Dan Gable: Olympic Wrestling, Mental Toughness & the Making of Champions | Lex Fridman Podcast #152
the following is a conversation with dan gable from two years ago i did not previously publish this conversation as part of this podcast but as a separate thing and as a result it did not receive many listens let me be honest and say that while i usually don't care about how many listens reviews something gets in this one case i feel like i've failed one of my heroes i feel i didn't properly introduce a truly special human being to an audience that might find him as inspiring as i did dan gable is one of the greatest olympic athletes of all time bigger than records and medals to many like myself he's a symbol of guts spirit mental toughness and relentless hard work as a wrestler he was undefeated in high school undefeated in college until his very last match and having lost that match he found another level and became a world champion and an olympic champion and most importantly he did so perfectly dominating his opponents he did not surrender a single point at the 1972 olympic games as a coach he led the iowa hawkeyes to 15 national titles and 25 consecutive big ten championships he coached 152 all-americans 45 national champions 106 big ten champions and 12 olympians including eight medalists he's the author of several books including wrestling life 1 and 2 and coaching wrestling successfully quick mention of our sponsors trial labs a machine learning company expressvpn grammarly writing helper tool and simply save home security so the choice is ai privacy grammar or safety choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i spent a few days in iowa and got to attend a wrestling duel meet in the historic carver hawkeye arena part of me wanted to stay in iowa forever to drill takedowns to start a family to live life simply wrestling is one of the pure sports both beautiful and brutal where both mental toughness and technical mastery of the highest form are rewarded with victory and everything else is punished with defeat and every such loss weighs heavy on the minds of anyone who has ever stepped on the wrestling mat including myself the same is true for one of the greatest wrestlers in history of the sport the man who graciously welcomed me into his home for this conversation the legend dan gable if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter lex friedman and now here's my conversation with dan gable you're persistent i love that because you've been trying to get me on this podcast for a long time and until i saw you on another podcast and you said you were russian did i call you back then it was over because russia to me you know is leading the world in wrestling almost every year what's the difference between american wrestling and russian wrestling he showed me this painting well it's mit it's science it's science you know and they they really study the sport they're really good technically they're really really good in strategy they don't really push like the real toughness they don't push like uh conditioning right and so americans we need what they have russians need what we have and if when they when you get to two together and for me why i could beat the russians is because i went their way a little bit but i i kept my toughness but you're known you're you're known for your toughness yeah but i wasn't known for my art i wasn't known for my science so when did you become a bit of an artist it took a loss delario most people thought i was already an artist just because i won 181 straight dominance in seven years and not just winning but you know kind of punishing people yes and from from that point of view yeah it might have been pretty good but i had a long ways to go yet and i didn't really realize that or i should have i should say i didn't really know how to get it out of me until i had a loss and then i realized i gotta buckle down learn some of that science become more of an artist how do you become an artist so that the russian way has this drilling technique thousands of reps how do you think you work on the science the art part you got to study the best in the world i think dave schultz was our guy in america that probably showed us that being artistic you needed that and he studied it he went over there as a high schooler and wrestled in some major tournaments over there and he saw their ways he used that russian science and then he was already an american and he saw what how i trained athletes he saw what i did in the olympics saw what other people how he held up and he applied that as well but i'd have to say he was more the artistic type he was more of a russian than an american when it came to uh uh wrestling you've coached 45 national champions 106 big ten champions and eight olympic medalists which is incredible what is a common thread between them and what are maybe some of the fundamental differences i think the common thread is that they all had one of those two avenues that we talked already and because we intertwined them so in a russian wrestling room they got the same people most the time in an american wrestling room we had the same people but when i was out recruiting at first i recruited just attitude but i needed more than that i needed some genetics in that wrestling room to actually that hard work people you know they could look and see wow that execution that's unbelievable but yet i can beat that guy after the first minute so you think you think uh the art the the technique is genetics you're born with it you think it's not i think your pop and your you know your ability to move timing and timing and your quickness and your strength you know the russians they usually picked out the people that can go into that sport that was the old-fashioned sports school but it's it's mostly like when you see when you walk into a russian wrestling room you see him hitting skills techniques you know you don't see them banging against each other that much but then when practice is over you might not see a bunch of sprints you might see them walk over to the uh the ropes and they drop down from the ceiling and they'll jump up and climb a rope boom boom boom and then they come down and then they don't jump right back on they have three or four other guys go and then they jump back on whereas i probably made my guys climb them get right back down climb them right back again but i also realized that i had to have a mix of that what was the role what was your role i mean those guys looked up and dan gable and what was the role in helping these athletes become their best these national champions we had to first of all prove that you were knew what you were doing in terms of technique or in terms of everything everything they just you had to be the first guy there and the last guy to leave and you had to be the most dedicated guy even though they were the ones that's trying to win the championships uh you had to prove that you were going to work just as hard as they were as a coach and what does that look like what so you can see it when you you know when you see it well you you're there ahead of them yeah and you're there after they leave you know it's that's it's that simple i'm picking up after them and you're analyzing them you out work them you out work them and you out thank them and so you know use that type of strategy and over time when you prove it works because