Dan had a lot of pressure on him. Jean was due to wrestle in the night's final match, and the PA announcer called for the match wrestlers: Jean had three minutes to get to the mat. "I'm not going to this tournament to be a national champion. ALEXANDER Stephen. He's an icon, a champion and the face of the sport. A stalemate brought the wrestlers back to the center, but, within seconds, the match was over. One competitor already knows hes going to win, and the other knows hes going to lose before either steps onto the mat, Gable likes to say. Just sitting here, talking about it it hurts. The two met in the finals of the 1970 NCAA wrestling championship. Gable, who admitted he was uncharacteristically worn down as the match dragged on, remembered telling himself, "Don't get caught in the cradle. [10], Gable has been written about in many magazines and numerous books, including Two Guys Named Dan (1976), From Gotch to Gable: A History of Wrestling in Iowa (1981), The Toughest Men in Sports (1984) and Legends of the Mat (2006), all by wrestling historian Mike Chapman.[11]. He coached 152 All-Americans, 45 national champions, 106 Big Ten champions, and 12 Olympians, including eight medalists. When he was 15 years old, a teenager from his neighborhood raped and murdered Gable's 19-year-old sister. Gable is in the U.S. Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Okla. Owings, despite a national title and an 87-4 record at Washington (52-1 in dual meets), is not. Gable grew up in Waterloo, Iowa. That loss is a key part of the creation story for the Dan Gable myth. He respected his pinning ability.". Shop official NCAA team and championship gear. It's full of great details like this in the aftermath of Gable's loss to Owings: With none of his family members in attendance that day, Owings remembers staggering around, trying to process what just happened. Drawing on personal accounts from former Maple Heights wrestlers, nationally known celebrities of the sport like Larry Owings and Bobby Douglas, and the four Milkovich brothers, Kalin draws a . Owings was an outstanding 29-1 for the season, Gable an astonishing 181-0 against high school and college competition. Does all that happens without the loss to Owings? The words hang in the air. Then, just an hour before the match, ABC-TV convinced him to do a short promo advancing the telecast, which would be shown a week later, by having him tell the viewer to watch him finish his career 182-0. Every once in a while now Owings will still go to the mat. Every sport except boxing and wrestling, she said. Phone: (405) 377-5243 He was Goliath, but David was coming to the mat, ready to live out a dream. He walked over and saw his teammate Chuck Jean there. Gable was only the third wrestler to have ever been inducted into the United World Wrestling's Hall of Fame in the Legend category. It was done out of utter desperation, but hey it worked. Lately hes been calling around -- to the University of Washington, to the Wrestling Hall of Fame in Iowa named after the loser of the match, to ABC, which was there to broadcast the event -- to see if anyone can send him a DVD, but no one seems to have one. He holed himself up in his room, he didnt talk to anyone, he didnt even return his parents phone calls. Gable finished the scramble on top and ended the second period in the opposite manner of the first, this time holding the momentum and the power and the clock reset with two more minutes on the clock for the final period. The basement in the Gable home in Iowa City is full of trophies and trinkets and framed photos in glass cases; Dan Gable calls this part of the house the museum, and every museum must be a complete representation of history. The way I see it, he says, Im the coach of the sport.. I got bumped down a seed at Nationals in 72 because the winner of the regionals 1 weight above me dropped down for Nationals. The atmosphere was electric, though what everyone had expected -- what ABC had come for -- was a coronation, not a competition. It's also a worthwhile read to find out more about Owings, who was an interesting figure in his own right. stream Just sitting here, talking about it it hurts. 11 ranked men's hoops teams in action tonight, DI indoor T&F championship selections revealed. Yes. His intensity only grew when he became coach at Iowa in 1976; Gable was legendary for going to extreme limits to solve a problem. The match changed my life, he says, but then he suddenly adds, but there was a time, a long time, when I wished it never happened.. ,Bk*+P2S` (fTrcSo NY]XX+%[w R&]_O!-(%z2R Er=
