The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  AUGUST 2012

  The Losses of Dan Gable

  Wrestling’s most famous winner is taking on one final battle: To save his sport and all he’s ever been.

  FEBRUARY 12, 2013, IOWA CITY, IOWA

  On the morning the IOC announced it would drop wrestling from the Olympics, Dan Gable was a continent away, fast asleep. It was dark outside. His wife, Kathy, sat at the computer, waiting on the coffeemaker to start. She scrolled through the Iowa wrestling message boards, and one thread caught her attention. When she finished reading, she hurried to the bedroom. Dan was on the left side of the bed, on his stomach. That sticks in her mind, for some reason—him peaceful, unaware. She tapped him, asked if he knew anything about the Olympics getting rid of wrestling in 2020. He mumbled something and kept sleeping for a few moments, until the information traveled through his subconscious and he rushed to the computer. The news rearranged his world. Sitting by himself in the dark, Gable struggled not to cry. He called the head of USA Wrestling and blurted, “Tell me it isn’t true!”

  Gable’s phone started to ring. One by one, his four daughters called. They said they loved him and that he could save wrestling. His oldest, Jenni, called from her home up the road and described the look on her son’s face when she told him. He’s 9. An unspoken dream seemed to die in his eyes. This hurt Dan most of all. As the sun rose, he pushed away his pain to do the thing he did best: fight.

  * * *

  —

  Dan Gable paces suite No. 8 at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, trying to decide whether he can watch the last Iowa match of the NCAA wrestling tournament. It’s March. The Hawkeyes, whom he hasn’t coached in 16 years, are having a miserable weekend, with no national champions. Just the other morning, a former Iowa wrestler saw Gable punishing an unsuspecting elliptical machine in the hotel gym. When the machine had asked his age, Gable, who is 64, typed in 29, as always, and began attacking the pedals, grinding out frustrations about the IOC and the collapsing Hawkeyes.

  “How you been?” the wrestler asked.

  “I’ve been better,” Gable said.

  Now, in the last hour of the tournament, a scowl anchors his face. His eyes jump from side to side, scanning the mats. The arena sound system pours out decibels, sludgy bass lines and screaming guitars. Derek St. John, the Iowa 157 and the last hope to salvage a national title from a tournament gone wrong, crouches at the center of the mat. Gable pumps his feet and looks like he might get sick.

  “I don’t think I can sit here,” he says, stepping out of the suite into the hallway.

  His life has been one of victory: He went 64–0 as a high school wrestler, 118–1 in college, won an Olympic gold medal in Munich without surrendering a point, won 15 national titles in 21 seasons as the Iowa coach. Outside in the concourse, feeling weak, then feeling guilty about feeling weak, he knows what must be done. Gable triumphs again—over himself. He swings open the door and steps back inside. “I’m gonna watch,” he declares, then almost to himself adds, “I can’t be such a chickenshit.”

  St. John pushes his opponent into the mat. “Ride him like a dog!” Gable yells. The first two periods pass. Sometimes Gable just mouths words, intense, forgetting to speak. St. John is tied with 48 seconds left. The Penn State fans in the next suite are peeking over at the red-faced, bald man losing his shit. At rest, Gable looks like a retired math teacher, but under the influence of anger and adrenaline, he transforms. His eyes seem to shift from a soft hazel to a dull black, the color of an alien, subterranean element. Given the right stimuli, like a vital Iowa match, he seems a good sweat from his final wrestling weight of 149. The eruption arrives. Watching Gable melt down is like watching Picasso paint. He shakes and strains, a rocket on the pad. The flying spit and sudden fits of decorum, like “Jiminy Christmas!”—Tourette’s in reverse—are followed by growling, intense curses.

  “SONOFABITCH!” he roars down into the fulcrum of noise.

  St. John bucks and twists, and with 38 seconds left, he breaks his opponent’s grip and takes a 3–2 lead. He is going to win the national championship. Someone says, “This match is over,” which pushes Gable to the edge. “No, it ain’t!” he yells, his voice sounding like a gut-shot deer looks, ragged from days of this. “It’s not over!”

