Fighter's Mind, A Read Free

won twenty-one consecutive Big Ten titles and nine consecutive NCAA titles (with a total of fifteen) from 1978- 1986, in what is known as the “Gable Era.” Gable wasn’t just great—he was dominating, not only as a wrestler, but as a coach, too. And that domination was very famously and publicly born of insanely hard work. Dan Gable trained much, much, much harder than everyone else. He worked out five or six times a day; he ran from class to class with ankle weights strapped on. He’s the definition of driven. For Dan “more is more.” His drive, his fanatical devotion to the blue-collar philosophy that “harder work means better results,” coupled with his unprecedented success has made him a mythical figure in his own time. Hard men gush like teenage girls when they talk about him.
    At its heart, wrestling is about intensity and pure conditioning. There is always a body on you, continuously in contact. The whole point is to dominate physically, and there aren’t a lot of ways to rest in a match—basically you’re going the whole time, all six or nine minutes. Wrestling is more tiring than fighting because it’s pure, and it’s more exhausting than grappling because it’s so positional. It’s a battle of will, and nothing destroys will like fatigue. Mike Van Arsdale, an Olympic wrestler who fought extensively in MMA, told me how much harder wrestling is, cardiovascularly, than fighting. In wrestling, you’re not going to get punched, you’ll just be dominated. Of course technique and strategy figure in but they are distant stars to strength and conditioning.
    What Gable brought to the table—what made him different—was his fanatical drive. It allowed him to push a dominating, tireless, relentless pace in practice and in matches. “Fanatical” is a clichéd concept in sports, but for Gable it seems like one of the only appropriate descriptions. He pushed so hard no one could keep up. He brought a whole new level of conditioning to the sport. He improved constantly, he studied diligently, he refined his game. Through example, Gable brought all that intensity along with him into his coaching career, and it paid off: his teams dominated and annihilated the competition for most of his career.
     
    I drove back down to Iowa City the next morning for my interview with the great man, through a complete white-out blizzard. Seven inches fell in a couple of hours. My friends and family would have been scared if they could have seen it. Only three or four really close calls. Who needs coffee when you’ve got adrenaline? But I wasn’t going to miss my interview, not now. Gable would have driven through the snow.
    The Gable homestead is a beautiful place, twenty-odd acres in the country. Most of Iowa is flat but where Gable lives there are rolling hills, timber, a sense of wilderness. I parked and walked across the snow to his office, a cabin he had built out back of the house. He had a fire glowing in the iron-and-glass woodstove. I was jealous—it would make a great writing studio, with a big full bathroom, a sauna, and a small gym.
    By now I was a little intimidated to meet the man. For wrestlers, Dan Gable is Jesus and Buddha. Douglas Looney, in Sports Illustrated, had called him “America’s Ultimate Winner.” Wrestlers will say he’s the Greatest American Athlete in History and they will be fighting serious—wild-eyed—when they say it. Wrestlers carry Dan Gable in their hearts. I didn’t know what to expect, and I wondered if he’d be annoyed by some snot-nosed nonwrestler asking questions.
    The man himself is just that, just a man dealing with his legend. Dan is of medium size and build, still thick in the shoulders and hands, his hair gone thinning and nearly bald, big glasses, light Irish complexion. He’s in his fifties and has had to pay the price for his unrelenting workout routines and wrestling schedules, with dozens of minor and major surgeries, hip replacements.
    He shook my hand and