Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Dan Gable
00:00:02 from two years ago.
00:00:04 I did not previously publish this conversation
00:00:06 as part of this podcast, but as a separate thing.
00:00:10 And as a result, it did not receive many listens.
00:00:13 Let me be honest and say that while I usually
00:00:16 don’t care about how many listens or views something gets,
00:00:19 in this one case, I feel like I failed one of my heroes.
00:00:23 I feel I didn’t properly introduce
00:00:25 a truly special human being to an audience
00:00:28 that might find him as inspiring as I did.
00:00:31 Dan Gable is one of the greatest
00:00:33 Olympic athletes of all time.
00:00:36 Bigger than records and medals, to many like myself,
00:00:39 he’s a symbol of guts, spirit, mental toughness,
00:00:43 and relentless hard work.
00:00:45 As a wrestler, he was undefeated in high school,
00:00:48 undefeated in college until his very last match.
00:00:51 And having lost that match, he found another level
00:00:55 and became a world champion and an Olympic champion.
00:00:58 And most importantly, he did so
00:01:01 perfectly dominating his opponents.
00:01:03 He did not surrender a single point
00:01:05 at the 1972 Olympic games.
00:01:07 As a coach, he led the Iowa Hawkeyes to 15 national titles
00:01:12 and 25 consecutive Big Ten championships.
00:01:15 He coached 152 All Americans, 45 national champions,
00:01:19 106 Big Ten champions, and 12 Olympians,
00:01:23 including eight medalists.
00:01:25 He’s the author of several books,
00:01:26 including A Wrestling Life One and Two,
00:01:29 and Coaching Wrestling Successfully.
00:01:32 Quick mention of our sponsors.
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00:01:47 Choose wisely, my friends.
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00:01:54 As a side note, let me say that I spent a few days in Iowa
00:01:57 and got to attend a wrestling duel meet
00:02:00 in the historic Carver Hawkeye Arena.
00:02:02 Part of me wanted to stay in Iowa forever
00:02:05 to drill takedowns, to start a family, to live life simply.
00:02:10 Wrestling is one of the pure sports,
00:02:12 both beautiful and brutal,
00:02:14 where both mental toughness and technical mastery
00:02:17 of the highest form are rewarded with victory,
00:02:21 and everything else is punished with defeat.
00:02:23 And every such loss weighs heavy on the minds
00:02:26 of anyone who has ever stepped on the wrestling mat,
00:02:29 including myself.
00:02:31 The same is true for one of the greatest wrestlers
00:02:33 in history of the sport,
00:02:35 the man who graciously welcomed me into his home
00:02:38 for this conversation, the legend, Dan Gable.
00:02:42 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:02:44 review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
00:02:47 support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter
00:02:50 at Lex Friedman.
00:02:51 And now, here’s my conversation with Dan Gable.
00:02:56 You’re persistent, I love that,
00:02:58 because you’ve been trying to get me on this podcast
00:02:59 for a long time.
00:03:01 And until I saw you on another podcast
00:03:04 and you said you were Russian, did I call you back?
00:03:08 Then it was over.
00:03:09 Because Russia to me, you know,
00:03:11 is leading the world in wrestling almost every year.
00:03:14 What’s the difference between American wrestling
00:03:16 and Russian wrestling?
00:03:17 You showed me this painting.
00:03:18 Well, it’s MIT, it’s science.
00:03:20 It’s science.
00:03:21 And they really study the sport.
00:03:24 They’re really good technically.
00:03:26 They’re really, really good in strategy.
00:03:28 They don’t really push like the real toughness.
00:03:32 They don’t push like conditioning.
00:03:35 And so Americans, we need what they have.
00:03:38 Russians need what we have.
00:03:40 And when you get the two together.
00:03:43 And for me, why I could beat the Russians
00:03:46 is because I went their way a little bit.
00:03:50 But I kept my toughness.
00:03:52 But you’re known, you’re known for your toughness.
00:03:56 Yeah, but I wasn’t known for my art.
00:03:59 I wasn’t known for my science.
00:04:00 So when did you become a bit of an artist?
00:04:02 It took a loss.
00:04:04 The Larry Owens loss.
00:04:05 Most people thought I was already an artist
00:04:07 just because I won 181 straight matches in seven years.
00:04:11 And not just winning, but you know,
00:04:13 kind of punishing people.
00:04:16 And from that point of view,
00:04:17 yeah, I might’ve been pretty good,
00:04:19 but I had a long ways to go yet.
00:04:21 And I didn’t really realize that,
00:04:23 or I should say, I didn’t really know
00:04:27 how to get it out of me until I had a loss.
00:04:29 And then I realized I gotta buckle down,
00:04:31 learn some of that science, become more of an artist.
00:04:34 How do you become an artist?
00:04:35 So the Russian way has this drilling technique,
00:04:41 thousands of reps.
00:04:42 How do you think you work on the science, the art part?
00:04:46 You gotta study the best in the world.
00:04:49 I think Dave Schultz was our guy in America
00:04:53 that probably showed us that being artistic,
00:04:58 you needed that.
00:04:59 And he studied it.
00:05:00 He went over there as a high schooler
00:05:02 and rustled in some major tournaments over there.
00:05:04 And he saw their ways.
00:05:08 He used that Russian science
00:05:09 and then he was already an American
00:05:12 and he saw how I trained athletes.
00:05:15 He saw what I did in the Olympics,
00:05:17 saw what other people, how we held up,
00:05:20 and he applied that as well.
00:05:21 But I’d have to say he was more the artistic type.
00:05:25 He was more of a Russian than an American
00:05:27 when it came to wrestling.
00:05:30 You’ve coached 45 national champions,
00:05:33 106 Big Ten champions, and eight Olympic medalists,
00:05:37 which is incredible.
00:05:39 What is a common thread between them
00:05:42 and what are maybe some of the fundamental differences?
00:05:47 I think the common thread is that
00:05:53 they all had one of those two avenues
00:05:56 that we talked already
00:05:59 and because we intertwined them.
00:06:02 So in a Russian wrestling room, they got the same people.
00:06:05 Most of the time in an American wrestling room,
00:06:07 we had the same people.
00:06:08 But when I was out recruiting,
00:06:10 at first I recruited just attitude,
00:06:15 but I needed more than that.
00:06:16 I needed some genetics in that wrestling room
00:06:21 to actually, that hard work people,
00:06:25 they could look and see, wow,
00:06:29 that execution, that’s unbelievable.
00:06:32 But yet I can beat that guy after the first minute.
00:06:37 So you think the art, the technique is genetics.
00:06:42 You’re born with it.
00:06:43 You think it’s not something.
00:06:44 I think your pop and your ability to move.
00:06:48 Timing.
00:06:49 And timing and your quickness and your strength.
00:06:53 The Russians, they usually picked out
00:06:59 the people that can go into that sport.
00:07:01 That was the old fashioned sports school.
00:07:04 But it’s mostly like when you walk into a Russian
00:07:07 wrestling room, you see them hitting skills, techniques.
00:07:12 You don’t see them banging against each other that much.
00:07:15 But then when practice is over,
00:07:17 you might not see a bunch of sprints.
00:07:18 You might see them walk over to the ropes
00:07:22 and they drop down from the ceiling
00:07:25 and they’ll jump up and climb a rope, boom, boom, boom.
00:07:28 And then they come down and then they don’t jump
00:07:30 right back on.
00:07:31 They have three or four other guys go
00:07:33 and then they jump back on.
00:07:34 Whereas I probably made my guys climb them,
00:07:38 get right back down, climb them right back again.
00:07:40 But I also realized that I had to have a mix of that.
00:07:46 What was the role?
00:07:47 What was your role?
00:07:48 I mean, those guys looked up and Dan Gable
00:07:51 and what was the role in helping these athletes
00:07:53 become their best?
00:07:54 These national champions.
00:07:55 Well, you had to first of all prove that you were,
00:07:58 knew what you were doing.
00:08:00 In terms of technique or in terms of hard work?
00:08:02 Everything, everything.
00:08:03 They just, you had to be the first guy there
00:08:05 and the last guy to leave
00:08:06 and you had to be the most dedicated guy,
00:08:08 even though they were the ones that’s trying to
00:08:10 win the championships.
00:08:11 You had to prove that you were gonna work just as hard
00:08:14 as they were as a coach.
00:08:15 And what does that look like?
00:08:17 So you can see it when you, you know it when you see it?
00:08:20 Well, you’re there ahead of them
00:08:22 and you’re there after they leave.
00:08:25 It’s that simple.
00:08:26 I’m picking up after them and you’re analyzing them.
00:08:29 You outwork them, you outwork them and you outthink them.
00:08:34 And so, you know, use that type of strategy.
00:08:36 And over time, when you prove it works,
00:08:39 because some of my kids that were the best kids
00:08:43 in the world really shouldn’t have been a wrestler.
00:08:49 I mean, they weren’t very coordinated,
00:08:53 but they worked so hard to develop themselves.
00:08:56 What was your role in that process?
00:08:58 I mean, that means pushing kids to their limit.
