The following is an excerpt from the book A Wrestling Life 2: More Inspiring Stories of Dan Gable by Dan Gable. Gable led the University of Iowa to 15 NCAA Championships and 21 consecutive Big 10 Championships during his 21 seasons as head coach (1977-97). This chapter is entitled The Final Season, which chronicles Gable's 1997 season that resulted in the all-time point record at the NCAA Championships -- a record that still stands. 

Click here to order the book. Copyright 2017 University of Iowa Press. Used with permission University of Iowa Press.

The Final Season

Early one morning in December of 1996, I jumped out of bed, and as my feet hit the floor, I crashed to the ground. It was tough to move, and it wasn’t letting up. It was like I had gotten hit with an explosive takedown and then the tight ride followed. (I’m only imagining what that is like, though, since I am the one who hits the takedown and the tight ride!) I couldn’t get up, so Kathy quickly helped me back into bed. Hoping the pain would go away, I lay there, waiting. But the pain just wasn’t letting up.

Kathy got me in to see an orthopedic specialist at the University of Iowa Hospital that day. I called my assistants at the office to make sure they ran the show without me. I’d been to practice almost every day for twenty-five years straight. I knew the culture of discipline and hard work was there, and things could move along without me, but I still needed to implement the fine points of coaching on a daily basis.

It turned out that this was a serious injury, and not just something I could work through: my hip had fractured and needed to be replaced. We scheduled an early January hip replacement surgery. I quickly developed a great relationship with Dr. Larry Marsh, a surgeon at the University of Iowa Hospital and the current chair of the orthopedics department. It’s very important to try to build this kind of relationship, if one can, with the person who is going to help decide your future.

This all meant that I was going to have a lot of downtime, so I had to learn how to coach from my bedside or on crutches. This gave me more time to think and analyze, which ended up being very productive, both for me and for the team. It gave me the chance to realize our greatest strengths, and lesser strengths, in a way I never had before. If I hadn’t been injured, I would have just spent more time working the wrestlers on the mat, instead of figuring out and correcting the real issues.

I was listening to a dual meet on the radio in early January, and freshman Kasey Gilliss had just lost a match. Something about it didn’t sound right through the radio announcing, so I began thinking about his wrestling. Kasey came to Iowa with a certain high-risk style of wrestling that used a lot of big moves. We were really focusing on basic technique with him, and as a result, we were encouraging him to wrestle in this more basic style that was still new to him and therefore wasn’t as effective.

I made a few calls from my hospital bed, saying it was time to let Kasey wrestle the best way he knew how. We told Kasey, “Go back to your way of wrestling, and if they are there, you can hit those leg shots we’ve been teaching you.” This seemed to work well for Kasey, and as he started hitting his own moves of headlocks, hip tosses, foot sweeps, lateral drops, front headlocks, and go behinds, more leg attacks opened up for him. A varied attack like that is great. When your opponent knows you can attack from everywhere, it puts fear into them. Kasey did this by mixing what he was best at with what we taught him.

Our 177-pounder, Tony Ersland, was another puzzle that needed to be solved. He was a great kid, really nice. He was so nice that it was tough for us to go hard on him. I soon realized that he reminded me of another athlete a few years back, Travis Fiser. Travis was another really nice guy, but he didn’t give great performances until I started treating him pretty rough. I realized that this was what Tony needed as well. Anyway, it couldn’t hurt trying since being nice to him wasn’t working, and Tony wanted it so bad. It was his senior year, and his first year as a regular, so it was both his first and last!

But I quickly found that I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t be mean to this nice young man. One day an opening appeared. I was hobbling around and entered the locker room during practice, and there was Tony in the corner with his head in his hands, crying.

“Tony!” I said, surprised to see him like this during practice.

He sobbed, “Coach, I’ve been waiting for these days my whole life. They’re here now, and I’m not performing up to my ability!”

This broke my heart, but instead of joining in and sobbing with him, I knew I needed to be stern. It could have been the drugs from my recent surgery, but this time I got tough with him. I knew he needed it. “Tony,” I said to him, “it’s time to man up. You think this is tough? Wait until you go out in life, get a job, get married, have kids—now that’s tough. And if you can’t handle this, where are you heading?” It was one of those moments that you don’t forget. Tony turned the corner and started to improve shortly after.

Our heavyweight, Wes Hand, was another one of the youngsters on the team. He was very good, but he either didn’t know it yet, or he did know it, but something was holding him back mentally. I saw some really great skills and talent in him a few times early on, but because I did see it, I wanted it every time. Show me something once, and I learned to expect greatness. So we had to build up his confidence in himself and his skills. Once Wes’s mind was in sync with his wrestling talent, he could do just about anything technical in the sport.