some of my kids that were the best kids in the world really shouldn't have been a wrestler i mean they weren't very coordinated yeah but they work so hard to develop themselves what was your role in that process i mean that means pushing kids to their limit if if you're not going but you can't push kids to their limit and even when you push them to their limit that's not their limit because their limits above and beyond that right i mean yeah coaches sometimes accidentally don't they lose kids yeah because of the heat because of hard work and all that and you gotta you gotta know where to when to back off you got to read your athletes and by that i mean you got to know them pretty well every once in a while you make a little bit of mistake but if you don't react right on that mistake before it gets too far then it's going to be a casualty and i don't mean somebody dying necessarily but maybe something that could turn them off or maybe something that can run them away or maybe something that wow that was close i maybe shouldn't have pushed him that far so you really have to be very educated and it's not just what you know is what you know about them and i'm not talking about the team i'm talking about each guy individuals yeah each person on the team and you you know it how you see it now you know how because you're the first one there and you're the last one to leave and and you set in the uh environment with them you're there for in the morning for practice sometimes you're there in the afternoon for two or three hours after practice you might have a a hot room or you might have a sauna or a steam or a whirlpool and you get in there with them and you listen you know you're not just feeding out information you do that but you're taking in a lot of that too and i'm telling you when you get in an atmosphere that they're relaxed and they feel comfortable it's like a massage and that's after practice in one of those areas that people are around you you learn a lot i mean you got a lot to learn as a coach and when you get in that atmosphere when all of a sudden you feel like very comfortable words start flowing and when those words flow you take them in as a coach and there's something probably going to be said that you can do and act upon that's going to help certain situations i've saved a couple kids lives for sure that we're on the brink you know sometimes performance is at such a high level in a high level atmosphere that life and death is actually involved and i don't mean pushing a kid to where he just dies but i mean he might feel himself as a failure then he may go home and take his own life yeah i mean but that's part of it you're putting so much heart so much blood and heart and sweat and every your whole meaning of life becomes winning so and sometimes it's so hard to lose within that context so if if in your i think the first wrestling life you wrote about chad zappato who lost i mean incredible wrestler but lost in three finals in the nationals and has this tattoo of a uh hawk clawing out the human heart yeah so what lessons is there any lessons from the incredible wrestling he's done but also the incredible suffering that he went through on himself yeah again you like that word suffering which is okay okay no no no no no keep it keep it because it fits right in where i want yeah i have to turn that suffering around to where he makes him feels good about himself are better does not feel perfect yeah because he did lose yeah you know and so but you have to actually get him to realize that yeah he's still unique compared to the walk of the earth he was unbelievably unique right at the top just a little bit short of but because it was you know he felt the suffering you now have to go about and change that and put it into good will some way and because he's you really have a lot of good will you can do a lot of goodwill and so and it's not easy it took him probably years years of tattooing yeah years of covering the tattoos and you know he told me moved to keller i go why are you moving to california because he was here for a couple years after his wrestling was done because he had a good job around here and he was i thought he was doing a good job but he he just he said i had to escape you know it's the same as the wrestling tattoo i had a wrestling terminology i have to get i hate to say this i hate to say this i go where are you going he says i'm going to go to california and i go is there any reason why you're going to california he says that's where everybody goes to hide but i said i think you're wrong there but you know i think what will determine your life will be what you do from now on you know and if you can and he's actually turned it around i mean he's actually turned around you have to discover that yourself exactly and he went someplace that he thought he could fit into and i think he did and i think he's got a good job and he's helping people and uh he covered that tattoo with uh feathers uh another tattoo well in the end it's a beautiful story yeah it is it really is suffering and overcoming yeah and he's not done yet he's not done yet no he's not done he he's got a lot more to do so you mentioned roger bannister again i think in your first book somebody you looked up to that's the man who broke the four-minute mile right when everybody said it was impossible everyone thought it was impossible because he would die he would die it's not human it's not human yeah so what well you've done your homework for what the book or what i don't know for me you've done your homework yeah i know but yeah sent sent here by putin to do research yeah so what lesson do you take from that story for yourself the impossible trying to accomplish the impossible well the impossible is possible it's just that simple time changes things i mean i mean if you look at what where the mile time is right now compared to that four minute mile which when it was broke by a couple tenths or three or four tenths it's now broke by uh another 20 seconds yeah i mean by 700 people yeah yeah i mean by tons of people and it's pretty much the common knowledge that you got to run a four minute mile if you're gonna go somewhere now or or below if you're going to win win events at major level you got to be able to do that and so you can take that and you can look at what in time history has as its record performance and you can realize that that record performance is going to change yeah and and they don't take into all the factors of knowledge they don't take in all the factors of better shoes they don't take in all the factors of better understanding and nutrition i mean it's like me as an athlete i went to practice every day in high school for at least my sophomore in my junior and part of my senior year and all of a sudden a new rule came up i said the rule said um before that said oh yeah at least most of the coaches uh you you we don't want you drinking water at practice yeah and and okay why because you gotta toughen you up that's a weakness water and so we would go through practice i mean and you're sweating and then you're sweating so much that you're almost out of sweat yeah and so you're mostly at the end of practice you're not even wrestling excuse me you're you're sitting against the wall yeah because you're tired so then all of a sudden they say okay go ahead drink water during practice drink gratery during practice