00:09:01 If you’re not…
00:09:02 Yeah, but you can’t push kids to their limit.
00:09:04 And even when you push them to their limit,
00:09:06 that’s not their limit
00:09:07 because their limit’s above and beyond that.
00:09:09 I mean, yeah, coaches sometimes accidentally don’t,
00:09:14 they lose kids because of the heat,
00:09:16 because of hard work and all that.
00:09:19 And you gotta know when to back off.
00:09:22 You gotta read your athletes.
00:09:24 And by that, I mean, you gotta know them pretty well.
00:09:28 Every once in a while, you make a little bit of a mistake,
00:09:30 but if you don’t react right on that mistake
00:09:32 before it gets too far, then it’s gonna be a casualty.
00:09:35 And I don’t mean somebody dying necessarily,
00:09:38 but maybe something that could turn them off
00:09:40 or maybe something that could run them away
00:09:43 or maybe something that, wow, that was close.
00:09:46 Maybe shouldn’t have pushed them that far.
00:09:49 So you really have to be very educated.
00:09:51 And it’s not just what you know,
00:09:54 it’s what you know about them.
00:09:56 And I’m not talking about the team.
00:09:57 I’m talking about each guy on the team.
00:09:59 Individuals, yeah.
00:10:00 Yeah, each person on the team.
00:10:01 And you know it how?
00:10:03 You see it in their eyes?
00:10:04 You know it how because you’re the first one there
00:10:06 and you’re the last one to leave
00:10:08 and you set in the environment with them.
00:10:10 You’re there in the morning for practice sometimes.
00:10:13 You’re there in the afternoon for two or three hours.
00:10:15 After practice, you might have a hot room
00:10:18 or you might have a sauna or a steam or a whirlpool
00:10:21 and you get in there with them and you listen.
00:10:25 You’re not just feeding out information.
00:10:28 You do that, but you’re taking in a lot of that too.
00:10:31 And I’m telling you, when you get in an atmosphere
00:10:33 that they’re relaxed and they feel comfortable,
00:10:36 it’s like a massage.
00:10:38 And that’s after practice in one of those areas
00:10:41 that people are around you, you learn a lot.
00:10:44 I mean, you got a lot to learn as a coach.
00:10:46 And when you get in that atmosphere,
00:10:48 when all of a sudden you feel like very comfortable,
00:10:52 words start flowing.
00:10:54 And when those words flow, you take them in as a coach.
00:10:59 And there’s something probably gonna be said
00:11:02 that you can do and act upon
00:11:04 that’s gonna help certain situations.
00:11:07 I’ve saved a couple of kids lives for sure
00:11:09 that were on the brink.
00:11:11 Sometimes performance is at such a high level
00:11:14 in a high level atmosphere
00:11:17 that life and death is actually involved.
00:11:21 And I don’t mean pushing a kid to where he just dies,
00:11:24 but I mean, he might feel himself as a failure.
00:11:28 He might go home and take his own life.
00:11:30 Yeah, I mean, but that’s part of it.
00:11:31 You’re putting so much heart,
00:11:34 so much blood and heart and sweat
00:11:36 and your whole meaning of life becomes winning.
00:11:39 So, and sometimes it’s so hard to lose within that context.
00:11:43 So if in your, I think the first wrestling life
00:11:47 you wrote about Chad Zapato who lost,
00:11:51 I mean, incredible wrestler,
00:11:52 but lost in three finals in the nationals
00:11:55 and has this tattoo of a hawk clawing out the human heart.
00:11:59 Yeah, so what lessons, is there any lessons
00:12:03 from the incredible wrestling he’s done,
00:12:06 but also the incredible suffering that he went through
00:12:10 on himself?
00:12:11 Yeah, again, you like that word suffering, which is okay.
00:12:14 Okay, so.
00:12:15 No, no, no, no, no, keep it, keep it.
00:12:17 Cause it fits right in where I want.
00:12:19 I have to turn that suffering around
00:12:22 to where he makes and feels good about himself
00:12:25 or better, doesn’t have to feel perfect.
00:12:29 Cause he did lose, you know?
00:12:31 And so, but you have to actually get him to realize
00:12:35 that yeah, he’s still unique
00:12:37 compared to the walk of the earth.
00:12:38 He was unbelievably unique right at the top,
00:12:41 just a little bit short of,
00:12:43 but because it was, you know, he felt the suffering,
00:12:48 you now have to go about and change that
00:12:50 and put it into goodwill some way.
00:12:52 And because he’s, you really have a lot of goodwill,
00:12:55 you can do a lot of goodwill.
00:12:57 And so, and it’s not easy.
00:13:00 It took him probably years, years of tattooing.
00:13:05 Yeah.
00:13:06 Years of covering the tattoos.
00:13:09 And, you know, he told me he moved to,
00:13:12 I go, why are you moving to California?
00:13:13 Cause he was here for a couple of years
00:13:15 after his wrestling was done, cause he had a good job
00:13:18 around here and he was, I thought he was doing a good job,
00:13:21 but he just, he said, I had to escape, you know?
00:13:24 Yeah, it’s the same as the covering up the tattoo.
00:13:26 I had a wrestling terminology.
00:13:28 I have to get, I hate to say this, I hate to say this.
00:13:32 I go, where are you going?
00:13:33 He said, I’m gonna go to California.
00:13:37 And I go, is there any reason why you’re going to California?
00:13:40 And he says, that’s where everybody goes to hide.
00:13:48 But I said, I think you’re wrong there,
00:13:51 but you know, I think what will determine your life
00:13:55 will be what you do from now on, you know?
00:13:57 And if you can find, and he’s actually turned it around.
00:14:00 I mean, he’s actually turned it around.
00:14:01 You have to discover that yourself.
00:14:02 Exactly, and he went someplace
00:14:04 that he thought he could fit into, and I think he did.
00:14:08 And I think he’s got a good job, and he’s helping people,
00:14:11 and he covered that tattoo with feathers, another tattoo.
00:14:18 Well, in the end, it’s a beautiful story.
00:14:20 Yeah, it is, it really is.
00:14:21 Suffering and overcoming.
00:14:22 Yeah, and he’s not done yet.
00:14:25 He’s not done yet.
00:14:25 No, he’s not done.
00:14:26 He’s got a lot more to do.
00:14:29 So you mentioned Roger Bannister,
00:14:32 again, I think in your first book,
00:14:34 and somebody you looked up to,
00:14:36 that’s the man who broke the four minute mile, right?
00:14:40 When everybody said it was impossible,
00:14:42 everyone thought it was impossible.
00:14:43 Oh, they thought he would die.
00:14:44 He would die.
00:14:45 It’s not humanly possible, yeah.
00:14:47 So what?
00:14:49 Well, you’ve done your homework.
00:14:50 For what, the book, or what?
00:14:51 Oh, I don’t know, for me, you’ve done your homework.
00:14:53 Yeah, I know, but yeah.
00:14:54 What?
00:14:55 I was sitting here by Putin to do research, yeah.
00:14:59 So what lesson do you take from that story for yourself,
00:15:03 the impossible, trying to accomplish the impossible?
00:15:05 Well, the impossible is possible.
00:15:08 It’s just that simple.
00:15:10 Time changes things.
00:15:12 I mean, if you looked at where the mile time is right now,
00:15:18 compared to that four minute mile,
00:15:20 which when it was broke by a couple of tenths,
00:15:23 or three or four tenths,
00:15:25 it’s now broke by another 20 seconds.
00:15:30 Yeah, by several hundred people, yeah.
00:15:32 Yeah, I mean, by tons of people.
00:15:35 And it’s pretty much common knowledge
00:15:37 that you gotta run a four minute mile
00:15:38 if you’re gonna go somewhere now,
00:15:39 or below if you’re gonna win events at major level,
00:15:43 that you gotta be able to do that.
00:15:45 And so you can take that,
00:15:47 and you can look at what in time history
00:15:53 has as its record performance,
00:15:58 and you can realize that that record performance,
00:16:01 it’s gonna change.
00:16:02 Yeah.
00:16:03 And they don’t take into all the factors of knowledge.
00:16:08 They don’t take in all the factors of better shoes.
00:16:12 They don’t take in all the factors
00:16:13 of better understanding of nutrition.
00:16:16 I mean, it’s like me as an athlete.
00:16:21 I went to practice every day in high school
00:16:23 for at least my sophomore, and my junior,
00:16:27 and part of my senior year,
00:16:29 and all of a sudden a new rule came up.
00:16:33 It said, the rule said before that,
00:16:37 it said at least most of the coaches,
00:16:43 we don’t want you drinking water at practice.
00:16:45 Yeah.
00:16:46 And okay, why?
00:16:48 Because you gotta toughen you up.
00:16:50 That’s a weakness, water.
00:16:53 And so we would go through practice.
00:16:55 I mean, and you’re sweating,
00:16:56 and then you’re sweating so much
00:16:57 that you’re almost out of sweat.
00:16:59 Yeah.
00:17:00 And so you’re mostly at the end of practice,
00:17:02 you’re not even wrestling.