Jessie Whitmer, our lightweight, was a fifth-year senior like Tony Ersland, and he had real potential, too. He hadn’t been in our starting lineup regularly the previous few years, which was an obstacle for him. He had been competing quite often at tournaments where more athletes were allowed to enter beyond the ten starting weight classes, and he had done okay at several of them. But during this final year of regular competition, he wasn’t finishing his matches strong.

He really liked his girlfriend, now wife, Meredith, and it apparently really inspired him when she painted her toenails bright red. So he started painting his toenails bright red, and as he put on his socks and wrestling shoes before matches, that extra adrenaline helped fire him up. I noticed this spark and started making sure that his toenails were freshly painted before his matches. They always were, but I kept a small bottle of red nail polish close by, just in case!

The other six wrestlers in our lineup were already credentialed All-Americans led by Lincoln McIlravy and Joe Williams, both also returning NCAA champions. We had another NCAA champion, Jeff McGinness, on the sidelines, redshirting that year so he could get bigger and stronger. It worked, and he won another NCAA title the following year at a higher weight class. Still, this team struggled a bit this season with a 21–13 loss to Oklahoma State at the National Duals in Lincoln, Nebraska.

McIlravy suffered a concussion early on and had to sit out part of the season. It was especially difficult for him because Lincoln had such a crazy way of wrestling. “It was frustrating because the success I had at Iowa had been the result of a tremendous amount of hard work,” says McIlravy. “The confidence I had was that I was better prepared than the other guys. That year I didn’t have the ability to work as hard as I had the year before. I had a series of concussions that year and had to miss a good portion of the year. I couldn’t even really workout that year. Even getting your heart rate up can affect a concussion.

“I went into the Big Tens pretty ill-prepared, and even the Nationals, since there really isn’t enough time to get ready for that type of competition. It was a frustrating year and a challenging year. The results were fine in the end, but the performances weren’t what they could have been if I was healthy.”

We struggled at the Big Ten championships, winning only two weight classes with Mark Ironside at 134 pounds and Lincoln McIlravy at 150 pounds, as well as winning the team championship by a somewhat narrow margin. I thought we could get by at the Big Tens, so I started out sitting in the stands with my crutches. That didn’t last long, and within an hour I bolted to the stage, somehow without my crutches! It was one of those moments where your body just reacts without any thoughts. I found my way to my wrestlers’ corners and stayed there for the rest of the tournament.

On the way back to Iowa City, I made plans for our last phase of training before the NCAAs. It was only eleven days away at the University of Northern Iowa. I had already made the decision to step down after this tournament, but I didn’t like the thought of stepping down without one final championship. I told myself, “What will be, will be!” That’s easy to say, but I was still anxious about our results. These young men needed a jolt to bring them up a notch to win this final battle of the season. We needed something to make the difference between finishing number two in the country and number one.

We traveled home from the Big Tens Sunday night and started our final round of practices Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday’s practice was a good tough one, and after it ended, I went into the office to continue planning. After a short time in the office, I did my nightly walk through the locker room and wrestling room, picking up a few items left by the wrestlers: sweatshirts, headgear, and so on. Stuff that, when stolen, cost the athletes a ton. The costs were inflated to encourage them not to lose things, but they still got left out sometimes. Peggy Jenn, the Iowa equipment manager, was proud that her plan worked pretty well, because once the wrestlers were charged for a lost item, they usually didn’t come back for seconds.

When I walked into the wrestling room that night, I saw Mark Ironside slumped on the mat against a big structural column. He was sitting in his soaked workout clothes in a pool of sweat, mostly asleep. “What the heck are you doing still here?” I asked.

“Coach, I’m exhausted. I haven’t recovered from the Big Tens yet,” he said in a low, worn voice.

“Okay, up and at ’em,” I told him, helping haul him to his feet. “Make sure you sauna and get plenty of cold water before you leave, with your lack of cool down.”

I kept waking up all that night, thinking about Ironside’s looks and comments. My thoughts went back to 1994 and my last-minute training with the US World team and how that backfired. I realized that I couldn’t make the same mistake again.

The 1994 World team had plenty of credentialed athletes, but they didn’t look good two weeks out from competition. They were coming off a disappointing finish in the Goodwill Games, and upon watching them for the first two days of my arrival at training camp at Foxcatcher Farms, I didn’t see any positives. As a result, I worked them too hard for too long and too far out of their routine habits too close to competition. It was too many toos.

