The ancient sport of wrestling was staring at its extinction as an Olympic sport just one year ago.
The International Olympic Committee announced Feb. 12, 2013, that one of the world’s oldest sports - one that had been a part of every Olympic Games - had been dropped as one of its core events and would no longer be a part of its program beginning in 2020.
Tuesday, one day short of a year after that announcement was made, one of the sport’s most revered ambassadors stood at a podium inside a banquet room at Doubletree Hotel in downtown Little Rock and explained to a group of about 400 how the sport had rebounded in only a year.
“We needed a kick in the pants,” said Dan Gable, who went 117-1 with two NCAA championships as a wrestler at Iowa State, won an Olympic gold medal in 1972 and then led Iowa to 15 team national titles as a coach in 1976-1997.
Gable said the IOC’s announcement forced amateur wrestling’s international body to reorganize itself with a new director, take steps to modernize the sport and, most important, come together rather than work against one another.
“It was the best thing that ever happened to wrestling,” said Pat Smith, a former Oklahoma State All-American who is now the director of the Arkansas Wrestling Academy. “We were a sleeping giant and they woke us up.”
The IOC’s ruling was overturned in September, which means wrestling won’t miss out on the Olympics.
So Gable’s message to high school wrestlers and coaches attending Tuesday’s meeting of the Little Rock Rotary Club was simple: They can shoot for the sport’s biggest carrot - an Olympic medal - without any uncertainty.
“The motivation needed was from needing that medal,” Gable said. “The bottom line is: We would be struggling, and not together, and we would be flailing. Now we’re on a path of coming back stronger.”
The progress of high school wrestling in Arkansas is one way to gauge that. Wrestling’s sixth state tournament will be held this weekend, beginning Friday at UALR’s Jack Stephens Center, and last fall Little Rock McClellan became the state’s 64th high school to start a wrestling program.
Gable acknowledged that Arkansas’ sanctioning of wrestling six years ago left Mississippi as the only one of 50 without wrestling in high school and he said the young men and women who participate are better off because of the opportunity.
“They needed a sport, they needed an activity that is going to get them off the street and that is going to help their own goals in life,” Gable said.
Many wrestlers who will compete this weekend listened to Gable talk about his upbringing in Waterloo, Iowa, and how he learned through a junior high math teacher who was also a wrestling coach that “not all teachers are bad people.”
He talked about the murder of his sister in 1964, how he never lost a match in high school, and about a college career that ended with a loss in the NCAA finals.
“Dan Gable is the legend,” said Smith, who in 1994 accomplished what Gable couldn’t by winning four individual national titles at Oklahoma State. “He’s the giant of our sport.”
Gable, 65, doesn’t do many speaking engagement anymore, but he has realized over the past year that promotion is essential after the sport almost met its death knell.
“I need to give it a little boost, a shot in the arm,” said Gable, who lives in Iowa City, where he coached for two decades before retiring in 1997. “Not until they kicked us out of the Olympics here the last year did it really, really [sink in] that you’ve got to do certain things a little bit better than you’ve done before.”
Smith and Greg Hatcher, a Little Rock businessman who sparked the start of high school wrestling in Arkansas almost a decade ago, are appreciative.
Gable’s Hawkeyes were the Cowboys’ biggest rivals when Pat Smith was wrestling in the early 1990s. Oklahoma State won the national title in 1990 and 1994, with Iowa winning in 1991-1993.
In 1991, Smith beat Gable wrestler Tom Ryan for the 158-pound title. But the rivalry between the two programs did nothing to diminish Smith’s respect of what Gable has accomplished.
“I’ll say this: Dan Gable is the greatest coach I have ever seen,” Pat Smith said. “He is our rival, but he’s the greatest coach I’ve ever seen in any sport.”
Gable said Tuesday he doesn’t like to think about “yesterday’s news.” He’d rather chat with young wrestlers, like he did Tuesday while posing for pictures and signing autographs, and talk about the future of the sport he’s been a part of for five decades.
“We’re all realizing that if we’re working together, we have a better chance to be a better sport,” Gable said. “We’re better off right now. However, we still have a lot of work to do.”
By the numbers
0◊Points allowed while winning 1972 Olympic gold medal in Munich 1◊Defeat suffered in three years of college competition
2◊NCAA titles won as a wrestler at Iowa State
12◊Former wrestlers who became Olympians
15◊NCAA team titles won at Iowa from 1976 to 1997
21◊Big Ten team titles won
45◊Individual NCAA titles won by wrestlers he coached 106◊Individual Big Ten title winners he coached
117◊College matches won in three years of competition
152◊Individual All-Americans he coached
Sports, Pages 19 on 02/12/2014