00:17:04 Excuse me.
00:17:05 You’re setting against the wall.
00:17:06 Yeah.
00:17:07 Because you’re tired.
00:17:08 So then all of a sudden they say,
00:17:10 okay, go ahead and drink water during practice,
00:17:12 drink greater aid during practice.
00:17:14 And all of a sudden at the end of practice,
00:17:16 we’re still out there competing.
00:17:18 And so I look at my career for two and a half years
00:17:21 where I, and junior high too.
00:17:23 So I got another three years
00:17:25 where I didn’t really, wasn’t able to push
00:17:28 as good as I could because I just was probably under.
00:17:32 Under hydrated.
00:17:33 Yeah.
00:17:34 Yeah.
00:17:34 So, but at the individual level,
00:17:37 in terms of the impossible,
00:17:38 when did you first believe the thing
00:17:41 that maybe probably people would laugh at you about
00:17:43 was that you would be an Olympic champion?
00:17:46 Well, I always visualized me being the best.
00:17:50 You believed it in the very beginning.
00:17:52 Forever, forever.
00:17:53 Yeah, I was, because I was,
00:17:55 I don’t know if you’d call it a dreamer or somebody that,
00:17:59 I was just involved with competitive sports
00:18:01 at the YMCA from age five.
00:18:05 Did you tell people that dream
00:18:06 that you’re gonna be Olympic champion one day?
00:18:08 You’re gonna be the best in the world?
00:18:10 I think they knew.
00:18:12 And the only reason why they knew,
00:18:13 cause there was something a little different
00:18:15 about this guy.
00:18:15 He was.
00:18:17 He’s not gonna stop.
00:18:18 Well, he was out in the yard.
00:18:20 Yeah.
00:18:20 And he was swinging baseball bats.
00:18:22 Yeah.
00:18:23 He was swinging baseball at six, at seven,
00:18:24 and eight, and nine, and 10.
00:18:26 And he was swinging baseball bats,
00:18:29 so much right handed and so much left hand
00:18:31 with nobody even there throwing the ball.
00:18:33 Yeah.
00:18:34 That all of a sudden when they walked by,
00:18:36 all of a sudden the grass was down to dirt
00:18:39 on both sides.
00:18:40 Yeah.
00:18:41 So it’s like, they saw me out in the yard
00:18:45 playing by myself sports,
00:18:48 or you get the neighborhood kids and you play a lot.
00:18:51 But if they weren’t there,
00:18:53 if you walked in my front room,
00:18:55 I was hiking a ball like I was the quarterback.
00:18:58 And I was running and running through the furniture,
00:19:02 that type stuff.
00:19:03 So who saw this guy mostly was probably the parents.
00:19:08 Yeah.
00:19:09 And the coaches at the YMCA level,
00:19:11 the junior high level,
00:19:12 they saw this guy come first and end up last.
00:19:15 But I wasn’t that great.
00:19:18 I wasn’t the fastest guy at that time.
00:19:21 And I wasn’t the strongest guy.
00:19:24 Actually, before I went to the Olympics,
00:19:25 when they tested me, they tested everybody.
00:19:28 And I probably came back with one of the highest scores,
00:19:31 but it was not like the highest person on this
00:19:36 and this and that.
00:19:38 I was all high across the board,
00:19:40 straight across the board high on every one of them.
00:19:43 But there was always people that were higher than me.
00:19:45 Genetics.
00:19:46 But then they would go down.
00:19:47 Yeah.
00:19:48 Then they would test on something else and go back up.
00:19:50 Mine stayed high all across the board.
00:19:53 And so I really didn’t have too many flaws,
00:19:56 but I didn’t have any things that also said
00:19:58 that you were gonna be unscored upon at the Olympic games.
00:20:02 Right.
00:20:03 So take me through that day, if you could.
00:20:06 1972, when you were going for the 68 kilogram
00:20:09 freestyle wrestling gold,
00:20:11 you scored 57 points, if I’m correct,
00:20:15 and had zero points scored on you.
00:20:18 57, zero.
00:20:19 So maybe take me through almost the details.
00:20:24 What was your routine?
00:20:24 What was your process?
00:20:25 What was going through your mind,
00:20:27 your thoughts of that day?
00:20:29 Yeah, first of all, it was quite a day
00:20:32 because we weighed in every day at that time.
00:20:36 In the morning?
00:20:37 Yeah, we weighed in two hours
00:20:39 before the start of the competition.
00:20:41 And so that didn’t mean that you weighed in two hours
00:20:43 before you wrestled,
00:20:44 because you didn’t know whether you’re gonna wrestle
00:20:45 right away or later on.
00:20:47 In fact, in that day,
00:20:48 I don’t think I wrestled until later on in the evening.
00:20:52 So had all day to recover,
00:20:54 but I didn’t really need it anyway,
00:20:55 because I wasn’t really pulling a whole lot of weight,
00:20:58 but it was just interesting.
00:21:01 But what was in your mind?
00:21:02 What were you thinking?
00:21:03 Were you nervous?
00:21:04 Were you?
00:21:05 I was confident.
00:21:06 I was confident.
00:21:07 You knew you were gonna win the gold.
00:21:09 Yeah, I knew I was gonna win.
00:21:11 But in reality, I didn’t know it
00:21:14 from a cocky point of view.
00:21:16 I only knew it because for the last
00:21:20 one, two, three and a half years,
00:21:23 I had been going to practice,
00:21:26 and I’d win in every practice.
00:21:28 You felt good, you won.
00:21:29 And I hardly ever lose a takedown.
00:21:31 And if I lost, if somebody scored on me,
00:21:35 it was like when I went to bed,
00:21:37 I couldn’t sleep until I figured it out.
00:21:41 Or if I didn’t figure it out,
00:21:44 I would fall asleep and I would wake up
00:21:48 with the answer of what I needed,
00:21:50 why I got scored upon.
00:21:51 So maybe now that you’ve won the gold,
00:21:53 can you tell me in the practice room
00:21:55 when somebody took you down,
00:21:57 how do you take Dan Gable down in the practice room?
00:22:00 Timing, technique?
00:22:01 Very difficult, but somebody could,
00:22:04 because they were going for one move.
00:22:09 All I wanted was one move.
00:22:10 Whereas if you can arrest somebody,
00:22:12 arrest them the whole practice or half a practice
00:22:14 for at least 10, 15 minutes,
00:22:16 and they were maybe gonna score
00:22:21 if they could work it in their mind.
00:22:24 But they knew that was gonna be their victory.
00:22:27 So in the practice room, maybe you can educate me,
00:22:31 at that, when you’re going for the Olympic gold,
00:22:35 you didn’t want to allow any takedowns.
00:22:38 So there’s no such thing as working
00:22:39 on some kind of weird position,
00:22:41 a weak point or something.
00:22:42 It’s important to not let down, take down.
00:22:45 It’s kind of like what we were saying before.
00:22:47 If something happened and somebody scored on me
00:22:50 in a certain way, I would go over that situation,
00:22:54 over that situation, over it again,
00:22:56 and I would come up with an answer.
00:22:58 And then I would actually test it.
00:23:01 Maybe I wouldn’t go right back the next day
00:23:03 because I didn’t want the guy to not have some,
00:23:07 I didn’t want him to think that I was thinking
00:23:09 about it all night, I didn’t tell him.
00:23:11 But maybe three days later when he wrestled again,
00:23:14 I actually had it figured out because he wasn’t able to.
00:23:20 Or even if I was in on a takedown, an offensive move,
00:23:24 and I got stopped and didn’t score,
00:23:27 I had to go back and filter that.
00:23:29 But it wasn’t something that usually I couldn’t solve.
00:23:34 I could usually solve it.
00:23:35 Let’s go back to the Olympic games.
00:23:37 So I get up in the Olympic in the morning
00:23:39 and I’m not sure when the weigh ins were,
00:23:41 but I think I was probably a pound over.
00:23:45 And that’s about a half a kilo and 1.1 pounds is a kilo
00:23:49 because we went in kilograms.
00:23:50 So what do you do with that pound?
00:23:51 You aren’t off or?
00:23:52 No, I just went over to the, they had a sauna there
00:23:55 and I got in the sauna.
00:23:56 And the funny thing was the morning of the finals,
00:24:03 there was another athlete in the sauna.
00:24:06 And it was American or?
00:24:10 No, it was a European.
00:24:12 I don’t remember where she was from.
00:24:14 Not a Russian.
00:24:15 Well, you know what?
00:24:16 I kind of think it was a plot because it was a girl.
00:24:22 Interesting.
00:24:22 And she didn’t have her top on.
00:24:24 Oh, wow.
00:24:27 And that was pretty common.
00:24:28 And so, you know, it was kind of interesting.
00:24:31 You think back about it because there’s some funny things
00:24:36 that go on behind the scenes in Olympic games,
00:24:40 in world games, anytime when you have country
00:24:43 against country.
00:24:44 And so there’s some crazy stuff that goes on.
00:24:47 Did any of it affect you?
00:24:49 Was there any?
