The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  A student walks past and doesn’t recognize him. Gable looks up at himself and down at the plaque, which is covered in snow, his carefully chosen message obscured. His face is chapped from the cold. Leaning over, he carefully wipes the snow off with his hand.

  * * *

  —

  The five-mile drive from the arena back to Gable’s house takes him from the heart of campus into gentle rural hills with clapboard farmhouses and grain silos. It’s just him and Kathy now. All four girls have moved out, started lives of their own. In five years, he’ll have been retired for as long as he was a head coach.

  It’s a Sunday afternoon, and he heads down to the basement, which is covered with trinkets from his travels. He loves the two cats, which like to crawl on his legs. Rudy is outside, playing in the woods, but Peekers is by the couch, hacking and dry heaving. The noise stops Gable, and he looks down, his face stern.

  “Don’t puke,” he orders.

  The cat hacks a few more times, bobbing her head, then vomits all over the carpet. Dan takes a step back, then rushes toward the door.

  “Oh, she puked,” he says. “Oh god.”

  He looks up the stairs.

  “Kathy!

  “Kathy!

  “Hey, Kath!”

  “What?” she calls.

  “Kath! She just puked. It wasn’t good puke either.”

  In the kitchen, Kathy starts laughing, imagining the scene.

  “It looks gray,” he says.

  He is helpless in the face of the sick cat. Fierce showdowns with Peekers seem like a comical use of the authority he built by demanding everything from himself and from athletes who wanted to be like him. Even 16 years after losing the opiate of competition, he’s still grasping for something to replace it. One of his girls says he lost confidence in himself when he turned over the program he built, too burned out to continue, his identity too tied to wrestling to ever let it go. “I’ve had some unbelievable conversations with Kathy Gable that Dan Gable doesn’t know about in that fucking closet right there,” says current Iowa coach Tom Brands, sitting in the Iowa wrestling room. He later elaborates: “She just . . . it just pains her that he’s not content. He needs something to do. He needs to be relevant.”

  That’s why Gable never fully pulled away, even after he left coaching in 1997, making good money on the lecture circuit, keeping an administrative job in the athletic department. From the beginning, he worked to stop the death of wrestling, many programs cut because Title IX required that schools add women’s sports, and the scholarship-hogging football teams paid everyone’s bills and were untouchable. The fight gave him focus. When asked by Al Gore to appear with him at an Iowa rally, Gable had a single question for the vice president: What is your position on Title IX? (He did not appear at the rally.)

  When Gable started lobbying, colleges were losing more wrestling programs each year, down from 146 in 1981–82 to 77 in 2011–12. His work paid off. After years of a slow reduction in the annual losses, the number of D-1 programs held steady last season. Every state but one now has high school wrestling, and every state but three has college wrestling. “Saving the sport” became his mantra. Still, most afternoons he found himself drawn to the Iowa wrestling practices, sitting in the bleachers like a fan, offering tips. Year after year, when the room cleared, Gable would change into his gear—he kept locker No. 1—and practice moves on the Takedown Machine, trying to keep intact a world he’d first built as a seventh-grade boy.

  His time in the wrestling room, and his quest to make sure the sport survived, helped control the storms he felt inside. Gable’s life is governed by justification and guilt, as if he’s forever paying off some unseen debt. He doesn’t like to eat, for instance, without working out, constantly balancing a ledger in his mind. One day in March, he stared at a bowl of pasta, hungry and stubbornly trying not to eat. He’d skipped the gym and now looked longingly at the noodles.

  “I don’t deserve it,” he said quietly.

  MAY 31, 1964, WATERLOO, IOWA

  Dan and his parents went to Harpers Ferry, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, to fish. They left his older sister, Diane, at home. She was 19. That night, a local boy raped her and stabbed her to death with one of the Gables’ kitchen knives. A neighbor found the body. The family threw away all its knives, not knowing which one had been used. Dan’s parents fought, torn apart by the murder. They wanted to sell the house and move, but Dan begged them to stay. Nobody touched Diane’s room. Her ghost lived there. At night, Dan heard the fights, the words burrowing into his memory, where they’d remain forever. The drinking escalated. He’d lost his sister, and now his deepest fear was coming true. The family was dying with her, and he would be left alone. One evening, his mother screamed, “I wish I’d raised her a whore!” and that was all Dan could stand. Enough! he thought. He got out of his bed, crossed the hall, and climbed into Diane’s bed, turning to face the wall. Half an hour later, his parents opened the door, humbled by the courage of their son. He felt the bar of light shining on the bed but stayed still. That night, he didn’t sleep a wink. In the morning, he moved his things into Diane’s room. The arguments slowed, then stopped, and his parents focused their attention on Dan, who started his junior wrestling season on a tear. He never lost, and his parents never missed a match. Dan loved the look on their faces when he won. He wrestled with a fury his opponents did not understand.

  * * *

  —

  Diane remains a daily presence in the Gable home.

  Around the corner from Dan’s favorite chair, an overstuffed brown recliner, is the big family room. Above the fireplace is Dan’s medal. Kathy has already put out Easter decorations, including stuffed bunnies and an Easter tree. But the first thing you see when you walk in, in a prominent place by the door, is an 8-by-10 picture of Diane, smiling and happy, forever a teenager.