  “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one,” a friend counts down, and the horn sounds. Everyone in the Gable suite celebrates, except Gable himself, who is almost panting, his eyes glassy. Without anyone noticing, he slips out the door into the concourse. Leaning over, with his head down, the tears come. Soon he is sobbing, his back to the suite. His shoulders heave up and down, shaking. A former Iowa wrestler stops to swap war stories, then suddenly backs up, a look of horror on his face. Mackie Gable, Dan’s youngest daughter, steps outside and finds her father weeping.

  “I’ve never seen him like that ever,” she says.

  Gable doesn’t say anything. What would he say? Not even he really knows what’s happening to him. Mackie seems unsure, taking a step toward him, then a step back. She doesn’t know what to do. She ducks into the suite, scans the room, and calls, “Mom?” Kathy Gable comforts Dan, talking softly to him, and soon he returns, drying his eyes, trying to explain something he doesn’t understand.

  Later that night, some friends sit around the hotel bar, just as baffled as Mackie. Why was the hardest dude on the planet crying because a wrestler he doesn’t coach won a match? Most of the guys at the table are young, and they see Gable as superhuman. But an old friend, Mike Doughty, has known Gable for decades.

  “Every once in a while,” he tells them, “I’ll be traveling with Dan and things like that will hit. He has these things locked in trapdoors and eeeek”—he makes the creaking sound of an old hinge opening— “they start coming out.”

  1955, WATERLOO, IOWA

  People think Dan Gable isn’t afraid of anything, but that’s not true. He is deeply afraid of one thing. Hidden in his past, before he ever wrestled a match, there’s a story most people don’t know. Even his four daughters have never heard it. When he was a small boy, his parents drank, and they fought. The Gables always seemed to be one bad night from breaking apart, leaving Dan without a family: alone. So when Mack and Katie went out on the town, young Dan would make his way to the front of the house. He would station himself in the big picture window, scared that they’d come home and get divorced, or maybe not come home at all. From time to time, he’d suck his thumb. All night, he’d peer down the street, looking for headlights.

  * * *

  —

  Back home, he’s got a 45-acre spread he’s put together in pieces over the years, a place to live out his uneasy retirement. This is where he was before the wrestling tournament and where he would return when it ended. Today, a month after the IOC decision, he sinks down into his hot tub, which overlooks a wide yard of snow, downrange from the two cement deer that, on occasion, real deer like to hump. Gable thinks this is hilarious. He’s soaking after his intense daily workout. There’s a sign above his head that reads: WHATEVER HAPPENS IN THE HOT TUB STAYS IN THE HOT TUB.

  Gable sighs, a look of mock resignation on his face. “Nothing’s ever happened in the hot tub,” he says.

  It’s late afternoon at the compound, near sunset. The buildings—the main house, his clubhouse with a sauna and gym, the barn with his axes and Everlast heavy bag—look like they belong in a Nordic postcard, all dark wood and peaked rooflines. He jokes that the set of Rocky was stolen from him.

  He’s focused on overturning the IOC decision. When the news broke, Gable invited a reporter to his home outside Iowa City and to the NCAA wrestling tournament, which remains a holy week in his family. He’s still the most famous person in the world of wrestling. A Des Moines newspaper reporter once wore an Iowa hat to a Russian village during the Cold War, in the mountains near the Siberian border, where an American had never been. A young man stepped out of the crowd, pointed toward the hat, a
nd said one of the few English words he knew: “Gable.”

  He sinks down farther into the water. The heat helps him think. He’s been doing a lot of that lately, out here by himself, looking back at a life of competition and pain.

  Steam rises off the water.

  “I never wore a mouthpiece,” he says suddenly.

  He sticks out his tongue. Gouges and divots cover the bottom, like a target-practice soda can, deep scars and even holes, dozens of them. Wearing a mouthpiece would have prevented the holes and the mouthfuls of blood he swallowed and spit out, but it would also have made him weak, made his jaw slide, made him feel vulnerable. He welcomed the hurt. Now he clenches his teeth. He’s always punished weakness with suffering, putting on a war mask for the world and for himself. His face hardens, his mouth curving into a frown, his muscles firing, looking like a weapon.

  “It makes you strong!” he roars.