00:24:49 Well, I almost stayed too long in the sauna.
00:24:51 You lost a little bit over a pound.
00:24:56 I lost a little more than a pound.
00:24:58 But it didn’t really bother me
00:25:00 because I wasn’t like cutting a lot of weight.
00:25:04 So your match against the Russian, the…
00:25:08 Azhelyov.
00:25:08 Yeah, Azhelyov.
00:25:09 He went on to be a two time world champion,
00:25:12 a silver medalist as well.
00:25:13 I mean, this is an incredible wrestler.
00:25:15 So what was going through your mind
00:25:18 before stepping on the mat with that guy?
00:25:20 You’ve beaten a bunch of wrestlers,
00:25:22 haven’t had a point scored on you.
00:25:24 And you’re stepping on the mat against this Russian
00:25:26 who you said was really, they picked,
00:25:29 the Soviets picked to beat you.
00:25:31 Right, and I know why they picked him
00:25:33 because he had a great attitude.
00:25:34 So he wasn’t just the typical artist.
00:25:38 He was a good artist.
00:25:39 He hooked elbows like Azhelyov.
00:25:42 And he’s from that area of the world
00:25:45 where they have some of those types of moves.
00:25:47 But he, and he was a goer,
00:25:50 but by cutting him down a weight,
00:25:52 he lost some of that go.
00:25:54 And I don’t know if, you gotta,
00:25:57 that’s a process you gotta go about scientifically.
00:26:00 Yeah.
00:26:01 And so, if you don’t do it as an American,
00:26:04 it can really hurt your performance.
00:26:06 If you don’t do it as a Russian,
00:26:08 it can hurt your performance.
00:26:09 And they already didn’t really do that a lot
00:26:12 where you usually wrestle the weight
00:26:14 where it was more like your weight.
00:26:17 And so by cutting him down,
00:26:19 maybe slowed his belief down a little bit.
00:26:23 So you saw it in him.
00:26:23 The spirit was a little bit gone when you were facing him.
00:26:26 Yeah, but then he came back and he won rest of the matches
00:26:29 and he was in the round robin
00:26:31 and he was able to go to the finals,
00:26:34 but he had lost another match actually
00:26:36 against in the round robin against the Japanese.
00:26:39 So I think I had already gained enough of artistic,
00:26:45 being able to finish a match.
00:26:46 Once I lost my match in college for the last two years,
00:26:49 I took on some of that artistic work.
00:26:52 And I think that he was already hoping to win,
00:26:57 but he was hoping to win by a long ways
00:27:00 because he had to pin me or beat me by eight points
00:27:04 to be able to win the gold.
00:27:06 And that wasn’t gonna happen.
00:27:09 I mean, the chances of pin is pretty good.
00:27:11 Is it hard to pin Dan Gable versus take down?
00:27:14 Like, have you taken risks where you could pay for them?
00:27:17 I can’t remember too many that I took
00:27:21 that would actually put me in a danger position.
00:27:23 I’ve taken risk, but the risks were so scientifically,
00:27:27 technically correct that I wouldn’t land
00:27:30 in that danger zone.
00:27:33 It’s like, if I’m gonna lock up and throw you,
00:27:35 I’m not gonna throw you to my own back
00:27:37 and roll you through.
00:27:38 I’m gonna turn in the air.
00:27:40 So you were scientific about it.
00:27:41 Yeah, exactly.
00:27:44 I learned the hard way.
00:27:46 Early on, there was moves from collegiate wrestling
00:27:49 that you did that exposed your shoulders,
00:27:51 which it cost me in some early freestyle matches
00:27:55 against great wrestlers.
00:27:57 But I would go back to my collegiate escaping type moves
00:28:03 to where I hit a Granby roll
00:28:04 where you expose your shoulders
00:28:06 and you lose two points every time.
00:28:08 But you learn that that’s not the system.
00:28:10 But if you hadn’t wrestled much,
00:28:12 you would get exposed under maybe a desperate situation.
00:28:17 You would hit it.
00:28:18 So you won the gold.
00:28:20 How did it feel?
00:28:22 I think it would have,
00:28:23 I think the question would be how would it feel
00:28:26 if you lost the gold for me?
00:28:28 Because I already went through that once.
00:28:32 Not at that highest level,
00:28:33 but the National Collegiate Championship level
00:28:35 my senior year.
00:28:36 The Larry Owings loss.
00:28:37 Larry Owings, yeah.
00:28:39 And that didn’t sit well.
00:28:40 Were you afraid of that happening again
00:28:44 at the Olympic level?
00:28:45 Was that even a thought?
00:28:46 No, I really wasn’t.
00:28:47 But it was why I changed my philosophy of training
00:28:52 and added to the scientific artist type.
00:28:57 And if I had won that match,
00:29:00 even though I wouldn’t have felt good about it,
00:29:01 even though I squeaked it out,
00:29:04 I wasn’t feeling good about that match.
00:29:06 It would have affected me a little bit,
00:29:09 but if I’d have won it,
00:29:10 I would have got over it.
00:29:12 I mean, I’m not over it now.
00:29:14 I mean, I don’t know why I was doing this kind of stuff
00:29:17 right before my match.
00:29:19 By that, I mean this kind of stuff.
00:29:21 Interviews, yeah, journalists.
00:29:23 Yeah, and I really wasn’t a good talker then.
00:29:25 I mean, me and you were talking pretty good right now,
00:29:26 except for I got a little cold,
00:29:28 but I don’t think I could say two words hardly then.
00:29:32 And they took takes.
00:29:35 Wide World of Sports said,
00:29:36 hey, we want you to be the introduction
00:29:39 for our next week’s show.
00:29:41 So I just say, hey, I’m Dan Gable.
00:29:42 Come watch me as I finish my career undefeated 182 and 0.
00:29:46 That’s what they want me to say.
00:29:47 Everybody assumed you’d be undefeated.
00:29:48 And I said it.
00:29:50 I had to take it 22 times.
00:29:52 And the last two or three times they wrote it out
00:29:56 and I read it and it still wasn’t like I just said it.
00:29:59 I was reading it like, hi, I’m Dan Gable.
00:30:02 Come on.
00:30:05 You know, that type of stuff.
00:30:06 So, and he finally just closed the book and said,
00:30:08 yeah, that’s good enough.
00:30:10 But I turned and it was my time to wrestle.
00:30:13 And so, you know, you just, you learn that,
00:30:17 and for me it was great coaching experience
00:30:20 because that’s what I turned into be.
00:30:22 You know, I coached for longer than I wrestled.
00:30:25 And I put out a lot of champions,
00:30:28 but you learn through mistakes that even in your own career
00:30:32 that you had made, you know, it’s an ever learning process.
00:30:36 It’s an ever learning process.
00:30:38 Have you ever been afraid on the mat?
00:30:40 Does fear have any role do you think for a wrestler
00:30:45 or it must be out there?
00:30:46 Well, I’m sure fear is out there.
00:30:48 And I’m sure that was to my advantage almost every time.
00:30:52 I’m sure in my Olympic finals, I was really off.
00:30:54 He had these doubts.
00:30:56 He probably had these doubts.
00:30:58 And that gives me the edge.
00:31:02 And I don’t know if I really ever had fear,
00:31:09 but obviously there was points in times
00:31:12 where I didn’t perform as well, not many, but a few.
00:31:16 And if I look back of it, look back at it,
00:31:20 I don’t think it was that American, you know,
00:31:24 raw, raw, raw stuff.
00:31:26 I think it was probably the fear
00:31:28 of not being an artist as much.
00:31:33 You know, maybe this guy might be better
00:31:34 than me scientifically.
00:31:37 And you know, you’re a scientist.
00:31:40 I think that got to me more than anything else.
00:31:43 I said early on that I want to eliminate
00:31:46 ever having to worry about getting tired in a match.
00:31:49 So I kind of eliminated that.
00:31:51 So I got rid of that point.
00:31:53 And I do think that in wrestling,
00:31:55 that is one of the fears that a lot of wrestlers have,
00:32:00 actually how they feel during the match
00:32:02 and are they gonna get tired
00:32:05 and is it gonna affect my performance?
00:32:08 And as a coach, that really was one of the things
00:32:11 I tried to eliminate on all my athletes.
00:32:13 So there wasn’t that fear factor,
00:32:15 but that fear factor would be put upon my opponent,
00:32:19 which would give me an edge.
00:32:23 But that’s not what I needed as much.
00:32:25 I needed to just focus,
00:32:26 make sure that I was doing the right things.
00:32:28 And I needed my team to be focused.
00:32:30 So I made sure that for my mistakes as an athlete
00:32:33 or even as a coach sometimes, that I didn’t repeat them.
00:32:37 Didn’t repeat them.
00:32:38 And if you make a mistake once and then you can repeat it,
00:32:41 then it’s like you didn’t learn anything.
00:32:45 Your goal throughout your wrestling career,
00:32:47 as you’ve beautifully put,
00:32:49 was to work so hard that you pass out on the mat, right?
00:32:52 That you would be carried off the mat.
