Fighter's Mind, A Read Free Page B

already firmly in place. The terrible, unthinkable horror simply revealed a little more of his iron nature. Dan took it personally. He kept his parents from selling the house and moved into Diane’s room. He’d already lost his sister, and he decided he wouldn’t lose his house. He fed the event to the hunger inside him.
    Between his tenth-grade year and all the way through college, Dan won 181 wrestling matches. He was considered unbeatable. And then, in 1970, for his last match ever in college, for his third NCAA title, the unthinkable: Dan lost to Larry Owings, a good, tough sophomore from the University of Washington. Gable went on to a pinnacle of greatness, but thirty-eight years later he is still thinking about Owings.
    “No matter what you do, you never forget certain things. People think that loss is over and done with?” He snorts derisively. “That’s never over, that goes to my grave with me . . .” he trails off, then continues, mellower, wiser. “Even though I have kind of figured it out, I know how I should have won that match. But that’s not the most important factor. The most important thing is: Could I have won that match and gone on to the levels I reached in the Olympics and coaching?” Here Dan is haunted, his thoughts far away. “I should have been able to do that, but I haven’t convinced myself I could have.”
    These things plague him even now. He has a further, secret confession to make. “Here’s something I realized in the last two months: I’ve been disappointed in my athletic career by a few things. Beyond losing that Owings match, I was always somewhat disappointed in the way I won the world championships and the Olympic games. Even though I was unscored on, in the last two minutes of that match I coasted.”
    Dan is incredulous, having a hard time believing it himself. Yes, it’s true. The shame of it, coasting.
    “I have been trying to figure out why I coasted to victory, because as a coach I don’t preach that. I always say when you get up, build-build-build on your lead.” He sighs, disturbed deeply by his own allegations.
    “It goes back to this Owings match, when I didn’t wrestle a good match. I was distracted, hearing things around me in the stands. I fought my way back into the match, came from behind, and pulled ahead. I was ahead by two points with thirty seconds left. But me, winning by two points? C’mon, I win by fifteen points or a pin!” The disgust rises in his voice. “I pin people! It wasn’t good enough to win, I had to pin him. So I went for the pin again. However”—and Dan grows wise again—“I didn’t read the match. I didn’t read the history of it. Twice before I’d tried to pin him and he’d escaped both times. I’d use arm bars and he had real loose shoulders and he could gumby out of there. It was just natural for me to try to dominate.” He growls, exasperated, “Yeah, coaching was involved but it was just my way. I went for the fall. He had the opportunity to score and he did by escaping. There was the referee’s call but I lost that match. What did that match do for me? CHOOM!” He makes his arm take off like a rocket. “It shot me up. I improved in the year following that loss as much as I had in the previous seven years.
    “But now, here’s the point. In the finals of the World, in ’71, the last period, I’m up by five points, and the athlete I’m competing against stops wrestling. Now it could have been a false thing, trying to lull me, but I had been really working on my mentality since the Owings match. When you’re beating somebody, you keep adding on. But now, when he shut down, I shut down, too. I coasted to victory. The only way he could win was if I gave him the opportunity to pin me. So I didn’t give it to him. At the time I couldn’t say why. When I wondered at it afterward, and analyzed it, me being overly aggressive was the only way I could lose. That Owings match taught me to do what I had to do to