Fighter's Mind, A Read Free Page A

launched into a quick, decisive interrogation. Who was I, where was I from, what was I doing, where did I live now? I had the sense that Gable was holding me up to the light like a jeweler, examining me carefully with those big eyes behind his thick glasses. He needed information to assess me, and he got it quickly and without stopping—he was intense and it was no act. In fact, there was almost an air of apology to it, as if he was aware that some consider him too intense, but he couldn’t do anything about it.
    He gave me a tour of his house, showed me some things he’d won, the Gold Medal. We ambled back to his office, woodstove ticking warmly, and sat down. Dan launched into the interview, without me asking a question. In fact, I think I managed one question during the whole interview. He told me what was what, and I hoped my tape recorder was working.
    Dan wanted to be clear. “Here’s where I come from,” he said with no prelude. “I’m a little fanatical. I’m on the extreme. If we had a thousand athletes and ranked them, and number one is the most disciplined and extreme, well, I’d be ranked right up there. I never changed my career, and my whole life was preparation for my profession.”
    Dan started in at the YMCA at four years old and mentions that he was already a little fanatical. He swam as a kid and won local meets; he played every sport that little kids play and then he found wrestling. “I had a mom and dad who were intent on making this kid special, on giving him good advice. I heard good things from everyone around me.” It was “do as I say, not as I do,” but “their credibility stayed high because it was a blue-collar town, everything was pretty routine—smoking and drinking and family fights.” Frank Gifford wrote a book in 1976 about courage, in which he profiled Dan Gable. Gifford recounts how Dan’s mother, when she found out that Dan was nervous about an upcoming wrestling match (at age twelve), said loudly to him that she would take away his wrestling shoes and get him some ballet slippers. She was apparently famous for comments like that.
    In junior high, Dan went from the Y into school athletics. He had great success in other sports—he was the quarterback on an undefeated football team—but “wrestling was an unbelievable commodity in Waterloo at that particular time, so I was closest to that.” There were some big name coaches in town, and kids were winning state championships. Dan fondly recounts how his eighth-grade math teacher (who was also a wrestling coach) got him on the right track with his academics. “But my academics was my wrestling—my other academics were an education for me, sure, but I wasn’t going to have to use any of that. Not like I was going to use my wrestling. I had my major going from the beginning.”
    We sat companionably in front of the fire but I rarely got a word in. Dan has a terrible earnestness, a ferocity of concentration that swells into an almost frightening intensity and then fades back to normal. It warms my heart to realize that his interview is like his wrestling: it’s relentless. His voice is rough, coughing and growling.
    As a kid he was something of a terror, with dozens of tales of “Dennis the Menace”-type shenanigans—chasing cats up trees and over the roof, feuding and battling with his parents and the world around him. In an interview with ESPN, Dan laconically said to the interviewer, “When I was a little kid, if I came in here I’d be looking to tear the place apart.” Gifford wrote, in his purple prose, “When Dan was a boy he was well on his way to becoming a Class A monster . . . his language was blue and his misdeeds violent.”
    In high school, during his sophomore summer, while Dan and his parents were away on a fishing trip, Dan’s older and only sister, Diane, was raped and murdered at the family home. A lot is made out of this tragedy, how it drove Dan, but I suspect that Dan’s character was