and all of a sudden at the end of practice we're still out there competing and so i look at my career for two and a half years where i end with junior high too so i got another three years where i didn't really wasn't able to push as good as i could because i just was probably under under hydrated yeah yeah so what so but at the individual level in terms of the impossible when did you first believe the thing that maybe probably people would laugh at you about that you would be in the champion well i always visualized me being the best you believed it in the very forever forever yeah i was because i was i don't think you call it a dreamer or somebody that i was just involved with competitive sports at the ymca from the from age five did you tell people that dream that you're gonna be olympic champion one day you can be the best in the world i think they knew and the only reason why they knew because there was something a little different about this guy he was uh he's not gonna stop well he was out in the yard yeah and he was swinging baseball bats yeah you know at six at seven and eight at nine and ten and he was swinging baseball bats so much right-handed and so much left hand with nobody even there throwing the ball yeah that all of a sudden when they walked by and they all of a sudden the grass was down to dirt on both sides so it's like they saw me on the yard playing by myself sports or you know or you get the neighborhood kids you play a lot but if they weren't there you know if you walked in my front room i was hiking a ball like i was the quarterback and i was running not and running through the through the furniture you know that type stuff so you know who who saw this guy mostly was probably the parents yeah and the the coaches at the ymca level the junior high level they saw this guy come first and and end up last but i wasn't that great i wasn't the fastest guy at that time and i wasn't the strongest guy you know actually before i went to the olympics when they tested me they tested everybody and i probably came back with one of the highest scores but it was it was not like the highest person on this and this and that i was all high across the board straight across the board high on every one of them but there was always people that were higher than genetics but then they would go down yeah then they would test on something else and go back up mine stayed high all across the board and so i you know i really didn't have too many flaws but i didn't have any things that also said that you were going to be unscored upon at the olympic games right so take me through that day if you could 1972 when you were going for the 68 kilogram freestyle wrestling gold you scored 57 points if i'm correct and had zero points scored on you 57 0. so maybe uh take me through almost the details what was your routine what was your process what was going through your mind your thoughts of that day yeah first of all uh it was quite a day because uh we weighed in every day at that time in the morning and that and that yeah we weighed in two hours before the start of the competition and so that didn't mean that you weighed in two hours for your russell because you didn't know whether you're gonna wrestle right away or later on in fact in that day i don't think i wrestled uh until later on in the evening so had all day to recover but i didn't really need it anyway because you know it wasn't really pulling a whole lot of weight but just uh it was just interesting but what was in your mind what would what were you thinking were you nervous were you i was confident i was confident you knew you were going to win the gold yeah i knew i was going to win uh but in reality you're i'm not i didn't know it from a cocky point of view i only knew it because for the last three and a half years i've been going to practice and i'd been winning every practice you felt good and i i hardly ever lose a takedown and if i lost this if i somebody scored on me it was like when i went to bed i couldn't sleep until i figured it out or if i didn't figure it out i would fall asleep and i would be whoa i would wake up with the answer of what i needed why i got scored upon so maybe now that you've won the gold can you tell me in the practice room when somebody took you down how how do you take dan gable down in the in the practice room timing very difficult but yes somebody could because they were going for one move all i wanted was one move whereas you know if you can arrest somebody and rest in the whole practice or half of practice for at least 10 15 minutes and they were maybe gonna score if they could work it in their mind but they knew that was going to be their victory so in the practice room maybe you can educate me and that when you're going for the olympic gold it you didn't want to allow any takedowns so there's no such thing as working on some kind of weird position a weak point or something it's important to not let down the take down it's kind of like what we're saying before if something happened and somebody scored on me in a certain way i would go over that situation over that situation over it again and i would come up with an answer and then i would actually test it maybe i wouldn't go right back the next day because i didn't want the guy to you know do not have some i didn't want him to think that i was thinking about it all night i didn't tell him but maybe three days later when he wrestled again i uh actually had it figured out because it it he wasn't able to or even if i was in on to take a a an offensive move and i got stopped and didn't score you know i had to go back and filter that but it wasn't something that usually i couldn't solve right i could usually solve it let's go back to the olympic games so i get up in the olympic in the morning and i'm not sure when the weigh-ins were but i think i was probably a pound over uh you know and that's about a half a kilo and 1.1 pounds is a kilo because we went in kilograms so what do you do with that pond you're right no i just i just went over to the they had a sauna there and i got in the sauna and the and the funny thing was the morning of the of the of the finals there was there was another athlete in the sauna and american or no it was a european i didn't i don't remember where she was from not a russian well you know what i kind of think it was a plot because it was a girl interesting and she didn't have her top on oh wow and that was pretty common and so you know it's kind of interesting you you think back about it because there's some funny things that that go on behind the scenes in olympic games in world games anytime when you have country against country and so there's some crazy stuff mine goes on yeah did any of it affect you did you was there anything well i almost stayed too long in the sun you los you lost a little bit of i lost a little more in a pound yeah but uh but it didn't really bother me because i wasn't like i wasn't like cutting a lot of weight so so your match against the russian the um how's your life yeah jolietf he's went on to be a two-time world champion a silver medalist as well i mean this is an incredible wrestler so what was going through your mind uh before stepping on the mat with that guy you've beaten a bunch of wrestlers haven't had a point scored on you and you're stepping on the mat against the russian who you said was really they