  “That’s my sister,” he says.

  He’s always been a protective parent, never letting his girls stay home alone overnight, even when they were in college, no matter how much they complained. He put hammers in their cars in case they ran off the road into a body of water. Diane’s death is a psychic phantom limb, a complicated pain he talks about more each year, even if he still can’t articulate how it makes him feel. One afternoon, he shows his collection of oversize black scrapbooks, which live in the same room as his used crutches and a pile of rifles and shotguns.

  His mother made the books, collecting mementos from his journey, starting with local papers, rising up to Sports Illustrated profiles. Katie and Mack Gable kept everything. His parents saved his weights from high school, which he still uses in the barn. When his mom died in 1994, he found hundreds of letters he’d written in college. The Gables invested so much in their only remaining child that everything touched by Dan took on a talismanic meaning. Later, over beers at a local bar, he tries to remember when the collecting began.

  “They were doing it before I died,” he says, then catches himself.

  He’s quiet for a moment.

  “Before my sister died,” he says, and he changes the subject.

  MARCH 28, 1970, EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

  After moving into Diane’s room, Gable kept winning. He graduated from high school 64–0, a three-time state champion. He didn’t lose as a sophomore at Iowa State, or as a junior. He won 118 times in college, entering his final match undefeated. An unknown opponent from Washington named Larry Owings waited. ABC’s Wide World of Sports showed up. Gable lost. The pain of his sister’s death had been waiting on a moment of weakness, an opening, and in defeat, he couldn’t find the strength that had gotten his family through her passing. He thought he’d let Diane down. He’d let his mom and dad down. When he got home, he avoided his parents. When his mom would get him on the phone, he couldn’t talk. His throat closed, and the words refused to come out. Everything unraveled. Katie Gable drove to Ames. She confronted her son
and slapped him, hard. Dan turned his focus to the Olympics. He got better, more dangerous. Every day for two years, he tortured himself, refusing surgery for torn cartilage in his knee, scared he would miss out on the Olympics. All else he shoved aside or pushed back down. Nobody scored on him in Munich, and when he won, he tossed the medal in the bottom of his gym bag. For a brief period, his panicked parents thought it was lost. They didn’t understand. For him, the reward wasn’t a medal but seeing how winning it made them feel. A family was his reward. Years later, sitting in a Des Moines hotel hot tub, Gable would bring up the Owings loss, which he does about once a day. He tried to describe what it did to him and to his mom and dad. Finally, choosing his words carefully, he said, “It was like a death in the family.”

  * * *

  —

  When the Gables finally arrive in Des Moines for the NCAA tournament, 37 days have passed since the IOC decision. “I’m coming here with one thing in mind,” Dan says after checking into his suite on the 10th floor of the Savery Hotel, reaching into the closet and thumbing past two Iowa jackets before pulling out one that reads USA. In the days ahead, he’ll talk to the Iowa state legislature, to groups of fans, to dozens of reporters, using his fame and influence to protect Olympic wrestling. Everyone expects him to lead the fight against the IOC. All his life, Gable has been able to sense other people’s hopes, just as he feels other people’s pain as if it were his own.

  Taking on other people’s pain is why he left the sport. The Des Moines Register’s wrestling beat writer, Andy Hamilton, said that Gable quit coaching, in large part, because he could no longer stomach seeing wrestlers he cared about lose. It sounds like coachspeak and only makes sense once you’ve watched Gable watch wrestling. In Des Moines, as the tournament gets under way, he starts making noises that sound like an animal’s death rattle, a moan that starts somewhere very deep inside.

  “Why do I do this to myself?” he says.

  He sets his feet far apart and leans down toward the mat. His hands twitch. The Hawkeyes lose match after match. They’re not wrestling aggressively, not attacking until the end of the third period, and after yet another defeat, Annie rushes back to Dan and says, “Dad, you gotta start coaching again,” an idea that is repeated not much later by a former college wrestler in the suite. “You want me to be dead in about two years?” Gable says. “I got out of it to save my life.”

  All of his angst coalesces into one brief window of agony, on Day 2, during Matt McDonough’s quarterfinal match. A year ago, McDonough dominated people, and now, for some reason, he is wrestling without anger or energy. Upset at the Big Ten tournament, he’d thrown his second-place medal in a trash can and stormed off. Now he is losing again.

  “Dad coached McDonough’s dad,” one of the girls explains.

  Generations now have come and gone, and Gable remembers the losers more than the winners. He can rattle off the wrestlers who suffered with him but never got the brief redemption of a championship. He never cheered after one of his own matches, but he’d leap into the air after theirs, and he’d mourn with them after defeats and sit in a sauna wearing a coat and tie to help them make weight. He lived and died with his wrestlers. One of them, Chad Zaputil, still haunts him. Zaputil wrestled at 118 and lost three times in the national finals. After the first defeat, he got the Herky the Hawk mascot tattooed on his thigh. After the second, he got another tattoo, over his heart: an angry golden hawk, wings out, talons sharp and ready. Then he got beat a third time, ending his career. Zaputil disappeared. Gable heard the whispers and searched for him, hanging at his house until he saw him go inside. Gable knocked. Zaputil wouldn’t answer, so Gable broke down the door.

