said, ‘Just wait and see,’ and when we finally got into competition with someone who was rated higher than us, I think it was Michigan, the athletes didn’t represent themselves. They didn’t wrestle well. Now, for me, when you go against higher competition you get MORE out of yourself. In the quarterfinals of the Olympics you got to be a little better, and then even better in the semis, and so on. You step it up as the season progresses. Now this team wasn’t representing itself. And it wasn’t a fluke—it happened again against the higher competition. I started to think about mentality. I’d always had it, but we didn’t have a good example in the room.” He could see these kids thought they were working hard, thought they trained tough, but there were depths unplumbed.

  Gable used himself as that example—because part of it, that extremism, is showing what is possible. He said, “I’m just off the Olympics, besides being a coach I’ll get out there, and work harder in the room to show it.” He needed living proof of what incredibly self-motivated people could do, and as he got older he had to find it in his wrestlers, hone it, and bring it out because a few individuals like that will raise the level of the whole team.

  It’s like the nuclear bomb in the years before anyone had made one. The secrets of the first atom bomb weren’t technical, not really—everyone in the scientific world knew how to make one, more or less; the theory was public. It was just whether the thing itself was possible; that was the secret. Could it work? Would it ignite the atmosphere in a chain reaction, destroying the world? Gable played a similar role with his first teams, even with his Olympic teams. He showed them what they were capable of. Gifford wrote, “Face to face with Gable, they were able to see what had to be done.”

  To Dan, there is no top end, no limit. You can always add new levels, and the guys who realize this go on to do amazing things. Dan gets fired up about this. He talks about the four-minute mile—how the journalists of the day were convinced the four-minute mile was the limit of human speed. In 1954, Roger Bannister crashed that wall and ran under four minutes because he believed overtraining to be a myth. Bannister said, “The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.” The following year, a few dozen athletes broke the barrier, this barrier that had previously been thought of as scientifically impossible. It reminds me of what the monks in Thailand had said, that the longer you meditate the more you realize pain is just an illusion.

  Gable is a true believer and, more to the point, he’s proven it. Gifford writes, “Dan talks in ‘odd’ phrases. Odd in that they are sometimes clichés. Only, when Dan says them, the moss falls off because they come from the lips of a man who has demonstrated since boyhood that he means every one of them.” In a way, that is the point of this whole book.

  Dan gets up and walks me over to a picture of a horse race. It’s Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes in 1973. Secretariat is so far ahead of the other horses, thirty-one lengths, that they don’t even appear to be running in the same race. When you watch the race, you see Secretariat way out in front, pulling away. And then he keeps on pulling away, pulling away. This is what Dan is all about, confounding experts, performing at levels that no one dared yet imagine. There’s always another level. People may not understand it, may not be able to grasp it, but there’s always another level.

  As a coach at the University of Iowa, Gable built a wrestling powerhouse and led the team to fifteen NCAA victories. I spoke with Tom Brands, one of his standout wrestlers who is now the head wrestling coach at Iowa. Tom (and his brother Terry) were outstanding wrestlers in the Gable era. Tom was a four-time all-American, a three-time NCAA champ, and won the gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. He won basically every award there is to win.

  Tom said of Gable, “It’s complicated but it’s simple. He steered you as you needed it. He says this all the time, ‘I can make pumpkin pie out of cow manure.’” What becomes clear in talking to Tom is that Gable studied his wrestlers the way he’d once studied opponents. “He would push the right buttons, eventually,” said Tom. “It wasn’t innate, I think it was trial and error, hard work, study, he’d eventually figure a guy out, what he really needed.”

  Tom tells a story about Gable and apples. Tom was a red-shirt freshman, and in a gruesomely hard practice. Gable was toward the end of his coaching career, perched high on the bleachers and eating apples from a box. He was really pushing his varsity wrestlers, with two-on-ones and other killers, and he kept saying, “This is the last one of these,” but the torture never seemed to end. One of his wrestlers started breaking, pushed past his mental endurance by Gable and what he was asking for; he started wanting to quit. The wrestler began screaming at Dan, “You’re a liar, you said that was the last one, I thought you were a man of your word!” Dan didn’t say anything, but he started throwing apples at him. Tom recalls wrestling with apples everywhere, apples underfoot and under bodies—because practice didn’t end—with this one wrestler screaming and crying, “going off the deep end.” The wrestler having the meltdown didn’t get it. Dan just kept pelting him with apples. Gable wasn’t insulted. “He wasn’t in your face, ‘that’s not how you talk to me,’ but you could see that if you were talking like that, you’re out of line. You’re not as tough as you need to be. This was the test and you can’t handle it. You’re failing, right now, and you don’t even realize it.”<
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  As head coach, Tom Brands has won the NCAA championship and word is that all the other sports at Iowa are doing better—inspired by the example of intensity.

  Gable knew he couldn’t expect everyone to wrestle and train as he had. “A lot of people make that mistake. They’ve been successful so they try to apply it straight on to everybody else. A lot of great athletes don’t make great coaches, because they’re already fixed on what they were doing to be great, as individuals. Because I’ve been a fanatic and an extremist, I know it works well and for me. But I’ve made adjustments for a whole range of people.”

  Tom gets a little frustrated by some of my questions. He thinks I’m looking for that one moment when Gable took him and said the key words that changed his life. Those words aren’t there (and I’m not expecting them). Tom conjectured for me, “He created an energy through mystery. He’s a serious guy, but these things are mysterious. What makes the real tough guys tick? We don’t know, except they’re badass sunofaguns. They’re fanatics. It’s not simple, it’s complicated.” Tom thinks about it.

  “You learn the number one thing—it’s about making guys feel good about their future and the direction that they’re going. One time at a tournament, as a real freshman, my brother and I both lost both our matches—I got pinned—and Gable put us in the corner and pointed his finger at us and scolded us. But it was so positive, because we were just freshman and he let us know we were valuable to what he was doing, that he counted on us. It was so gratifying. He expected more from us.”