picked the soviets picked to beat you right and i know why they picked him because he had a great attitude so he wasn't just the typical artist he was a good artist he he hooked elbows like sad gelav and he's from that area of the world where they have some of those types of moves but he was and he was a goer but by cutting him down a weight he lost some of that go and i don't know if you you got to that's a process you got to go about scientifically yeah you know and so you know if you don't do it as an american it can really hurt your performance if you don't do it as a a russian it can hurt your performance and they already didn't really do that a lot where you usually wrestle the weight where it was more like your weight and so by cutting him down you know maybe slowed his belief down a little bit you saw it in him the spirit was a little bit gone when you were facing yeah but then he came back and he won you know rest of the matches and he was in the round robin and he was able to go to the finals uh but he had lost another match actually against in the round-robin against the japanese so i i think i had already gained enough of artistic being able to finish a match once i lost my match in college for the last two years i took on some of that artistic uh work and i think that he was already hoping to win but he was hoping to win by a long ways because he had to pin me or beat me by eight points to be able to win the gold and uh you know that wasn't going to happen i mean the chances of pin is pretty good is it hard to pin down gable versus take down like have you taken risks where you could pay for them i can't remember too many that i took uh that would actually put me in a danger position i've taken risk but the risks were so scientifically technically correct that i wouldn't land in that danger zone it's like if i'm going to lock up and throw you i'm not going to throw you to my own back and roll you through i'm going to turn in the air so you're scientific about it yeah exactly i you know he just i learned the hard way early on there was moves from collegiate wrestling that you did that exposed your shoulders which it cost me in some early freestyle matches against great wrestlers but i would go back to my collegiate escaping type moves to where i hit a granby roll where you expose your shoulders and you lose two points every time but you learn that that's not the system but if you hadn't wrestled much you would get exposed under maybe a desperate situation you would hit it so you won the gold how did it feel i think it would have i think the question would be how would it feel if you lost the gold for me because i already went through that once not at that highest level but the national collegiate championship level my senior year the larry owings law larry owings yeah and that didn't set well were you afraid of that happening again at the olympic level was that no i really wasn't but it was why i changed my philosophy of training and added to the scientific artist type and i if i had won that match even though i wouldn't have felt good about it even if i squeaked it out i wasn't feeling good about that match it would have affected me a little bit but if i don't want it i would have got over it i mean i'm not over it now yeah i mean i don't know why i was doing this kind of stuff right before my match yes by by that i mean this kind of stuff talking interviews oh yeah journalists yeah and i really wasn't a good talker i mean me and you were talking pretty good right now except for i got a little cold but but uh i don't think i could say two words hardly then and they took takes wide world of sports says hey just we want you to be the introduction for our next week's show yeah so just say hey i'm dan gable come watch me as i finish my career undefeated 182.00 that's what they want me to say everybody assumed you'd be undefeated and i said it i had to take it 22 times and in the last two or three times they wrote it out and i read it and it still it wasn't like i just said it yeah i was reading it like hi i'm dan gable come come up you know that type of stuff so it and he finally just closed the book and said hey that's good enough but i turned and it was my time to wrestle yeah and so you know you just you learn that and for me it was great coaching experience because that's what i turned into be you know i coached for longer than i wrestled yes and i put out a lot of champions but you learn through mistakes that even in your own career that you had made you know it's it's a never learning process it's an ever learning process have you ever been afraid on the map does fear have any role do you think for a wrestler or it must be well i'm sure fear is out there and i'm sure that was to my advantage almost every time i'm sure in my olympic finals as really if he had these doubts he probably had these doubts and that gave gives me the the edge and i don't know if i really ever had fear but obviously there was points and times where i didn't perform as well not many but a few and if i look back of it look back at it i don't think it was that american you know raw raw raw stuff i think it was probably the fear of uh not being an artist as much you know maybe this guy might be better than me uh scientifically and uh you know you're a scientist i think that got to me more than anything else i i said early on that i want to eliminate ever having to worry about getting tired in a match so i kind of eliminated that so i got rid of that point and i do think that in wrestling that is one of the fears that a lot of wrestlers have actually how they feel during the match and and do they get are they going to get tired and and is it going to affect my performance and as a coach that really was one of the things i tried to eliminate on all my athletes so there wasn't that fear factor but that fear factor would be put upon my opponent which would give me an edge uh but that's not what i needed as much i need to just focus make sure that i was doing the right things and i needed my team to be focused so i made sure that for my mistakes as an athlete or even as a coach sometimes that i didn't repeat them didn't repeat them and if you make a mistake once and then you can repeat it then it's like you didn't learn anything your goal throughout your wrestling career as you've beautifully put was to work so hard that you pass out on the mat right that you would be carried off the mat so you never did successfully in that's one of the ways you failed in your careers you've never worked so hard that you've passed out have you ever come close do you remember a time you've come close you've been pushed to the limits of exhaustion you know the question is really a good question about that pushing to you collapse yeah because i don't as a coach today i don't think i could if i said that to my athletes i don't know i could get in trouble because you know it's understood isn't it by the athletes yeah they understand it but the outside might not understand it because it's almost like what do you mean they're you push them to the point where they go collapse that means they may die or that something might happen to them and you know that's dangerous that's dangerous we can't have our kid in that type of atmosphere but it's something that's highly unlikely that's going to happen but i'm going to tell you there's many times in a