A Kid Who Doesn't Kid Around

As he sat in his apartment recently and measured his past, Dan said, "What really turned me on was when Bob Buzzard beat the tar out of me in the wrestling room I had fixed up in our basement. He beat me so bad that I cried. He had gone to Iowa State and was a two-time Big Eight champ, and when he beat me it proved that I had to get better. This was the summer after my senior year in high school and I suddenly realized that being a three-time state champ wasn't good enough. Right then I set a goal that I'd work out at least once every day. That was six years ago and I've never taken a break in training since."

When he got to Iowa State, however, he found out he was not rugged enough to contend with his more experienced teammates. Day after day they worked him over, so much so that his father was ready to bring his dejected son home. "Give me 30 days," Dan said. By the end of those 30 days he had markedly improved.

"The first time I got any idea of how good I was came in my freshman year," he recalls. "I went to the Midlands tournament and beat Don Behm, who had been third in the NCAA championships in 1965. I wrestled Masaaki Hatta, a former NCAA champ, in the finals, and I remember being interviewed on radio before the match. The announcer said, 'I understand you've never lost since junior high.' I said, 'That's right, but I'm about to get licked.' Then I went out and beat Hatta by five points."

Dave Martin, an NCAA champion in 1970, was one of several wrestlers who shared an off-campus house with Gable at Iowa State. "As a freshman he was ultra-shy," Martin recalls. "We used to tease him a lot. A bunch of us would be walking down the street and we'd say loud enough for other people to hear, 'Is that Dan Gable? Is that really the famous Dan Gable?' He'd get so embarrassed he'd run and hide. Dan won the Athlete of the Year award twice at school, and after they gave it to him during his junior year he was so embarrassed that he handed me the trophy and ran off.

"But I've never seen anybody work like him. He used to play this game with a deck of cards where he'd pull out a card and then do as many pushups as the face value of the card was worth. He'd see how many times he could go through the deck. And then he'd start all over and do the same thing by doing curls with a barbell.

"Dan was always giving things to people and he seemed to enjoy that. If someone was overweight, he would always try to help him lose weight, no matter how tired Dan was. And he was tough. The day after he had an operation on his elbow he was wrestling—with one arm."

Gable's toughness and his conditioning program enabled him to keep on winning at Iowa State. He became the most dynamic wrestler in college history, relentlessly pursuing his foes and pinning 60% of them.

Before the 1970 NCAAs Gable was given amateur wrestling's Man of the Year award. When the trophy was handed to him Dan merely nodded. Then everyone in the banquet hall arose and applauded Gable, who at that point had won 176 matches in a row. Everyone then sat down and waited for his acceptance speech. Gable looked at the audience, nodded and, dumbstruck with embarrassment, walked off.

Gable advanced to the finals of the NCAAs with five straight pins. Only one match lay between him and the goal of becoming the first wrestler ever to win every match throughout high school and college. He came even closer than that. With 30 seconds to go against Larry Owings of the University of Washington Gable was ahead. Then, in a blur of action at the edge of the mat, Owings took Gable down for two points, then got two more for momentarily clamping his shoulders down. When the match ended, Gable had lost.

At the victory ceremonies Gable, for the first time in his life, accepted a second-place plaque. Eight thousand five hundred fans in Northwestern University's McGaw Hall arose and applauded.