00:32:54 So you never did successfully in,
00:32:56 that’s one of the ways you failed in your career
00:32:58 is you’ve never worked so hard that you’ve passed out.
00:33:01 Have you ever come close?
00:33:02 Do you remember a time that you’ve come close
00:33:04 that you’ve been pushed to the limits of exhaustion?
00:33:07 You know, the question is really a good question
00:33:08 about that pushing to you collapse.
00:33:12 Yeah.
00:33:13 Because I don’t, as a coach today, I don’t think I get,
00:33:15 if I said that to my athletes,
00:33:18 I don’t know, I could get in trouble.
00:33:22 Because, you know, it’s like.
00:33:23 But it’s understood, isn’t it, by the athletes?
00:33:26 Yeah, they understand it.
00:33:29 But the outside might not understand it.
00:33:31 Because it’s almost like, what do you mean there?
00:33:34 You push them to the point where they go collapse.
00:33:36 It means they may die or something might happen to them.
00:33:40 And, you know, that’s dangerous.
00:33:41 That’s dangerous.
00:33:42 We can’t have our kid in that type of atmosphere.
00:33:45 But it’s something that’s highly unlikely
00:33:48 that’s gonna happen.
00:33:49 But I’m gonna tell you, there’s many times in a practice
00:33:52 where I had pushed myself to all of a sudden
00:33:55 the whistle blew or it was time to stop.
00:33:58 And when I got up off the mat or wherever I was at
00:34:01 and I needed water, I needed fresh air,
00:34:07 because you’re usually in a fairly small room
00:34:09 with a lot of guys that the heat rises
00:34:12 and it’s hard to breathe.
00:34:14 And that I can remember, and I stayed a lot of times
00:34:17 not by the door, the far end of the room.
00:34:20 I can remember walking from the far end of the room
00:34:22 to that door.
00:34:23 And I can remember, am I gonna make it the next step?
00:34:27 Am I gonna make it the next step?
00:34:28 I need air, I need water, I need oxygen,
00:34:31 I need to get out of here.
00:34:33 It didn’t happen often,
00:34:34 but I can recount four or five times in my career
00:34:37 that I pushed myself to that level
00:34:39 where I thought I was gonna maybe go out,
00:34:42 but every step I was dizzy.
00:34:44 But once I got to that door,
00:34:47 I was able to open it and go out and grab the water
00:34:50 and get cold water in my face.
00:34:51 And so, no, I never really was able to do that.
00:34:55 And I think the story is in a book
00:34:57 where my daughter pushed a collapse, Molly.
00:35:00 It made you proud.
00:35:01 Oh my gosh, and she didn’t win.
00:35:04 But she pushed a collapse.
00:35:06 Now, did she suffer because of that?
00:35:10 Well, she didn’t get to go to the next event
00:35:13 because she had to qualify.
00:35:15 But I think it probably helped her too,
00:35:18 realizing because she was winning the race
00:35:20 and she was beating people she normally never pushed,
00:35:23 but she was at a new level that she had never been before
00:35:25 and she only needed about five feet to finish.
00:35:28 And it was just one of those things that
00:35:30 I bet there was a lot of learning that she did there.
00:35:33 And it probably made her realize that she could be better,
00:35:37 but she had to hold up though.
00:35:40 So you mentioned in Wrestling Life
00:35:42 that the Brands Brothers looked up to Roy Salger,
00:35:47 who was known for pushing the limits of physical wrestling,
00:35:50 but not getting too rough.
00:35:52 So how do you find the line
00:35:54 between extreme physical wrestling,
00:35:56 but at the same time not rough wrestling or angry wrestling?
00:36:00 So that line between aggression, tough wrestling and anger.
00:36:05 Well, I think anger would cause less successful wrestling.
00:36:11 I think anger would cause you to make mistakes
00:36:14 and actually get out of position
00:36:18 because I think anger is kind of a loss of control.
00:36:21 And there can be a furious type of attack,
00:36:31 but I think if it crosses the line to anger,
00:36:36 then you’re gonna be vulnerable.
00:36:38 And so Royce and the Brands wrestled to the edge,
00:36:47 through the edge, but when the whistle blew,
00:36:50 they stopped.
00:36:52 And there’s people that when the whistle blows,
00:36:54 they keep going.
00:36:56 It’s like in a football game,
00:36:59 a fight breaks out and it’s after the whistles blow.
00:37:02 Well, when the whistle blew, they backed off.
00:37:07 So that whistle was something that in a match,
00:37:14 that kind of gave them the boundaries.
00:37:18 But perhaps it could be a little bit of fuel.
00:37:20 So in Wrestling Tough, the book that you just got
00:37:23 from Mike Chapman, the new edition,
00:37:25 talks about Bill Cole, undefeated Northern Iowa wrestler.
00:37:28 And how he talked about how my strength, speed
00:37:33 and ability to think were increased tremendously
00:37:36 by just sitting apart from the action prior to the match
00:37:39 and getting into a state of controlled anger.
00:37:42 So can anger, controlled, so anger could be fuel
00:37:48 as long as it’s controlled.
00:37:49 Right, exactly.
00:37:50 You had that line.
00:37:52 One side of the line, you can have an anger
00:37:55 for performance and the other side of the line,
00:38:00 if you go beyond that, it’s not gonna be for performance.
00:38:02 It’s gonna be for not performance
00:38:04 because you’re gonna lose points.
00:38:06 It’s a fine line.
00:38:07 There’s definitely a fine line.
00:38:09 You’re talking about Roy Selger.
00:38:11 You’re talking about Tom Brands.
00:38:13 You’re talking about Terry Brands.
00:38:14 I mean, you got world championship titles there.
00:38:16 You got Olympic championship title there.
00:38:18 You got a world silver medalist in Roy Selger.
00:38:23 And when I talked to him about the world silver medalist,
00:38:30 he’s haunted by that.
00:38:32 Cause he was actually 20 seconds away from winning
00:38:35 when he got beat in the end there,
00:38:36 but that’s part of the game.
00:38:38 And I don’t know whether he’s okay with it or not.
00:38:43 Cause he says every, after talking about things,
00:38:45 he goes, I’m okay with it now.
00:38:49 But then he keeps talking about it.
00:38:51 So I don’t really think he’s okay with it.
00:38:54 And it’s hard for him to actually make amends to himself
00:39:01 when you really don’t do it.
00:39:02 I mean, it’s no matter what the situation,
00:39:04 even with the Owings loss.
00:39:07 Yeah, it still eats it.
00:39:09 I mean, yeah, I’m a world champion.
00:39:10 He’s not, and he wanted to be.
00:39:13 I’m Olympic champion.
00:39:14 He’s not, he wanted to be.
00:39:16 One of the greatest coaches of all time.
00:39:18 Yeah, yeah.
00:39:19 And so, it’s like, why do I keep going back to it?
00:39:25 Because you don’t get over those things.
00:39:30 So Roy really keeps going back to it,
00:39:32 even though he says he’s fine.
00:39:35 But then he realizes he’s really not fine
00:39:38 because that’s just the nature of the game.
00:39:39 And that’s why he was able to win national titles
00:39:42 and make world teams and stuff like that.
00:39:48 What’s interesting about him,
00:39:49 he’s analyzed all the people that he’s wrestled,
00:39:52 and a lot of them have won world and Olympic championships.
00:39:55 And he’s beaten every one of them at one time or another.
00:39:58 And he didn’t get to that world championship gold
00:40:01 or Olympic gold.
00:40:03 And he says it because they did it.
00:40:08 So he’s showing people that I beaten those guys.
00:40:14 But apparently he didn’t beat them at the right time.
00:40:18 And so it’s still haunting.
00:40:20 You don’t get away from that stuff.
00:40:22 I mean, it’s just like anything in life that’s really high.
00:40:27 I mean, it doesn’t have to be athletics.
00:40:30 I mean, you think I’m ever gonna get over
00:40:33 the murder of my sister?
00:40:35 And you might not even know that.
00:40:37 Let me pause for a second, please.
00:40:39 You’ve talked about it, you’ve written about it.
00:40:41 So I hope it’s okay for me to say that your sister,
00:40:44 your older sister, on May 31st, 1964,
00:40:48 was raped and murdered by a local boy.
00:40:52 So the echoes of pain and anger from that tragic day,
00:40:57 do they ripple through your life still?
00:41:00 Through your wrestling, through your coaching,
00:41:02 through the way you, when you wake up in the morning?
00:41:06 What is that like?
00:41:09 It can be very emotional to me under certain circumstances.
00:41:15 And it can be the mood I’m in.
00:41:21 It can be maybe if I’ve had a Mountain Dew
00:41:24 or maybe if I’ve had a Gable beer.
00:41:27 Yeah, or maybe if you turn the country music
00:41:33 up a little bit loud, emotions come out
00:41:39 and everybody has them in their life.
00:41:43 It’s just so happens, what brings it out?
00:41:46 And hopefully it’s nothing that you do
00:41:49 to the extreme point to where it brings it out.
00:41:52 For me, it’s not extreme.