  “Let me see that tattoo,” he demanded.

  “No,” Zaputil said.

  Gable ripped Zaputil’s shirt off, and what he saw staggered him. The tattoo had been expanded, to show the hawk clawing out a human heart, with blood splattered all down Zaputil’s torso.

  “It just killed me,” Gable says. “I couldn’t handle it.”

  He thought quitting would spare him the pain, but he was wrong. In Des Moines, McDonough is losing, and Dan is in a panic. His family panics with him. Mackie brings her knees up to cover her face, wraps her arms around her knees. Jenni screams. Dan is screaming now, too, spittle flying out of his mouth.

  “What’s he doing?” he yells. “McDonough, get up! What’s he doing!?

  “McDONOUGH! GET OUT OF THERE! No, he ain’t. No, he ain’t. That’s bullshit. Ohhhhhh. McDonough got beat! NICE JOB, McDONOUGH!”

  The arena falls quiet.

  “I’m gonna throw up,” Mackie says.

  Gable can’t sleep that night, haunted by McDonough’s loss and the losses of every wrestler he’s seen in the past few days, even ones from other schools, kids he’s never met. It all combines in his chest, a consuming ache.

  “I know the pain,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  His daughters have been watching. Not just the past month, or the previous few days, but their whole lives. They’ve seen the peaks of arrogance and the valleys of self-doubt. They’ve learned a lot about him by having their own kids. If they don’t fully understand what pushes him, they know which clues are important. Lately he’s been taking the time to understand new things, like the straps and buckles on his grandkids’ car seats. He’s been more emotional, calling old wrestlers on the phone to tell stories about how it used to be.

  These things must mean something. During a lull in the wrestling, the girls and their husbands sit in the suite, trying to connect the stories, explaining how losing the Olympics feels like the beginning of the end to Dan. “If they drop wrestling,” son-in-law Danny Olszta says, “he’ll feel he failed.”

  “I feel bad for my dad,” Mackie says. “I don’t even know how to explain it. This is . . . his life. Having that taken away, I don’t want to say it’s killing him. . . . You gotta understand, wrestling is what he went to when he recovered from his sister passing away.”

  Oldest grandson Gable sits in his chair, never taking his eyes off the mats. His patience astounds them, and they’re starting to wonder what his future might hold. He’s 9, but he can lock into a sporting event for hours and is so disciplined, he cries if he thinks he might be late for school. While he watches, his mom and his aunts crowd around one another.

  “I feel like none of us would be here were it not for wrestling,” Jenni explains. “After what wrestling did for my dad and his family, after their tragedy. Wrestling saved them from going down a path of destruction.”

  Jenni thinks the IOC members would change their mind if they came to Iowa. Drive them through the cornfields to this suite in a deafening, packed arena. Meet her family. See what wrestling means out in the middle of the country and in places like it all over the world, where the thin line between survival and extinction is guarded by toughness. Make them understand what Olympic wrestling has meant to her family, to her father and to her sisters, and what it will mean if it is taken from her sons.

  “I have these kids,” Annie says. “I have this son. I have this new baby son. How can I possibly look at them and tell them they can never become an Olympic champion? It’s part of their blood.”

  “Like their grandpa,” Mackie says.

  * * *

  —

  Gable has been watching himself, too, looking inward, changing, thinking about his family. This year, for the first time since seventh grade, he hasn’t spent at least three or four days a week in a wrestling room. One day, as he walks from the hotel to the arena, he tries to explain why. There’s a long pause as he thinks.

  “Time to move on,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “I had never seen a sunset,” he says, and he’s laughing at himself, at how he sounds. The wrestling rooms of his life come back to him, bunkers, dark and hot, without windows or natural light, a lot like a po
et’s vision of hell. Dan loved them. The Iowa wrestling room was perfect, carefully constructed over decades as a confessional, a place where pain could be traded for absolution. Even when he went on long speaking trips, it remained there, a spiritual home. The idea of the room kept him tethered to something, and he remained its alpha. Then he stopped coming.

  “This year,” he says, “I was getting pulled in one direction toward the wrestling room, but”—he sighs—“I think my wife, the love for my wife . . .”

  There’s a yawn of silence. Ten seconds pass.

  “I got hurt in July,” he says.

  He hesitates, considering how much to reveal. “Starting a chain saw,” he says.

  His rotator cuff, long abused, snapped. He felt it immediately, a burn, and when he says “burn,” his voice changes, like he’s feeling it anew. He couldn’t use his arm for two weeks, couldn’t crank a boat, couldn’t chop wood. Then he reinjured the shoulder—someone tapped him and he swung around, his own motion doing the damage—and doctors told him he couldn’t go into the wrestling room. During the heat of summer, when a team is formed, Gable stayed at home, not connected to the Hawkeyes. He liked his time alone, looking out on all he’d built. That surprised him.