practice where i had pushed myself to all of a sudden the whistle blew or it was time to stop and when i got up off the mat or wherever i was at and i needed water i need i needed fresh air because you're usually in a fairly small room with a lot of guys that the heat rises and you know it's hard to breathe and that i can remember and i stayed a lot of times not by the door the far end of the room i can remember walking from the far end of the room to that door and i can remember am i going to make it the next step am i going to make it the next step i need air i need water i need oxygen i need to get out of here it didn't happen often but i can cut recount four or five times in my career that i pushed myself to that level where i thought i was gonna maybe go out but every step i was dizzy but once i got to that door i was able to open it and go out yeah and grab the water and get cold water in my face and so no i never really was able to do that and i think the story is in a book where my my daughter pushed a collapse molly he made you proud oh my gosh you know she didn't win yeah but she pushed her collapse yeah now did she suffer because of that well she didn't get to go to the next event because she didn't she had to qualify but i think it probably helped her too realizing because she was wood in the race and she was beating people she normally never pushed but she was at a new level that she had never been before and she only needed about five feet to finish and it was just one of those things that i bet there was a lot of learning that she did there and uh it probably made her realize that she could be better but she had to hold up though so you mentioned in wrestling life that the brand's brothers looked up to royce alger who was known for pushing the limits of physical wrestling but not getting too rough so how do you find the line between extreme physical wrestling but at the same time not rough wrestling or angry wrestling so that line between aggression tough wrestling and anger well i think anger would cause less successful wrestling i think anger would cause you to make mistakes and actually get out of position because i think anger is kind of a loss of control and there can be a furious type of attack but i think if it crosses the line to anger then you're going to be vulnerable and so royce and the brands wrestled to the edge through the edge but when the whistle blew they stopped and there's people that when the whistle blows they keep going it's like in a football game a fight breaks out and it's after the whistles blow well when the whistle blew they they backed off so that whistle was something that in a match that that kind of gave them the boundaries but perhaps it could be a little bit of fuel so in wrestling tough the book that you just got from mike chapman uh the new addition talks about bill cole undefeated northern iowa wrestler and uh how he talked about how my strength speed and ability to think were increased tremendously by just sitting apart from the action prior to the match and getting into a state of controlled anger so can anger trolling controlled yeah so anger could be fuel as long as it's controlled right exactly you have that line one side of the line you can have an anger for performance and the other side of the line you if you go beyond that it's not going to be for performance it's going to be for not performance because you're gonna lose points it's a fine line there's definitely a fine line you're talking about roy selger you're talking about tom brands you're talking about terry brands i mean you got world championship titles there you got olympic championship title there you got a world silver medalist in uh in uh and roy selger and you know and that that's what when i talk to him about the world silver medalist he's haunted by that because he was actually 20 seconds away from winning when he got beat in the end there but that's part of the game and it's i don't know whether he's okay with it or not because he says every after talking about things he goes i'm okay with it now but then he keeps talking about it so i don't really think he's okay with it and i it's it's hard for him to actually make amends to himself when you really don't do it i mean it's no matter what the situation even with the owings loss yeah it still eats i mean yeah i'm a world champion he's not and he wanted to be i'm olympic champion he's not he wanted to be one of the greatest coaches of all time yeah yeah yeah and so you know so he you know it's like why do i keep going back to it because because you're not you don't get over those things so royce really keeps going back to it even though he says he's fine and he and but then he realizes he's really not fine because that's just the nature of the game and that's why he was able to win national titles and and make uh world teams and and stuff like that uh you know even if what's interesting about him he's analyzed all the people that he's wrestled and a lot of them have won world and olympic championships and he's beaten every one of them at one time or another and he didn't get to that world championship gold or a limping cold and that i i he says it because they did it so he show he's showing people that that i beaten those guys yeah but apparently he didn't beat him at the right time and so it still haunts him you don't get away from that stuff i mean it's just like anything in life that's really high i mean it doesn't have to be athletics i mean you think i'm ever going to get over uh the murder of my sister and you might not even know that let me pause for a second please you've talked about it you've written about it so i hope it's okay for me to say that your sister your older sister on may 31 1964 was raped and murdered by a local boy so the echoes of pain and anger from that tragic day do they ripple through your life still through your wrestling through your coaching through your the way you when you wake up in the morning what is that like it can be very emotional to me under certain circumstances and it can be the mood i'm in right you know it can be maybe if i've had a mountain dew or or maybe if i've had a gable beer yeah yeah or or or uh or maybe if you turn the country music up a little bit loud you know it emotions come out and everybody has them in their life it just so happens you know what brings it out and hopefully it's nothing that you do to the extreme point of to where it brings it out for me it's not extreme i don't have to have any of that really i can get emotional how did that change you as a man what it did was realize that i was already pretty well developed because i was only a sophomore 15 years old in high school and i had parents that weren't making it and my parents are a lot older than me and now that we're down just to me and my parents and i'm going to be around the house for another two years and they had just lost a a daughter that was the only only other sibling they weren't handling it they they were the ones that were suffering much more than me even though i always look back upon one area that i wasn't good at was communication at that time except inside the wrestling room because i had been tipped off and tipped off what do you mean well the neighbor boy said that something to me about my sister just three weeks before that that's right that really wasn't normal or practical and i said nothing