I should have seen the positives in who they were and what they had already accomplished. My thinking normally is “Do it once and I expect it all the time.” Instead, I only focused on all the negatives. We did win a couple of medals: Melvin Douglas took third at 198 pounds and Bruce Baumgartner took second at 286 pounds. But these days I wonder, how did we get those medals after what I put them through? With more time and better relationships between the athletes and the coaches, me included, that team could have won it all. It’s better to go with what you have than to force-feed them. I force-fed them and they swallowed.

I had been involved with, but was not the actual head coach of, World or Olympic teams for ten years. I think this made the transition even tougher for both athletes and me as the coach. I would have been better off sliding in easy and not pushing the envelope. Then, we could have gone from there in the direction needed for more success.

This 1997 Hawkeye team was too close to the NCAA finals for me to really push them. They didn’t look good, but they had been proven before. We had six All-Americans, two of whom held a total of three NCAA titles. I knew they could wrestle and wrestle well; I just had to make sure they felt good and were motivated.

At our 6:30 a.m. practice the next morning, we warmed up really well. Then, when they thought the wrestling was going to begin, I told them to hit the sauna and showers instead. They were so surprised they actually stood there and looked at me like I was kidding. Once they realized I was serious, they did so.

The rest of the time before the NCAAs was focused on good warm-ups and short blasts of wrestling. I stressed recovery, along with scoring, feeling good, and team bonding. To this day, I thank God I ran into Ironside that night! He was the heartbeat of the team, and his own heart was pounding from exhaustion.

So the stage was set.

Kasey Gillis started the Hawks off with a planned two-on-one tie, which led to a foot sweep to a headlock to a pin. The Hawks won a record number of matches in a row on the second day, and that disrupted the trophy presenters. The tournament administrators apparently expected the Hawkeyes to come in second, because my high school coach, Bob Siddens, was set to present the award to the runner-up team. After our sweep of victories that day though, I heard his name called over the sound system: “Bob Siddens, come to the head table.” They changed his role so he was now presenting the award to the championship team.

We had six wrestlers in the finals after day two, with two others still going for third place. Two wrestlers lost their pivotal match in their quest to become All-Americans in the last round on Friday night.

On the final day, Mike Uker ended up taking fifth, and Kasey Gilliss ended up sixth, both All-Americans. This was Uker’s second time as an All-American.

During the finals, five out of six of our wrestlers won. Mike Mena was the only defeat that day, and that was in overtime. I actually made a mistake with Mena in our team meeting after the semis that Friday night. Mena was a senior and a four-time All-American who hadn’t made it to the finals before. In that meeting, I noticed he was enjoying his semis win and still had a smile on his face. I saw it but decided to let him enjoy it, thinking he would refocus shortly. This was a mistake. The next day after the wrestlebacks, we had another meeting, and Mena had the same smirk. He should have had the proper game face on before he went to sleep. I quickly told him that it was time to focus on what’s next: the finals. I hoped it was enough time, for he still had all afternoon. Obviously it wasn’t enough, though. It’s not that he wrestled poorly, just not as well as he needed to. The lesson here is, move your focus on to the next thing, not what you’ve already done.

Still, it was an outstanding performance for the Hawkeyes, as Fullhart ended the evening with an escape in overtime to win our last match, and it set a record that still holds. Everyone who wrestled contributed vital individual points to that record-setting team performance:

1st Place: Iowa—170 points (record performance)

2nd Place: Oklahoma State—113.5 points

118—Jessie Whitmer, 1st place

126—Mike Mena, 2nd place

134—Mark Ironside, 1st place

142—Kasey Gillis, 6th place

150—Lincoln McIlravy, 1st place

158—Joe Williams, 1st place

167—Mike Uker, 5th place

177—Tony Ersland, lost in the final round to place to the no. 1 seed in the tournament.

190—Lee Fullhart, 1st place

HWT—Wes Hand, lost in the final round to place

“There were a lot of exciting things going on that year,” says McIlravy of it now. “It was my senior year, and it was the last year Coach Gable ever coached. The nationals were at UNI, so there were a lot of Hawkeye fans there, and then to set the point record like that. I don’t think anybody thought we had that ability going in, and I don’t think anyone was worried about it. But we were very well prepared, and even Gable did some of his best coaching that year.

“One of the things that’s so impressive with Coach Gable over the years is that the situations are always different and your athletes are different, and he found ways to adapt to all those variables, including his health at the time, and be very, very successful.”