The Pride Of Iowa

To help stoke the locals' fires, Brands coaxed Gable out of his fund-raising job in the Hawkeyes' athletic department and onto his staff. There is no equivalent to this move, not in any sport, at any level, unless the Green Bay Packers somehow coaxed Vince Lombardi out of eternity to call plays from the press box. Gable's role is somewhat mysterious, in that he refuses to offer his former pupil any unsolicited advice. But his impatience with losing might provide the program with just enough impetus to regain its stature.

The day after the Minnesota loss, for example, Gable was radiating pure disgust. "Three takedowns!" he said, referring to Iowa's paltry output. "I can get three takedowns before I get out of bed. And by that, of course, I mean my wife." Like Brands, he believes Iowa wrestling is a civic trust: "People here love this sport, and they've seen some great wrestling. We had a style that people are craving, a dominant style, pushing, shoving, snapping, wrestling to the edge, standing toe-to-toe. They've seen enough of that for 50 years to know the difference. They've seen meets with 10 competitive weight classes, not a 'cigarette break' in there. They are highly expectant. We had a team--Brands was part of it--when we had 11 All-Americas in 10 weight classes." He returns as asked, caretaker of this trust.

Gable is an odd duck, his intensity and fear of losing probably no longer as contagious as they once were. Still, you cannot be around him for long and be unaffected. As an aside, he brought up that miserable blight on his career--a loss in his final NCAA match, when the particulars of his unbeaten career were being etched in trophies. He was distracted, he admits, and the defeat proved properly transforming. "I wouldn't have been the man I am, the coach, or the husband and father, without that loss," he says.

But he still mourns it. "I remember the depression afterward," Gable recalls. "I went back to school, but I physically couldn't talk to my parents when they called." He reenacted the scene, reaching to answer an imaginary phone call. "I'm choking up right now, a little bit." His mother mistook his silence for--who knows what?--and drove to his campus dorm, knocked on his door and slapped him. He laughs at the memory, a little. It was 35 years ago, after all.

It may be that fear of losing is not something you coach, anyway, but something that's instilled in all those small gyms in all those small towns where farm boys escape a comparative drudgery for one that promises at least a little fame, however local. Bill Smith, the 1952 Olympic gold medalist, recalls that he and his Council Bluffs teammates hated to wrestle those farm boys at state. "They were just stronger than us," he says. "They had these powerful grips. Milking cows, we always figured."

Brands, whose intensity is almost comic, tries to explain what it's like to be from a small town and do something memorable. "My first state tournament," he says, "I was one and out. But I remember the drive home on the bus, sitting next to our heavyweight, who won a championship, and he was on top of the world. He's a garbage man back in Sheldon, haven't seen him for years. But he's a champion forever."

It's almost impossible, in fact, to explain the hold the state tournament has on Iowa each February. There were 23,000 requests for 13,700 tickets this year. Driving home afterward from Des Moines to Iowa City every year, Gable admits that he falls into a depression. "Not a long one, but a depression." When I ask him why, he shoots me a look. "Because it's over."

Some of these kids will go on to wrestle in college, and some of them will then return to their little towns and nurture their own three- and four-timers. In Iowa City two former Hawkeyes who were NCAA champions coach rival programs, Brad Smith at City High and Mark Reiland at West High. It's not unheard of.

In Iowa wrestlers wear their letter jackets without a coastal sense of irony, the shiny diaper pins (pins--get it?) actually conveying something to their peers. They pursue goals that require ungodly work but have little logical reward in this day and age. A college scholarship, perhaps, but not a $35 million contract, and not much TV time either.

Still, in the northernmost part of the state, you could do worse than drop the name of Mark Schwab, a four-timer from the mid-1980s. You might even get some conversation out of a mention of Gerald (Germ) Leeman, a three-timer who won a silver medal at the 1948 Olympics. Both of them, believe it or not, came from Osage (pop. 3,451; CITY OF MAPLES). No doubt you've flown over it.