  Gable leaps from the hot tub and dives into the drift of snow.

  “Ahhhhhhhh,” he moans, a cloud of vapor exploding as bare skin hits cold ground, moving his arms and legs back and forth, carving out wedges. Gable is spread-eagled in his backyard making goddamn snow angels. Just as quickly he jumps back into the hot water, his body temperature skyrocketing, the snow melting off.

  “It burns,” he says, gritting his teeth, and he sounds supremely happy.

  * * *

  —

  His journey has consumed all of their lives.

  For years, if you saw Gable at a wrestling event, you saw his wife, Kathy, and his four little girls. At Carver-Hawkeye Arena, they sat in section NN, seats 1–6, the first two rows. If you’ve seen him at a match lately, they’re still there, grown up, screaming down at poorly performing wrestlers, questioning their manhood, urging a coach to “slap the shit” out of one who celebrates a poorly wrestled match. Forget winning an Olympic medal. Are you man enough to marry a Gable? His daughters are funny, pretty, and intense. All ended up with former athletes, and only Molly lives outside the state of Iowa. Jenni and Annie both live in Iowa City. Mackie’s just up the road in Dubuque, and they get together as much as they can, mostly around wrestling events. During a speech not long ago, Gable laughed about the rolling circus that travels with him. “My wrestling and family go together,” he said. “It’s always been that way, from day one with my mom and dad, my sister, my wife, four daughters, grandsons, son-in-laws. They’re all here.” Some coaches ignore their families on their climb to the top; Gable needed his to be with him, as Sherpas, eventually as fellow climbers. His career molded his family, then welded it together. Wrestling kept his daughters from sitting in a window looking for headlights.

  Kathy Gable knew he needed to build his family around wrestling. A blue-eyed Iowa girl, hilarious but fierce in defending her family, she found a soul mate in Dan. She lived with the storm of his career because she loved his willingness to devote himself fully to something. Even now, she alone seems capable of seeing through the shell into the real Dan Gable. He turns to her for the simplest of questions, such as: “When did my mother die?” They first met at a party. She lived in Waterloo then, in high school, and Dan, at Iowa State, sometimes trained in his hometown. For their first date, two years later, he invited her on a bike ride. Between that ride and their wedding some 12 months later, in 1974, he called her every night. The calls came from his desk at the Iowa wrestling office, after he’d finished coaching.

  The Gables measured time in seasons, their world growing as small and insular as Dan’s. Until high school, or maybe even college, Mackie thought the John Lennon song “Imagine” was written especially for a 1992 wrestling highlight video. She thought it was about wrestling, she admits sheepishly. Dan’s obsession became theirs. Even though he chose this life and they did not, that distinction became smaller and smaller until it ceased to matter at all. “He brought his work home with him a lot,” Mackie says. “His life was his wrestling. When my dad was coaching, there would be some nights at home when it was scary.”

  He threw a mug through the Christmas tree. One night they heard a loud crash; Kathy had asked Dan why he wouldn’t kick a wrestler named Rico Chiapparelli off the team if he was causing so many problems, and Gable flipped over the kitchen table. The girls’ bedroom doors had holes in them; they’d slam and lock them, and Dan would punch through them. Boyfriends getting the tour would see the holes and make a mental note. The girls never actually felt in danger, just that they needed to stay clear. Before a match with main rival Oklahoma State, the girls knew not to talk to their dad, and if they saw him in the tunnel, not to expect a hello. They all shared the cost of his obsession.

  Then, in 1997, burned out and with chronic pain in his hip, he quit.

  Without wrestling, he felt something missing. So did his family. Mackie cried during the final news conference. Even though she says their relationship improved after he quit, since he suddenly had time to watch her play soccer, she also wanted him to keep coaching. It’s hard to explain, this dichotomy, but when he gave up that job, they all lost something.

  “I still don’t think I have forgiven him,” she says.

  They needed the clarity of Gable’s obsession. Without it, they were a different family. Mackie was in elementary school when he quit. She wanted to wrestle in junior high school, but her mom wouldn’t let her join the boys’ team. Instead, she volunteered to be the high school wrestling manager, staying after practice to clean the mats. Her reasons are her own, but it’s hard not to see a girl trying to keep a world intact. They followed him on his journey and counted his successes as their own. “Our gold medal,” Mackie starts to say one day, laughing, correcting herself. “My dad’s gold medal hangs above the fireplace. It’s been there our whole life. It’s almost like something we’ve looked up to.”