de DHN"q)^P#o6Cx$%{s'1|zV9 % While at Iowa State, Gable continued his winning ways by capturing three Big Eight Championships, earning All-American honors all three years. After losing 20 pounds and growing several inches, nobody believed he couldn't be a wrestler anymore. It happened March 28, 1970, at McGaw Hall, an 8,800-seat fieldhouse on the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, Ill. Gable was (and is) the god of the sport, a no-nonsense, punishing force who may have been the world's best-conditioned athlete. Phone: (319) 233-0745 Owings at that moment pulled off a move that hed never done in a match: a leg sweep that caught Gable by surprise and dropped him down to the mat -- as Gable fell, he felt like he was going down in slow motion. How Tall Is Dan Gable? Dan Gable will tell you that eighty percent of wrestling matches are decided before the first whistle blows. Larry Owings Documentary: https://youtu.be/AHuD161zOBU Full match vs Dan Gable: https://youtu.be/98HYl3c0L1c Any can be beaten, nothing is impossible! By the end of the second period, Owings had stretched the lead to 7-2 and the crowd was hysterical. Gable calls his loss to Larry Owings of Washington his greatest loss. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED is a registered trademark of ABG-SI LLC. Where Are They Now: Catching up with Cubs legend Ernie Banks. He Googles his name on the iPad. Only one man who ever lived can say he beat Dan Gable, and that man is 1968 Canby Union High School grad Larry Owings. The roar of the crowd was unbelievable. Working out from under Gable gave Owings momentum and confidence, and he translated that energy into a takedown of his own against his opponent to give Owings the lead 3-2 in the match and rode out Gable for the remainder of the first period to finish the first three minutes on top. No one had ever said something that, at least no one who could back it up. All Rights Reserved. I didn't know how the referee would score it.". Owings nearly escaped, but Gabled rolled him around and nearly put him on his back before Owings persistence paid off and he earned the escape point. Im not going out there, Jean said. More than any other sport, wrestling is rooted in self-belief and desire: being big, strong, fast and talented can take you only so far; in the end, it is about endurance, stamina, conviction. I told him he had to get out there." No, she says, disbelieving. "I really didn't want to see it or talk about it much. He won every college match before dropping his last match in a stunning 13-11 loss to Washington's Larry Owings in the 142-pound finals in 1970. His voice cracks, his eyes flicker, and suddenly, he goes silent, grasping for words. After a slow start, "He had won more than 200 matches in high school.". See, Larry Owings is the The Man Who Beat Dan Gable. It was my moms worst fear. Feeling stripped of his powers after his loss, Gable was finding out what it was like to be human. Wrestling never came up until they went on a date later in their relationship and two strangers walked up to them and asked for Owings autograph. He went on to the sensational international and Olympic career that has already been described. Then, one night about 10 years ago, he had an epiphany, which he believes came from God. Gable began scouting Owings' matches. Leading 7-2, Owings continued to ride Gable before Gable notched a reversal and put himself back on track with a 7-4 score. 2023 National Wrestling Hall Of Fame. Gable's college career record was 1171, with his only loss being in the final match of his final season to Larry Owings of the University of Washington. Most have never heard of Larry Owings. Larry Owens (born January 8, 1983) is an American professional basketball player. Only 30 seconds remained in the match; and Gable, despite the fact that he could coast to a one-point win, continued to stand up and circle with Owings. There was no reason to think that Gable would not cruise through this final match at 142 pounds and end his career with a 118-0 record. I say that I went undefeated for seven years, lost a match, and then I got good, he says. When Owings arrived, the mind games, so subtly important in this sport, began. Gambling problem? He would get up in the middle of the night to do pushups, knowing his opponent still slept. 13-11. No, with his movie star looks and charisma, and a physique that would make Chris Hemsworth jealous, he was legitimately world famous. Maybe it does but maybe it doesn't. Now nearly 70 but still strong as an ox, Owings is not one to use a blackboard to teach his wrestlers how to do a takedown. While the result of the match against Owings was unusual, in comparison with Gable's previous results, his effort is undeniable. The wrestler would go on to win a national championship. That softie had been nowhere to be found earlier in on this day as he navigated his black pickup through Iowa City while downing cans of Mountain Dew and breathlessly telling rollicking old wrestling stories that crackle like firecrackers. And then, having found a nine-minute YouTube clip titled Gable-Owings, Larry Owings taps the play button, and, with a strange mix of fascination and unease, he leans back in his chair. He will show up at a practice at a high school just a few miles from where he lives now, and he will stand in front of the teenagers and say, If you can score on me, you can win the state title. Some of the wrestlers will think hes joking. He said he "coached some wrestling ". With less than a minute remaining, the scoreboard showed Owings leading 9-8, but Gable actually had a 10-9 lead. They said Id never be a wrestler because I was too fat, he recalled, much later. 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