The Ultimate Winner

Not that young Dan was always a model of perfection. Once, when he was four, he got on a department store elevator with his mother and instructed the operator, "Fifth floor, you bastard." Since that didn't happen to be the operator's name, some confusion ensued. Katie resolved the issue by stepping off on the third floor and leaving her son alone with his new friend. Boys will be boys.

The summer before Gable entered Iowa State, a top Cyclone wrestler, Bob Buzzard, decided to show Gable the difference between high school and college wrestling. "Little did I know," says Gable, "that he was going to be unmerciful." Mostly Gable kept bouncing off his head. He became furious, not to mention bloody, and stormed off the mat. "I contemplated quitting the sport," Gable says. "But then I told myself, 'No, this is never going to happen again. I will increase my intensity at every level.' " Which, of course, he did.

In 1974, he met and married a Waterloo girl. Ahhh, yes, yes, her name is Kathy. "Sometimes Dan doesn't hear everything I say," she says patiently. "Perhaps he's got his mind on wrestling." Perhaps. The Gables have three children, all girls as it turns out, and Kathy says they are Jennifer, 6, Annie, 5, and Molly, 18 months. Dan agrees those are the names of his kids.

Worldly possessions don't motivate Gable. Moments after he was awarded the gold medal in Munich, it disappeared. Gable's parents were frantic, but he shrugged it off: "It doesn't matter. I don't need no medal. I know I won it." Subsequently, the medal was located, in the rubble at the bottom of his gym bag. Until recently, Katie had put the medal in a safe place in the basement whenever there was a tornado warning, and now Kathy does the same.

Nor does money qualify as a Gable god. He's making about $80,000 a year in wrestling—in salary, money from his camps, endorsements and so on. In March Oklahoma State athletic director Myron Roderick offered him $2.5 to $3 million over 10 years to coach there, a wildly exorbitant offer in a sport in which $5 is still considered a lot of money; the offer sort of died on the table. That's because Oklahoma State kept leaving messages but Gable didn't call back. "I just didn't have time to think about it," says Gable. "I'm thinking about the Olympics." Question: Would you have time to think about $3 million?

Gable's wife wanted him to at least consider it, which prompted some hot words one night in a car en route to a high school sports banquet in nearby Manchester. Finally, Gable said, "Do you have enough money now to pay the bills?"

Kathy, pouting: "Well, yes."

Gable: "O.K."

Case dismissed.

Oklahoma State, to save face, tried to deny such an offer had been made. But the wrestling world knew that if Gable said the deal had been proposed, and he did, then it had been proposed. Period. "If they didn't want me to talk about it," says the disgustingly honest Gable, "then they shouldn't have talked to me about it." In wrestling circles, the feeling is that if Gable ever should decide to leave the University of Iowa, no doubt, he would be able to develop a national championship team at any other school very quickly, within three to five years.