to nobody you you don't is there a part of you that blames yourself yeah absolutely absolutely but i'm 15 years old and you make mistakes uh and you don't really act on everything that happens in your life but i can tell you how it affected me and i acted a lot on anything that maybe wasn't even of that consequence i mean because i had four daughters and i'm telling you when they left every time to go somewhere in a car or go out with someplace i always said something to him and they would always say dad you said that last night i don't care what like i love you or like i'd be careful i'd stay like don't be driving and drinking or or don't be uh in a car with somebody that's uh you know of of the of the same nature or you know stay out of trouble you know don't go be somewhere where you you know you have i said you know how to get out of a car if you if your car goes into the river you know you know i just you know i'm always thinking ahead a little bit just in case if something uh did happen and i it goes back to that goes back to that walk to school with that with that young man that when he was talking to me and i just i took it and i kept it inside me and once i found out she had been murdered it it took me maybe 25 to 30 minutes and i told my dad i think i know who killed her and he looked at me and he just like he slapped me actually he pushed me against the car he didn't slide he pushed me in his car my mom slaps me and she was the one that slapped me around a little bit but my dad he uh he he pushed me against his car what do you mean you might know something about this i said dad i i don't for sure but and i would probably all crying but and i don't i doubt if i was crying yet i've probably cried a lot of tears since but but you know i just said hey i was walking to school with this neighbor and i never had walked to school with him before and he was kind of a troubled kid and he said something about diane and it wasn't good but i i didn't he goes why didn't you say something i said i daddy i i just boy talk you know so you know and so he hugged he hugged me he hugged me he hugged me and uh you know it it was one of these things that it's definitely made me a lot of who i am because there's been a lot of choices and i don't i took the word choice out of my life and i just like to say okay do the right thing do the thing that's that you should do and so i don't really i don't it's like you're going to do this or this well what do you mean which one's better you know well then i'm so i don't have that choice yeah just give me the right way to go and so it's not that i've been perfect by any means but it's made a big difference in my life uh on how i handled my life it's it's probably given me the opportunity to be married for 44 years it's just given me opportunities to uh be better in my life and and i you know i i want to thank my sister for that you know it's uh and i think my family was ready to make a split because of that incident they're blaming each other and i think that uh i was able to help but more than that they really liked each other but they didn't really know it at the time until i got out of the house two years later it probably was going on for a couple years until i moved on and went to college then they found out they really liked each other when they were alone and it worked out pretty good but i think them being able to follow me not just through college and olympics and worlds but my coaching so it's the same the same success and factor you know the excitement and and all those things gave them a real purpose and uh it gave my four daughters it gave my wife uh you know a real purpose to be able to be close to all these champions and championships and and and now it's because now it's like there's a family of 22 and they're all interested in what what we're interested in and it's going good knock on wood but you know it's something that when all of a sudden you've got too much time in your hands and you're not doing accomplishing much that things probably you know get off get off track what do you think is the role of family in wrestling can a man do it alone and if not where's family most important you know you could do it alone but why would you want to yeah i think the chances of doing it alone are much less than the chances of doing it together yeah i know they say don't bring your profession home sometimes they say that this might never i never got away from my profession yeah and you know sometimes i it's like my house right here so when i'm moving home and i'm not gonna have an office because i'm not gonna coach anymore or i'm not gonna be an assistant athletic director for a while that got to do something that gives you a little bit of a break not you necessarily maybe the person you're living with and so i don't know if you looked outside there i got a cabin right out of my backyard you probably can't see it right there but what's in the cabin that's my house away from my house it's only 30 feet from my house and it's my office and it's my workout room it's my i got a sauna there it's it's a bed upstairs if i need it if i ever uh get too close and she says hey why don't you go sleep in the other house but you know he kicks me out of the bed but get the heck out it's never happened yeah but i do spend a lot of time out there and uh it's uh you know you gotta have a little distance sometimes and you gotta know you're gonna know your role and so all of a sudden when you're a guy that's been gone your whole life from eight o'clock in the morning until close to 7 30 or 8 o'clock at night so 11 12 hours a day then all of a sudden you're not gone as much even though you still work she's trying to slow me down now i'm doing uh not so much like here what we're doing right now but when i get in the car and drive somewhere or fly somewhere you know like just last night i just went to bed and i hadn't told her that this guy called me and he wants me to uh speak for uh you want to build another wrestling wants to start another wrestlers in business networking out in uh delaware because we don't have any colleges and wrestling in delaware and so i said well you know you know gladly that because that's my life you know so but then all of a sudden i i didn't say anything to my wife until all of a sudden this morning and i told her that i might go on the friday the 21st of december oh no well well i said that's not this christmas she goes we're celebrating christmas that weekend early because a lot of the family can't be i'll be here except for that weekend yeah and i said oh well that's not gonna work but i kind of didn't say anything to her first and then well i'll tell you she started getting a little emotional and if i want to stay married for another year 45 years then i better tell those people that i got family obligations because uh yeah it depends what's most important i love wrestling i love wrestling and i want to start another west helper start another wrestlers and business network but there's more than one dang gable out there well maybe not but but but there's there's a lot of people that are um maybe even closer yeah and they got big names i mean we're we're doing pretty well right now i mean we got first two years ago and we got second this year uh and then we got the women's freestyles doing good in wrestling we got to work a little bit on our greco yet but