The Ultimate Winner

Iowa State obviously felt Gable wasn't going to be anything special as a coach. After his glorious collegiate wrestling career, the school made little effort to keep him on the staff as other than just another lowly graduate assistant. He finally was asked if he'd like to travel around the state soliciting beef and pork donations to be used at the athletic training table. What was the job title? Says Gable, "Beef-and-pork man, I think." Fortunately, Kurdelmeier wasn't nearly so shortsighted, and he snapped up Gable for his staff for the 1972-73 season. Since that day, the Hawkeyes have become the longest-lived dynasty since John Wooden's UCLA basketball teams of the late 1960s and early '70s.

Nobody understands wrestlers like Gable, and he says, "In no way will I demand of a kid 100 percent dedication because I leave it up to the individual how much he really wants to win." In truth, anything less than full dedication simply doesn't cut it with Gable. "When I talk, my athletes listen to me," he says. "But the more they lose, the harder it is to make them believe. You've got to get them success. They've got to be able to look at their parents and feel good. But the day my athletes quit listening is the day they quit believing in me, which is the day I get out of coaching."

Lewis was recently pondering what makes Gable so effective as a coach. "He knows how to make adjustments, when to work, when to ease off," Lewis said. "And he has the ability to keep things new. Workouts are different every day. You never know what's next. He'll tell you to start running laps, and you don't know if it will be one lap or 10. But when he sees you're really tired, I'll tell you what, that's when he pushes you some more."

Gable's hands-on coaching style is also central to his success. Minutes before Iowa's loss to Oklahoma State, Riley came up to a weigh-in still needing to shed another half pound. So Gable took him by the arm, walked into the sauna with him and stayed there until Riley lost another few ounces. What struck some as unusual was that Gable had on a coat and tie and it never occurred to him to take them off until he'd been in the sauna for five minutes. Tunnel vision. Last March, Gable was at Northwestern to coach a U.S. team against a Soviet team. Again in sport coat and tie, he walked into a workout room—a casual observer. But almost predictably he couldn't bear just watching. And after exactly 32 seconds, he was down on the mat, wrestling.

Everything bad that happens to Gable he takes as a positive. In junior high, he pleaded for new wrestling shoes, and when his parents got them for him, he promptly lost. "Let's see about gettin' him some ballet shoes," sniffed Katie. That really motivated Dan. When Diane, his sister, was murdered in the family home in Waterloo in 1964 by a neighborhood boy, Dan insisted the family remain in the house. "They took my sister from me," he said. "They're not going to take my home from me." That tragedy motivated him to excel—for Diane; it also taught him a practical lesson: "I never sleep far from my shotgun." Reflecting on the loss of his last college bout to Larry Owings, Gable says, "I feel like that made me stronger, a better person. I really started working harder." Often, in talking of his past, Gable will describe a setback and then say, "So I redoubled my effort." The thought of Gable redoubling his already prodigious efforts time and again makes one's eyes glaze.

It does seem that Gable was to the wrestling mat born. Mack says that two days after he brought his firstborn home from the hospital, the baby was trying to bridge on his head. "Hey," Mack had said, "you're going to be a wrestler."

Gable's childhood in middle America was decent, ordinary—sort of like Waterloo itself. Little Dan would get out on the front lawn and pretend he was Mickey Mantle, pretend he was Jim Brown, pretend he was an Olympic swimmer—complete with flip turns through the air. He was, you won't be surprised to learn, intense about all this. "It was all so real to me," he says.

One day when Dan was in fourth grade, Diane had some friends over. He got to wrestling with the older boys and beat them. The flame was lit. Says Gable, "Athletes can see the end only when it's close to the end. That's how I was different. When I was in junior high, I could look ahead and see the Olympics. Most people can't stay motivated that long." Mack helped in the process; he installed a wrestling mat in the basement.

At West Junior High, Gable quarterbacked his football team to an undefeated year; he won a YMCA state swimming championship in the backstroke; he was a decent basketball player. But he quit all those sports when somebody told him that wrestling didn't mix with anything else. Says Gable, "The reason I was successful is I was naive. I believed older people. I believed them when they said I couldn't swim and wrestle. Now I know adults don't know everything, but I'm still glad I listened."

Gable's high school wrestling coach, Bob Siddens, says, "Dan never got stale because he always said, 'I can do better.' Nobody had to tell him to keep going." In a copy of a book about his wrestling career, Gable wrote the following inscription to Siddens: "I sincerely believe that in all the people I've been associated with, you have been the biggest factor in building my desire & attitude in wrestling."