Dan Gable

[BigCoach 3]

Big day tomorrow.  Bigger days coming up in a few weeks in Frankfort.  An excellent article was on ESPN.com on E-ticket.  Will only have one winner tomorrow (State Duals) and only one per weight class in a few weeks in Frankfort.  For all others, this article speaks to you.  Enjoy and puts many things in perspective and goes to the one thing I love most about wrestling, this sport more than any other rewards HARD WORK!!

There is a picture attached to this post.  The picture says it all and is Owings having his hand raised with Gable right beside him.  What a powerful picture!!!!

THE LOSS THAT MADE THE MAN

On Saturday, March 28, 1970, Dan Gable of Iowa State lost to Larry Owings of the University of Washington in the 142-pound weight class at the 1970 NCAA Wrestling Championships in Evanston, Ill. Gable, a senior, entered the match with a perfect career record of 181-0-0 through high school and college.

In chemistry class, he wrote scouting reports in his notebook: height, weight and record of his next opponent; lists of the guy's tendencies; stick-figure sketches of moves and counters. He marked time between one match and the next the way they do at Cape Canaveral. The countdown began when the referee held up his arm after a win. Every second, every day, every gesture and ritual from that moment on ticked him closer to zero hour: The next time the whistle blew. No variation. No distractions.

Gable's older sister, Diane, had been murdered when he was a high school sophomore. He knew who had done it even before the police told him. He'd had a bad feeling about the guy. Maybe if he'd said something earlier, he could have saved her. He couldn't bring her back. He could only wrestle. "I was wrestling to recover, to lift my family up somehow," he says. "I thought every match could make things a little better." No variation. No distractions.

And then, with one match to go, he wavered. Three days before the final, he read a headline: Owings said he had come to the tournament to beat him. Gable never read headlines. Why now? Two nights before the match, he attended a banquet in which he was honored as wrestling's man of the year. He never went to banquets. He didn't care about awards. Why now? In his early matches in the tournament, he found himself glancing up, eyeballing Owings on another mat. He never looked anywhere but straight through the heart of his opponent. Why now?

Thirty minutes before the final, when he should have been going through his routine, 10-9-8 ..., he was taping a television interview, stumbling through takes in which he looked into the camera and tempted the fates: "Hi, I'm Dan Gable. Come watch me finish my career 182-0." Why now? And on the mat with Owings, even when he had a lead midway through the third period, he heard conversations going on in the crowd, noticed people moving in the stands. He was elsewhere. Why now?

"I don't know. I got caught up. I got distracted," he says. "I wasn't doing anything the way I normally would, and I'm really not sure why." Maybe he got a little full of himself. Maybe he hadn't made Owings a goal, a target, the way Owings had focused on him. Maybe the pressure to win every single time out (he had gone undefeated in winning three consecutive Iowa state titles at West Waterloo High School, too: 64-0) finally broke something inside him. Maybe the weight of Diane's memory was something he had to finally put down. It could have been all these things, he thought.

He stood there on the mat, watching Owings' hand go up. Can't even remember if he said anything to him. Didn't know what to do. There was no way to mark time now. No next match. No countdown. He was lost. The guilt hit him in waves, first for letting his family down by losing, and then, all over again, for letting harm come to his sister. "I didn't know until then how connected they were in my mind," he says.

The drive back to campus was quiet. He couldn't speak. Had no idea what to say. He walked into Beyer Hall, the recreation center at Iowa State, went up to the wrestling room and found someone who would get down on the mat with him. No variation. No distractions. "I was still good," he says. "That kind of shocked me. It made me know I could go on."

He went on to win at the World Freestyle Championships in 1971. In 1972, he won an Olympic gold medal in Munich. And beginning in 1976, he became the most successful coach in the history of collegiate sports, leading the University of Iowa to 15 NCAA titles and 21 consecutive Big Ten crowns.

The losses, first Diane and then the match to Owings, made him. He didn't just go on, he got better. That was the hardest part, he says. The focus came at such a high price, with so much hurt underneath.

You ask him: What is perfection? What has it meant to chase it for so long?

He's still in pursuit, he says: "If I could figure out how I could have gone back and saved Diane, and how I could have gone back and not had that loss in that tournament, and still gone on to be the same person I am today, that would be perfect."