but they are working on it but our men's freestyle team right now are are excellent and you know and uh the key for them is to get them all on the same page instead of just have new highlights and by that i'm saying who look you look and see who won this year well the three guys that have never won before won this year we had three world champions our two past world champions didn't win this year i mean they they did okay you know they got medals yeah deborah's win no he did not he got third oh that's right he got bronze yeah and inside got i mean um snyder got second so those two are our main guys you know so the three new guys that came through were guys that hadn't won world gold in fact two of them have never made a world team before and so when we have three world champions this year but we needed all five of them to come through to win the uh the championships and so the key really is getting them all to do the same at the same time year in and year out and not just uh based on okay uh burl's got beat this year so he'll win next year it's got to be every year if you're capable of doing that and that's what the coaching staff has to do it's kind of funny that i do have a lot of influence actually on the coaching staffs right now at the usa level because the the women's freestyle guy is uh is terry steiner and he wrestled for me he was a national champion he's got a twin brother that's at uh fresno state and then billy zaddick is the uh freestyle coach and he wrestled for the hawkeyes back in uh the early days and uh he was the national champion so we got a lot of uh former gable influence on there but but it's got deep roots in there in 2013 the international olympic committee ioc voted wrestling out of the olympics so a lot of folks know about this the absurdity of it and so on but in a big picture you can step back now it's five years later what did you learn from that experience well first of all did it surprise me yeah but did it really surprise me no you gotta run you gotta have people running the organization that are top-notch if you take anything for granted and you're not the person of authority somebody can kick you out and even though we had a lot of authority because we're wrestling we're the one of the first sports in the olympics ever and that we uh think that you know we're in 180 some countries and uh some of the number one countries in the world that are politically strong have the sport you know we thought we were okay but then you got to look and see who's running the ilc the ioc the international olympic committee yeah and then you got to see that in wrestling we don't have anybody in there i mean that shocked me we've never had anybody on the ilc from wrestling yeah you know why because we didn't have to but yes that's wrong you have to and if you don't have somebody looking out for you right within the structure then it's pretty easy people turn their head yeah but all it took was the statement you guys are kicked out of the olympics you guys are done everybody came together i think well yeah i mean it's the first time in ever in history that probably all this competitive people that were working for their own agenda turn that agenda to the sport and that so that made a big difference and we got a lot done in fact in america there was several people that were really out there that we didn't know about until this point in time and when they came aboard now they're still aboard that doesn't mean we're doing everything perfect because just because we got voted back in before we even got kicked out really that doesn't mean we're by any means safe we have to do some of the things that i'm talking about or some of the things that we didn't do before we can't fall right back into the same mess yes and so our leadership got changed and it's better but it's got to stay better but there are things that we could still be doing to make sure that we don't have situations like this happen i'll tell you when i first learned about it i was like i broke down and wept yeah again it's like every once in a while i'll break down and and and cry about my sister yeah or i'll break down i don't know if i cry about losing to owings but i'd probably get more determined but that's kind of uh you have to go back and and think about those moments when you heard when i heard that moment and i i said i it just overcame me it was like four o'clock 4 4 30 in the morning when i heard about it and uh my wife had been been up looking at the internet and she she woke me up i thought she was joking but i jumped out of bed really quick when she said that i knew she was serious and i started making phone calls right then to find out if it was true and when i found out was true you know it was just like devastating you know and it was one of these things that it's a nightmare and but you don't let it happen again it's that simple yeah and you keep getting stronger yeah and uh if people haven't read they should read the loss of dan gable by ray thompson the espn article that kind of in this very beautiful poetic way ties together uh all the losses of dan gable the losing your sister losing to larry owings losing wrestling from the olympics all of these tragedies of various forms so that's the ioc there's politics and you're sort of being very pragmatic but stepping back wrestling is one of the oldest forms of combat period dating back there's cave drawings 15 thousand years ago and if you look at uh the ancient olympics the greek olympics twenty seven hundred years ago did you ever when you wrestled or coached do you now see wrestling in this way a freestyle folk style wrestling the purity of sort of two human beings locked in combat the the roots of that us just human beings this fair struggle between two men or two women i don't think i ever looked at it as anything but just to a combat and i think there's times that have made me figure out how to make that combat better there's little markers or little points in time in your life that make you wonder or i should say determined to be able to get more out of yourself and to be able to take it to a new level and i don't think people can actually feel that way unless you've actually had a lot of accomplishments in anything i think there's anything out there i mean no matter what sport or or breaking the four minute mile i mean when you broke that when they broke that roger banister broke that four minute mile i can't imagine him breaking it from his best time being 4 30. you know it's one of these things that along the line there that he did had some close calls or he had some coaching that was given him the opportunity to become a little better but i think because he was doing well and being very successful that the opportunity came and so as for me it's like the same thing i had so much success and so many practices that went well and so much goodness out of this sport that it gave me the opportunity to really look more finite and look more how i can even make it better and so it's like if you look at my library upstairs i got a library upstairs and there's a lot of books up there from the family and but if you look at the gable books up there i got a lot of russian technique books i can't read the book but i can see the diagrams and i can see this the figures they don't really show it in pictures they do it in drawings and and so it's like when i was trying to beat