00:41:54 I don’t have to have any of that really,
00:41:55 I can get emotional.
00:41:57 How did that change you as a man?
00:42:01 What it did was realize
00:42:03 that I was already pretty well developed
00:42:09 because I was only a sophomore,
00:42:11 15 years old in high school.
00:42:13 And I had parents that weren’t making it.
00:42:17 And my parents are a lot older than me.
00:42:20 And now that we’re down just to me and my parents,
00:42:24 and I’m gonna be around the house for another two years.
00:42:27 And they had just lost a daughter
00:42:30 that was the only other sibling.
00:42:36 They weren’t handling it.
00:42:37 They were the ones that were suffering much more than me,
00:42:42 even though I always look back upon one area
00:42:47 that I wasn’t good at was communication at that time,
00:42:50 except inside the resident room,
00:42:52 because I had been tipped off.
00:42:55 Tipped off, what do you mean?
00:42:57 Well, then everybody said that something to me
00:42:59 about my sister just three weeks before that,
00:43:03 that really wasn’t normal or practical.
00:43:08 And I said nothing to nobody.
00:43:12 Is there a part of you that blames yourself?
00:43:16 Yeah, absolutely.
00:43:19 Absolutely.
00:43:20 But I’m 15 years old and you make mistakes.
00:43:27 And you don’t really act on everything
00:43:30 that happens in your life.
00:43:32 But I can tell you how it affected me.
00:43:34 And I acted a lot on anything
00:43:37 that maybe wasn’t even of that consequence.
00:43:39 I mean, cause I had four daughters
00:43:41 and I’m telling you when they left every time
00:43:42 to go somewhere in a car or go out with someplace,
00:43:45 I always said something to them.
00:43:47 And they would always say, dad, you said that last night.
00:43:50 I don’t care.
00:43:51 What, like I love you or like be careful?
00:43:54 I’d say like, don’t be driving and drinking
00:43:56 or don’t be in a car with somebody
00:43:59 that’s of the same nature,
00:44:03 or stay out of trouble.
00:44:05 Don’t go be somewhere where you have,
00:44:07 I said, you know how to get out of a car
00:44:09 if your car goes into the river.
00:44:12 I’m always thinking ahead a little bit,
00:44:16 just in case of something did happen.
00:44:19 And it goes back to that walk to school
00:44:22 with that young man that when he was talking to me
00:44:25 and I just, I took it and I kept it inside me.
00:44:28 And once I found out she had been murdered,
00:44:33 it took me maybe 25 to 30 minutes.
00:44:37 And I told my dad, I think I know who killed her.
00:44:41 And he looked at me and he just like,
00:44:44 he slapped me actually.
00:44:46 He pushed me against the car.
00:44:47 He didn’t slap me.
00:44:48 He pushed me against the car.
00:44:48 My mom slaps me.
00:44:49 She was the one that slapped me around a little bit.
00:44:51 But my dad, he pushed me against the car and go,
00:44:55 what do you mean you might know something about this?
00:44:57 I said, dad, I don’t for sure,
00:44:59 but, and I would probably all crying,
00:45:02 but, and I don’t, I doubt if I was crying yet.
00:45:06 I’ve probably cried a lot of tears since,
00:45:08 but, you know, I just said,
00:45:11 hey, I was walking to school with this neighbor
00:45:15 and I never had walked to school with him before.
00:45:17 And he was kind of a troubled kid.
00:45:20 And he said something about Diane and it wasn’t good,
00:45:26 but I didn’t, he goes, why didn’t you say something?
00:45:29 I said, daddy, I just boy talk, you know?
00:45:33 So, you know, and so he hugged me, he hugged me,
00:45:35 he hugged me and, you know, it was one of these things
00:45:39 that it’s definitely made me a lot of who I am
00:45:46 because there’s been a lot of choices and I don’t,
00:45:48 I took the word choice out of my life
00:45:51 and I just like to say, okay, do the right thing,
00:45:53 do the thing that you should do.
00:45:55 And so I don’t really, it’s like,
00:45:57 are you gonna do this or this?
00:45:58 Well, what do you mean?
00:45:59 Which one’s better?
00:46:00 You know?
00:46:01 Well, then I’m, so I don’t have that choice.
00:46:03 Just give me the right way to go.
00:46:05 And so not that I’ve been perfect by any means,
00:46:08 but it’s made a big difference in my life
00:46:10 on how I handle my life.
00:46:13 It’s probably given me the opportunity
00:46:16 to be married for 44 years.
00:46:18 It’s just given me opportunities to be better in my life.
00:46:22 And I, you know, I wanna thank my sister for that,
00:46:26 you know, and I think my family was ready to make a split
00:46:33 because of that incident, they’re blaming each other.
00:46:36 And I think that I was able to help, but more than that,
00:46:41 they really liked each other,
00:46:43 but they didn’t really know it at the time
00:46:45 until I got out of the house.
00:46:47 Two years later, it probably was going on
00:46:50 for a couple of years until I moved on and went to college.
00:46:52 Then they found out they really liked each other
00:46:55 when they were alone and it worked out pretty good.
00:46:58 But I think them being able to follow me,
00:47:02 not just through college and the Olympics and worlds,
00:47:06 but my coaching.
00:47:08 So it’s the same, the same success and factor,
00:47:11 you know, the excitement and all those things
00:47:14 gave them a real purpose.
00:47:16 And it gave my four daughters, it gave my wife,
00:47:21 you know, a real purpose to be able to be close
00:47:24 to all these champions and championships.
00:47:27 And now it’s like, there’s a family of 22
00:47:32 and they’re all interested in what we’re interested in.
00:47:34 And it’s going good, knock on wood.
00:47:36 But you know, it’s something that when all of a sudden
00:47:39 you got too much time in your hands
00:47:40 and you’re not doing and accomplishing much
00:47:42 that things probably, you know, get off track.
00:47:47 What do you think is the role of family in wrestling?
00:47:49 Can a man do it alone?
00:47:50 And if not, where’s family most important?
00:47:55 You know, you can do it alone, but why would you want to?
00:48:00 Yeah.
00:48:01 I think the chances of doing it alone
00:48:03 are much less than the chances of doing it together.
00:48:07 I know they say, don’t bring your profession home sometimes.
00:48:10 They say that, I never got away from my profession.
00:48:16 And you know, sometimes I, it’s like my house right here.
00:48:21 So when I’m moving home and I’m not going to have an office
00:48:25 because I’m not going to coach anymore
00:48:27 or I’m not going to be an assistant athletic director
00:48:29 for a while, that you got to do something
00:48:34 that gives you a little bit of a break.
00:48:39 Not you necessarily, maybe the person you’re living with.
00:48:42 And so I don’t know if you looked outside there,
00:48:44 I got a cabin right out in my backyard.
00:48:45 You probably can’t see it right there, but.
00:48:47 What’s in the cabin?
00:48:48 That’s my house away from my house.
00:48:51 It’s only 30 feet from my house and it’s my office
00:48:55 and it’s my workout room.
00:48:57 I got a sauna there, it’s a bed upstairs if I need it.
00:49:00 If I ever get too close and she says,
00:49:03 hey, why don’t you go sleep in the other house?
00:49:05 But you know, it kicks me out of the bed, but.
00:49:07 Get the heck out.
00:49:08 It’s never happened.
00:49:09 But I do spend a lot of time out there.
00:49:11 And it’s, you know, you got to have a little distance
00:49:15 sometimes and you got to know your role.
00:49:18 And so all of a sudden when you’re a guy that’s been gone
00:49:21 your whole life from eight o clock in the morning
00:49:23 until close to seven, three or eight o clock at night.
00:49:25 So 11, 12 hours a day, then all of a sudden
00:49:28 you’re not gone as much, even though you still work.
00:49:30 She’s trying to slow me down now.
00:49:32 I’m doing not so much like here, what we’re doing right now,
00:49:35 but it’s when I get in the car and drive somewhere
00:49:37 or fly somewhere, you know, like just last night
00:49:40 I just went to bed and I hadn’t told her
00:49:41 that this guy called me and he wants me to speak
00:49:45 for a bit, want to build another, wrestling wants
00:49:48 to start another wrestlers and business networking out
00:49:51 in Delaware because we don’t have any colleges
00:49:55 in wrestling in Delaware.
00:49:57 And so I said, well, you know, I’m glad to do that
00:49:59 because that’s my life, you know?
00:50:01 So, but then all of a sudden I didn’t say anything
00:50:04 to my wife until all of a sudden this morning.
00:50:07 And I told her that I might go on the Friday
00:50:09 the 21st of December.
00:50:11 Oh no.
00:50:12 Well, I said, that’s not Christmas.
00:50:14 She goes, we’re celebrating Christmas that weekend early
00:50:18 because a lot of the family can’t be here
00:50:21 except for that weekend.
00:50:22 Yeah.
00:50:23 And I said, oh, well, that’s not gonna work.
00:50:26 But I kind of didn’t say anything to her at first.
00:50:28 And then, well, I’ll tell you,
00:50:30 she started getting a little emotional.