  During the holidays, Gable sits in front of his television and watches White Christmas. He’s seen it hundreds of times, sometimes alone, sometimes with his kids piled around. It’s about General Waverly, who is relieved of his command and struggles to build a new life. At the end, General Waverly puts on his old uniform and is greeted by the soldiers who loved him during the war, who sing “The Old Man.” This is the Gable family’s favorite part, because it echoes their own lives: a general and his troops, happy to be finished with the battle but missing the fight. At the end, Dan always falls silent, tears in his eyes, no longer thinking about an old movie but about his wife and his girls.

  “We’ll follow the old man wherever he wants to go,” the song goes. “Because we love him.”

  * * *

  —

  Gable spends his days trying to be useful. There’s a wrestling-sized hole in his life, and he is always trying to fill it. His struggle is never clearer than when he stops by the Iowa wrestling office, to pick up mail that still arrives there addressed to him or to sign autographs. One afternoon, Gable comes into the reception area, making small talk. He asks the secretary, “You need me?”

  She smiles and pulls out a stack of posters for him to sign.

  “Don’t I always need you, Dan?”

  “I hope so,” he says.

  She gives directions, telling him to just sign his name or to add a personal note to a specific fan. After finishing, he walks up a narrow stairwell, toward the lobby of Carver-Hawkeye Arena. People nod when he passes, and he zips his Iowa wrestling coat. It’s freezing outside. A bitter laugh escapes his lips, and he looks tired and uncertain.

  “I don’t know where I’m at when it comes to this Olympic wrestling,” he says. “I almost feel—not useless, but . . .”

  The IOC’s decision is based on internal politics, he explains. The international wrestling governing body’s leader and lieutenants weren’t respected in the Olympic community and were told repeatedly to make changes to the sport, to fix many of the confusing rules that had been added over the years. They refused. After the IOC decision—its ruling can be cemented or
reversed in a September meeting, during which wrestling, squash, or baseball and softball will be chosen—the president of FILA, the international wrestling body, was pushed out by his own board. Gable has used his fame to bring awareness and to lobby behind the scenes, constantly working the phones or getting on planes. He’s on fire these days, energized. Gable is on the newly formed Committee for the Preservation of Olympic Wrestling. Dan calls it “C’Pow,” like the sound a fist makes on someone’s jaw. This battle has, as Kathy Gable says, awakened a sleeping giant. He is fully himself again, filling up the leather-bound calendar he takes everywhere. “Dan is a man of purpose,” his friend Doughty says. “This is a new purpose.”

  Part of his role with CPOW is helping redesign the rules, an important request from the IOC. But Gable fears that the old FILA politics will keep the rules from changing. He fears he is powerless to create that change.

  “I don’t know,” he says now. “I’d like a little more ability to have my fingers on it.”

  Outside Carver-Hawkeye, he takes small, sliding steps toward his truck, past the statue of him put up a year ago. The bronze Gable isn’t lifting his fists in victory, or wagging a finger, but raising his arms in what wrestling fans recognize as a stalling call. It’s as if the statue of Lombardi outside Lambeau Field were forever calling delay of game, demanding his teams keep pressing. It’s perfect, really. There was no greater sin for a Gable wrestler than to be caught stalling—backing up, eating clock, not attacking and destroying—and once Gable even screamed at a ref to call it on his own guy. The statue is addressing everyone who passes, demanding that they keep fighting. Even before the IOC decision, Gable worried about the future of his sport and hoped to inspire people to save it. On the plaque, he wanted the inscription to read STALLING, as if the bronze Gable were screaming at people. School administrators worried people wouldn’t get it, so after weeks of fighting, they settled on a compromise: (NO) STALLING. The statue is also there for his girls and for his grandchildren, so that if they ever need advice when he’s dead and gone—he figures he’s got 15 years—there will be a piece of him left, forever, reminding them to get off their asses and fight.