the best that has labeled the best because they win the world championships every year since they've been just about involved and i don't think they got started involved until like the 50s but but you know it's something you know you study the best who's out there but then you don't focus so much on the best that you can't beat the best you learn from them but there's something that they don't have that you can have toughness to technique to the art to the science yeah all that stuff and that's why even talking to you when you're sitting over there you love mit and you're bragging about it over harvard you know you know it's because it's true in your eyes and and that's and that's great and it might be but uh but it's the same type of thing that uh you know there's something that you're probably stealing from harvard yeah but you won't give them credit well then in the interest of time uh i've read that you're pretty serious you're pretty seriously into fishing so what's the biggest fish you ever caught what are we talking about here are we you're talking about no i don't think i've ever caught a big ocean fish i'm not i'm a river lake fisherman i have trout no probably uh probably northern okay i probably caught a northern that weighed 20 some pounds uh you know i my fish i like to catch is walleyes and that the reason why i like to catch them because they're really good eating fish and the best eating fish are not the real big ones uh you know it's kind of kind of interesting they i got people hunting deer right on my land and they're looking for the big bucks but they're not the best eaters if you want if you want to eat them but they're the best trophy so you know i do have a couple trophy walleyes on the wall but but uh most time i throw the big ones back and put them back in there so i don't know if you know there's a book by hemingway called old man in the sea and part of it and uh ernest hemingway ernest hemingway yeah and he uh there's a there's an old man that basically uh catches an 18-footer but it can't pull it in doesn't have the strength so they together spend while the sharks eat away at it i mean this is very powerful story i think one in the nobel prize but he says it's better to be lucky the old man says it's better to be lucky but i would rather be exact that that that way when luck comes you're ready so let me ask uh what do you think about luck do you believe in free will that we have actions that control the direction destination of our life or does luck and some other outside forces really land you where you end up for me i'm not about luck but i do think there is luck is involved but i think it's mostly created uh just how lucky you are through preparations and things happen things have happened in my life forever and a lot of good things and a lot of people could say hey you've been pretty lucky to win all these awards i don't know if you analyze my life i don't think it was involved with luck you know i think it was more involved with preparation and you know and again science had you been smarter had you understood that you could do some things and be just as lucky that'd be great but i'm only as smart as today so when i was training in my life and me even training people in my life as of that moment that's how lucky i am to uh be able to um have whatever is available to me and that's what you call that a lot of science so for me i i think that uh you know like right now if i look back i do a lot of things different just because things are proven differently like i'd give people water during practice and i did and i would let them change their running wrestling shoes into running shoes to run sprints on the concrete or i would actually maybe um maybe i had a guy climb 12 ropes after practice one after another and then maybe the next day i'd do it again ah you know i might not make him do it the next day i might let him recover a little bit more and uh you got to learn keep adding to your philosophy and your philosophy may have been great at that time but it's at that time and what is really important is where you at with this time today and so there's better ways to do things now if you ever take attitude out of it and just depend on total science then you know you're not going to be as as uh you know i think it's i i listened to a couple of people that are really pretty famous people uh one of them was john irving he was a writer yeah and he told me he said you think i really learned how to be a great writer in uh writing school i he said yeah i learned a lot there but really what gave me the ability to stay focused just to work extra hours to be more disciplined was wrestling practices that's right he was a wrestler yeah yeah he goes i go back to that that's what gave me that chance you know and and there's a guy in iowa that uh a guy named norman borlaug he uh he he learned he he invented a process to feed the underprivileged countries of the world and he was a wrestler and he said the same thing and he worked extremely hard and he said i give a lot of credit to the sport of wrestling and even though i was i'm known for this and i got a statue in in washington dc because i saved a billion lives plus uh i'm gonna give wrestling a lot of credit so you know i think some of these mma stars and some of these guys that maybe weren't wrestlers that had to wrestle russell had to fight wrestling guys and stuff missed a little bit there but i think the ones that did have wrestling probably have a really good chance and can adapt to the other ones but you know i think every martial art or every activity is good and you probably can't skip any but i don't think they're ever going to overlook and say that wrestling's pretty not are not valuable because it is however that doesn't mean you're going to make it you still got to take the values and apply it whatever area you're going to be in and and some people forget that some people can't get over the highness of getting your arm raised in a wrestling match and i and you know what what's even greater than me getting my arm raised is that i if i'm a coach or if i doesn't belong with you that you get your arm raised yeah and even if you don't get your arm raised it's what you walk away with and how and how you learn to uh handle that as well because there's going to be some losses but you don't want many because you don't want to get used to losing i can tell you that that's the hunger for the win it's the brotherhood the sisterhood of the wrestling room and it's hard work and science that's going to be luck at the end of the day absolutely that luck you know i'm you know i i like luck but i think it's created by uh the opportunity that you make your luck you make your luck yeah dan it was a huge honor thank you for welcoming me into your home and for having this conversation yeah no problem good man thanks for listening to this conversation with dan gable and thank you to our sponsors trial labs a machine learning company expressvpn grammarly writing helper tool and simply save home security so the choice is artificial intelligence privacy grammar or safety choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from dan gable the first period is won by the best technician the second period is won by the kid in the best shape and the third period is won by the kid with the biggest heart thank you for listening and hope to see you next time