00:50:32 And if I want to stay married for another year, 45 years,
00:50:36 then I better tell those people that I got family
00:50:41 obligations because that depends what’s most important.
00:50:48 I love wrestling.
00:50:48 I love wrestling and I want to start another,
00:50:52 start another wrestlers and business network.
00:50:54 But there’s more than one Dan Gable out there.
00:50:55 Well, maybe not, but there’s a lot of people
00:50:59 that are maybe even closer and they got big names.
00:51:05 I mean, we’re doing pretty well right now.
00:51:06 I mean, we got first two years ago
00:51:09 and we got second this year.
00:51:12 And then we got the women’s freestyles
00:51:14 doing good in wrestling.
00:51:15 We got to work a little bit on our Greco yet,
00:51:17 but they are working on it.
00:51:20 But our men’s freestyle team right now are excellent.
00:51:25 And the key for them is to get them all on the same page
00:51:32 instead of just have new highlights.
00:51:35 And by that, I’m saying, you look and see who won this year.
00:51:39 Well, the three guys that have never won before
00:51:41 won this year.
00:51:42 We had three world champions.
00:51:43 Our two past world champions didn’t win this year.
00:51:48 I mean, they did okay, they got medals.
00:51:51 Did Borrows win?
00:51:52 No, he did not.
00:51:54 He got third.
00:51:55 Oh, that’s right, he got bronze, yeah.
00:51:56 And Sajilov got, I mean, Snyder got second.
00:52:00 So those two are our main guys.
00:52:02 So the three new guys that came through
00:52:05 were guys that hadn’t won world gold.
00:52:08 In fact, two of them have never made a world team before.
00:52:11 And so we have three world champions this year,
00:52:14 but we needed all five of them to come through
00:52:16 to win the championships.
00:52:18 And so the key really is getting them all to do the same
00:52:22 at the same time, year in and year out,
00:52:25 and not just based on, okay, Borrows got beat this year,
00:52:30 so he’ll win next year.
00:52:32 It’s gotta be every year if you’re capable of doing that.
00:52:34 And that’s what the coaching staff has to do.
00:52:36 What’s kind of funny that I do have a lot of influence
00:52:39 actually on the coaching staffs right now at the USA level
00:52:41 because the women’s freestyle guy is Terry Steiner.
00:52:46 And he wrestled for me, he was a national champion.
00:52:49 He’s got a twin brother that’s at Fresno State.
00:52:52 And then Billy Zaddik is the freestyle coach
00:52:56 and he wrestled for the Hawkeyes back in the early days.
00:53:00 And he was the national champion.
00:53:02 So we’ve got a lot of former Gable influence on there,
00:53:06 but it’s.
00:53:07 You got deep roots in there.
00:53:08 In 2013, the International Olympic Committee, IOC,
00:53:12 voted wrestling out of the Olympics.
00:53:14 So a lot of folks know about this,
00:53:17 the absurdity of it and so on.
00:53:20 But in a big picture, you can step back now,
00:53:22 it’s five years later.
00:53:23 What did you learn from that experience?
00:53:26 Well, first of all, did it surprise me?
00:53:31 Yeah.
00:53:32 But did it really surprise me?
00:53:35 No.
00:53:38 You gotta run.
00:53:39 You gotta have people running the organization
00:53:45 that are top notch.
00:53:48 If you take anything for granted
00:53:51 and you’re not the person of authority,
00:53:53 somebody can kick you out.
00:53:57 And even though we had a lot of authority
00:54:00 because we’re wrestling,
00:54:01 we’re one of the first sports in the Olympics ever,
00:54:05 and that we think that we’re in 180 some countries
00:54:12 and some of the number one countries in the world
00:54:18 that are politically strong have the sport,
00:54:22 we thought we were okay.
00:54:23 But then you gotta look and see who’s running the IOC.
00:54:26 The IOC, the International Olympic Committee.
00:54:32 And then you gotta see that in wrestling,
00:54:35 we don’t have anybody in there.
00:54:37 I mean, that shocked me.
00:54:39 We’ve never had anybody on the IOC from wrestling.
00:54:43 You know why?
00:54:45 Because we didn’t have to, but yes, that’s wrong.
00:54:50 You have to.
00:54:51 And if you don’t have somebody looking out for you
00:54:55 right within the structure,
00:54:58 then it’s pretty easy for people to turn their head.
00:55:01 But all it took was the statement,
00:55:07 you guys are kicked out of the Olympics.
00:55:08 You guys are done.
00:55:09 Everybody came together.
00:55:11 Well, yeah, I mean, it’s the first time in history
00:55:14 that probably all this competitive people
00:55:18 that were working for their own agenda
00:55:20 turned that agenda to the sport.
00:55:27 So that made a big difference and we got a lot done.
00:55:30 In fact, in America, there was several people
00:55:35 that were really out there that we didn’t know about
00:55:40 until this point in time.
00:55:42 And when they came aboard, now they’re still aboard.
00:55:47 That doesn’t mean we’re doing everything perfect
00:55:50 because just because we got voted back in
00:55:52 before we even got kicked out really,
00:55:54 that doesn’t mean we’re by any means safe.
00:55:58 We have to do some of the things that I’m talking about
00:56:00 or some of the things that we didn’t do before.
00:56:03 We can’t fall right back into the same mess.
00:56:06 And so our leadership got changed and it’s better,
00:56:11 but it’s gotta stay better.
00:56:13 But there are things that we could still be doing
00:56:18 to make sure that we don’t have situations like this happen.
00:56:22 I’ll tell you, when I first learned about it,
00:56:24 I was like, I broke down and wept again.
00:56:29 It’s like every once in a while,
00:56:30 I’ll break down and cry about my sister
00:56:35 or I’ll break down, I don’t know if I cry
00:56:38 about losing the owings, but I probably get more determined.
00:56:42 But that’s kind of, you have to go back
00:56:45 and think about those moments when you heard,
00:56:47 when I heard that moment and it just overcame me.
00:56:53 It was like four o clock, 4.30 in the morning
00:56:56 when I heard about it.
00:56:57 And my wife had been up looking at the internet
00:57:00 and she woke me up and I thought she was joking,
00:57:03 but I jumped out of bed really quick when she said that.
00:57:05 I knew she was serious.
00:57:07 And I started making phone calls right then
00:57:10 to find out if it was true.
00:57:11 And when I found out it was true,
00:57:13 it was just like devastating.
00:57:14 And it was one of these things that it’s a nightmare,
00:57:20 and, but you don’t let it happen again.
00:57:24 It’s that simple.
00:57:26 You keep getting stronger.
00:57:27 Yeah, and if people haven’t read,
00:57:30 they should read The Loss of Dan Gable
00:57:32 by Ray Thompson, the ESPN article.
00:57:34 That kind of, in this very beautiful poetic way,
00:57:38 ties together all the losses of Dan Gable,
00:57:42 the losing your sister, losing to Larry Owens,
00:57:46 losing wrestling from the Olympics,
00:57:48 all of these tragedies of various forms.
00:57:53 So that’s, well, the IOC, there’s politics,
00:57:57 and you’re sort of being very pragmatic.
00:58:00 But stepping back, wrestling is one of the oldest forms
00:58:03 of combat, period.
00:58:04 Dating back, there’s cave drawings 15,000 years ago.
00:58:08 And if you look at the ancient Olympics,
00:58:11 the Greek Olympics, 2,700 years ago,
00:58:14 did you ever, when you wrestled or coached,
00:58:17 do you now see wrestling in this way,
00:58:20 freestyle and folk style wrestling,
00:58:22 the purity of sort of two human beings locked in combat,
00:58:26 the roots of that as just human beings,
00:58:30 this fair struggle between two men or two women?
00:58:34 I don’t think I ever looked at it
00:58:37 as anything but just a combat.
00:58:43 And I think there’s times that have made me
00:58:50 figure out how to make that combat better.
00:58:53 There’s little markers or little points in time in your life
00:58:58 that make you wonder, or I should say determined,
00:59:06 to be able to get more out of yourself
00:59:10 and to be able to take it to a new level.
00:59:13 And I don’t think people can actually feel that way
00:59:16 unless you’ve actually had a lot of accomplishments
00:59:19 in anything.
00:59:20 I think there’s anything out there.
00:59:22 I mean, no matter what sport
00:59:24 or breaking the four minute mile,
00:59:26 I mean, when you broke that, when they broke that,
00:59:29 Roger Bannister broke that four minute mile,
00:59:31 I can’t imagine him breaking it
00:59:33 from his best time being 4.30.
00:59:37 It’s one of these things that along the line
00:59:41 that he did had some close calls
00:59:45 or he had some coaching that was giving him
00:59:49 the opportunity to become a little better.
00:59:50 But I think because he was doing well
00:59:54 and being very successful, that the opportunity came.
00:59:58 And so it’s for me, it’s like the same thing.
01:00:00 I had so much success
01:00:04 and so many practices that went well
01:00:09 and so much goodness out of this sport
01:00:14 that it gave me the opportunity to really look more finite
01:00:21 and look more how I can even make it better.
