Books : A Season on the Mat : Excerpts

From Chapter One

The team bus shouldered through spitting snow, heading north and west out of Iowa City, up two-lane highways empty of traffic. It was Thanksgiving Day, 1996, and in farmhouses glowing with lights it wasn't difficult to imagine the smell of roasting turkey and the garbled chorus of family voices. A different kind of family was riding in the bus, a fraternity of athletes with Popeye arms and Olive Oyl waists: the University of Iowa wrestling team, two-time defending NCAA champions, coached by Dan Gable.

The team had already spent six weeks in the wrestling room, drilling and fighting for starting berths, and now the Hawkeyes were ready to open the 1996-97 season in a double-dual meet against South Dakota State and Buena Vista University on Friday night in Spencer, Iowa. Last year's team had given Gable his fourteenth national title in his twenty years at Iowa, and while two individual champions had graduated, the cupboard was hardly bare: Amateur Wrestling News, the Oklahoma-based monthly that is the bible of the sport, ranked the Hawkeyes No. 1 in its preseason poll. Gable anticipated another strong season—if he could get through it. If he could last.

When he got off the bus after the five-and-a-half-hour trip, Gable was stiff and sore. Arthritis had padlocked his joints, made movement such a chore that he needed help tying his shoes. At age forty-eight—bespectacled and balding, standing five-foot-eight, unremarkable in appearance—Gable walks like an old man, a listing, creaking ship with leaks. He had long contemplated a life outside of coaching, and he was thinking about it now more than ever.

Wrestling had done this to him, but it also had given him an Olympic gold medal to encase behind glass and display on his mantle. It had allowed him the chance to visit the Carter White House (after turning down Nixon's invitation because Gable preferred to use the time to train). It conferred upon him a measure of fame and status, and he was known and admired in the unlikeliest circles. In the November 1996 GQ cover story, actor Tom Cruise spoke reverentially about Gable's fighting spirit and dedication.

In his prime, in the late 1960s and early '70s, Danny Mack Gable was a fierce sumbitch. Nobody trained harder. Dislocated fingers were popped back so he could resume practice. It was rumored that he sometimes pushed himself to such limits in the Iowa State wrestling room that he had to be taken out on a stretcher. Not true, Gable said, almost wistfully. "At the time, my goal was to not be able to get back to my feet to get out of there," he later recalled. "A couple of times I was so exhausted that I would start crawling towards the door. Then I'd be good enough to get to my feet. So I never really did do it, but that was my goal." He mowed the lawn in double layers of sweats during sweltering Iowa summers, half-running, to keep in shape. The day after winning a gold medal in Munich, he ran four miles.

For most of his career, Gable was unconquerable up to 150 pounds. As a scrawny, nerdy-looking 95-to-112-pound wrestler at Waterloo (Iowa) West High, he won sixty-four straight matches and three state championships. He won another 117 straight at Iowa State University and two NCAA titles before the national championships of his senior year on a snowy night in March 1970, in Evanston, Illinois. ("TITLE TO CYCLONES—GABLE FAILS!" screamed the headline in the state newspaper, the Des Moines Register.) For the next two years, Gable worked out three times a day, eight hours of running and lifting and hard wrestling, striving for Olympic perfection. He got it; in the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich—before the Black September slaying of Israeli athletes—Gable went undefeated in his six matches, pinning three opponents and shutting out three. No one scored on him, even though he competed on a damaged left knee that required surgery a year later. The feat towers in Olympic wrestling history. "If he were in the World Series, it would be the equivalent of pitching two no-hitters," Iowa State coach Bobby Douglas said. "You just don't do that."

Gable jumped from competing to coaching with barely a twitch, becoming one of the most successful coaches in the history of college athletics. Under Gable, Iowa has never lost a Big Ten title, winning twenty in a row entering the 1996-97 season, but that hardly mattered to him. "The one that matters is at the end of the season—the nationals," he said. "That's what you work the whole year toward. The rest just gets you ready."

His teams had amassed a 340-20-5 dual-meet record and had not lost in more than two years. Gable coached the 1984 U.S. Olympic freestyle team that won seven of ten gold medals in Los Angeles in the absence of the powerful Russians. Three American gold medalists—Randy Lewis and the Banach brothers, Ed and Lou—had wrestled for Gable at Iowa; a silver medalist, Barry Davis, returned in the fall for his senior year at Iowa and won his third national title.

Iowa teams were molded in Gable's image: tough and relentless, attacking constantly. The coach made sure of that. He once barricaded the 1995-96 team in the locker-room sauna until they figured out that they should wrestle hard for the team as well as for personal glory. Six weeks later, the Hawkeyes won another national title.

On the Thanksgiving night, Gable and his team ate at Maxwell's, on West Okoboji Lake. In summer, the area serves as the Iowa Riviera—deep glacial lakes spread over pool-table prairie. Now, as winter set in, the lakes had frozen and the tourists were gone. Riding around the lake, Gable guessed at the cost of expensive homes; his father, a hard-drinking realtor many years ago, before his stroke, would know better.

Gable sat at a candle-lit table with his wife, Kathy, and their four daughters, who ranged in age from eight to nineteen. Christmas lights framed the windows that faced the lake. From a buffet, the athletes and the coaches and their families wolfed down turkey and dressing, mashed and baked potatoes, cranberry sauce, and bread and biscuits and pies. Gable looked up when one of his assistant coaches, Tom Brands, a 1996 Olympic gold medalist, rose, shrugged into his jacket, and announced, "I'm going for a walk on the lake. Who's coming?"

A couple of wrestlers followed him into the eerie glow of snow under moonlight, the lake vast and frozen. One of Gables daughters asked her father if it was all right, Brands and the others walking out onto the lake at night. What if something happened?

Gable smirked. "It's OK," he said. "He's only a coach."

Gable didn't eat much. He'd had an upset stomach, and it was hanging on. He drank water. He loved the smell of coffee, but never drank it because he couldn't abide its taste. When the Brands party returned, everyone filed to the door. A waitress thanked Gable, who was last in line.

"Good luck," she said, which caused him to square his shoulder to her and deliver his standard riposte.

"Luck? Ah, we don't want luck," he said. "Luck is when you win the lottery. Attitude: That's how you win."

Outside, the best amateur wrestling talent in the country was packing and firing snowballs. There was Jessie Whitmer, 118 pounds; he had waited four years for his chance to start and now here it was, less than twenty-four hours away. Tomorrow night, the Hawkeyes would meet Division II South Dakota State and then Buena Vista, a Division III school from Storm Lake, Iowa. Whitmer, a smalltown Iowan like many on the team, had worked hard and lifted weights and built himself into a toy Schwarzenegger. Gable pecked at Whitmer through his varsity career, which consisted of forty matches, none of them in the crucible of NCAA championship competition, believing one day he would be a starter. In team meetings and practices, Gable hyped Whitmer's thickly muscled arms and chest ("Jessie Whitmer, strongest man in the world!"), although Gable also teased Whitmer that he needed lifts to make himself five feet tall and court his girlfriend. Gable liked Whitmer, who had absorbed four years of punishment with only a letter jacket that he wore all winter to show for it. "[Quitting] never crossed my mind," Whitmer said. "In my family, we just don't quit anything. Once you start, you're in it for good."