01:00:23 And so it’s like, if you look at my library upstairs,
01:00:27 I got a library upstairs
01:00:30 and there’s a lot of books up there from the family.
01:00:35 But if you look at the Gable books up there,
01:00:39 I got a lot of Russian technique books.
01:00:42 I can’t read the book, but I can see the diagrams
01:00:49 and I can see the figures.
01:00:52 They don’t really show it in pictures.
01:00:54 They do it in drawings.
01:00:56 And so it was like when I was trying to beat the best
01:01:01 that has labeled the best
01:01:04 because they win the world championships every year
01:01:07 since they’ve been just about involved.
01:01:09 And I don’t think they got started involved
01:01:11 till like the fifties, but it’s something,
01:01:16 you study the best who’s out there,
01:01:19 but then you don’t focus so much on the best
01:01:23 that you can’t beat the best.
01:01:25 You learn from them,
01:01:27 but there’s something that they don’t have
01:01:31 that you can have.
01:01:32 Toughness to technique, to the art, to the science.
01:01:36 Yeah, all that stuff.
01:01:37 And that’s why I even talking to you
01:01:39 and you’re sitting over there and you love MIT
01:01:41 and you’re bragging about it over Harvard.
01:01:45 Cause it’s true.
01:01:47 In your eyes and that’s great.
01:01:50 And it might be, but it’s the same type of thing
01:01:54 that there’s something that you’re probably stealing
01:01:57 from Harvard, but you won’t give them credit.
01:02:01 Well, Dan, in the interest of time,
01:02:05 I’ve read that you’re pretty serious.
01:02:07 You’re pretty seriously into fishing.
01:02:10 So what’s the biggest fish you ever caught?
01:02:15 What are we talking about here?
01:02:16 What are we talking about?
01:02:18 No, I don’t think I’ve ever caught a big ocean fish.
01:02:22 I’m not, I’m a river lake fisherman.
01:02:24 I have fish in the…
01:02:25 Trout?
01:02:26 No, probably Northern.
01:02:30 I probably caught a Northern that weighed 20 some pounds.
01:02:35 The fish I like to catch is walleyes.
01:02:37 And the reason why I like to catch them
01:02:39 cause they’re really good eating fish.
01:02:41 And the best eating fish are not the real big ones.
01:02:44 It’s kind of interesting.
01:02:47 I got people hunting deer right on my land
01:02:50 and they’re looking for the big bucks,
01:02:52 but they’re not the best eaters if you want to eat,
01:02:54 but they’re the best trophy.
01:02:56 So I do have a couple of trophy walleyes on the wall,
01:02:59 but most of the time I throw the big ones back
01:03:03 and put them back in there.
01:03:05 I don’t know if you know there’s a book by Hemingway
01:03:07 called Old Man in the Sea.
01:03:09 Heard of it.
01:03:11 Ernest Hemingway?
01:03:12 Ernest Hemingway, yeah.
01:03:13 And there’s an old man that basically
01:03:17 catches an 18 footer, but it can’t pull it in,
01:03:19 doesn’t have the strength.
01:03:20 So they together spend while the sharks eat away at it.
01:03:24 I mean, this is very powerful story.
01:03:26 I think one of the Nobel Prize,
01:03:27 but he says, it’s better to be lucky.
01:03:30 The old man says, it’s better to be lucky,
01:03:33 but I would rather be exact that way
01:03:36 when luck comes, you’re ready.
01:03:38 So let me ask, what do you think about luck?
01:03:43 Do you believe in free will that we have actions
01:03:47 that control the direction, destination of our life,
01:03:49 or does luck and some other outside forces
01:03:53 really land you where you end up?
01:03:57 For me, I’m not about luck,
01:04:00 but I do think luck is involved.
01:04:04 But I think it’s mostly created,
01:04:07 just how lucky you are through preparations.
01:04:11 And things have happened in my life forever,
01:04:16 and a lot of good things.
01:04:18 And a lot of people could say,
01:04:19 hey, you’ve been pretty lucky to win all these awards.
01:04:22 I don’t know, if you analyze my life,
01:04:27 I don’t think it was involved with luck.
01:04:29 I think it was more involved with preparation.
01:04:32 And again, science, had you been smarter,
01:04:36 had you understood that you could do some things
01:04:39 and be just as lucky, that’d be great.
01:04:42 But I’m only as smart as today.
01:04:46 So when I was training in my life,
01:04:48 and me even training people in my life,
01:04:52 as of that moment, that’s how lucky I am
01:04:54 to be able to have whatever is available to me.
01:05:00 And that’s what, you call that a lot of science.
01:05:01 So for me, I think that, like right now, if I look back,
01:05:07 I do a lot of things different,
01:05:09 just because things are proven differently.
01:05:12 Like I’d give people water during practice, and I did.
01:05:17 And I would let them change their wrestling shoes
01:05:20 into running shoes to run sprints on the concrete.
01:05:23 Or I would actually, maybe I’ve had a guy climb 12 ropes
01:05:27 after practice, one after another.
01:05:30 And then maybe the next day I’d do it again.
01:05:32 Ah, I might not make him do it the next day.
01:05:35 I might let him recover a little bit more.
01:05:38 And you gotta learn, keep adding to your philosophy.
01:05:43 And your philosophy may have been great at that time,
01:05:46 but it’s at that time.
01:05:48 And what is really important is where you at
01:05:51 with this time, today.
01:05:53 And so there’s better ways to do things.
01:05:56 Now, if you ever take attitude out of it,
01:05:59 and just depend on total science,
01:06:03 then you’re not gonna be as,
01:06:05 as you know, I think as I listened to a couple people
01:06:08 that are really pretty famous people.
01:06:11 One of them was John Irving.
01:06:13 He was a writer.
01:06:15 And he told me, he says,
01:06:16 you think I really learned how to be a great writer
01:06:21 in writing school?
01:06:26 He said, yeah, I learned a lot there.
01:06:29 But really what gave me the ability to stay focused,
01:06:35 to work extra hours, to be more disciplined,
01:06:38 was wrestling practices.
01:06:41 That’s right, he was a wrestler, yeah.
01:06:42 Yeah, he goes, I go back to that.
01:06:44 That’s what gave me that chance.
01:06:47 And there’s a guy in Iowa, that guy named Norman Borlaug.
01:06:52 He learned, he invented a process
01:06:57 to feed the underprivileged countries of the world.
01:07:02 And he was a wrestler, and he said the same thing.
01:07:06 And he worked extremely hard.
01:07:08 And he said, I give a lot of credit
01:07:11 to the sport of wrestling.
01:07:13 And even though I’m known for this,
01:07:15 and I got a statue in Washington, DC,
01:07:18 because I saved a billion lives plus,
01:07:21 I’m gonna give wrestling a lot of credit.
01:07:23 So I think some of these MMA stars
01:07:29 and some of these guys that maybe weren’t wrestlers,
01:07:32 that had to wrestle, had to fight wrestling guys and stuff,
01:07:36 missed a little bit there.
01:07:38 But I think the ones that did have wrestling
01:07:40 probably have a really good chance
01:07:41 and can adapt to the other ones.
01:07:43 But I think every martial art or every activity is good,
01:07:48 and you probably can’t skip any.
01:07:49 But I don’t think they’re ever gonna overlook
01:07:51 and say that wrestling’s not valuable, because it is.
01:07:58 However, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna make it.
01:08:00 You still gotta take the values and apply it,
01:08:03 whatever area you’re gonna be in.
01:08:05 And some people forget that.
01:08:07 Some people can’t get over the highness
01:08:12 of getting your arm raised in a wrestling match.
01:08:15 And you know what?
01:08:16 What’s even greater than me getting my arm raised
01:08:20 is that if I’m a coach or if I belong with you,
01:08:23 that you get your arm raised.
01:08:25 And even if you don’t get your arm raised,
01:08:27 it’s what you walk away with
01:08:29 and how you learn to handle that as well.
01:08:33 Because there’s gonna be some losses,
01:08:35 but you don’t want many.
01:08:37 Because you don’t wanna get used to losing,
01:08:39 I can tell you that.
01:08:40 So it’s the hunger for the win.
01:08:42 It’s the brotherhood, the sisterhood of the wrestling room.
01:08:45 And it’s hard work and science
01:08:46 that’s gonna beat luck at the end of the day.
01:08:49 Absolutely, that luck, I like luck,
01:08:54 but I think it’s created by the opportunity that…
01:08:57 You make your luck.
01:08:58 You make your luck, yeah.
01:09:00 Dan, it was a huge honor.
01:09:01 Thank you for welcoming me into your home
01:09:03 and for having this conversation.
01:09:05 Yeah, no problem.
01:09:06 Good man.
01:09:07 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Gable.
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01:09:34 And now, let me leave you with some words from Dan Gable.
01:09:38 The first period is won by the best technician.
01:09:41 The second period is won by the kid in the best shape.
01:09:44 And the third period is won by the kid
01:09:47 with the biggest heart.
01:09:48 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.