Dan Gable visits New Jersey to promote wrestling and permanently preserve it as an Olympic sport
Dan Gable's "green room" was the front seat of a black sedan.
He was due to speak in a couple of hours, but was feeling "a little under the weather." So he was resting, which is something the face of American wrestling rarely does. Even now, at 67.
Could it really be 44 years ago that the kid from Waterloo, Iowa stood atop the Olympic podium, gold medal draped around his neck and a bandage on his cauliflower ear? That iconic photo -- the wrestling version of The Pugilist at Rest -- said maybe, just maybe, the ferociously competitive Gable had reached a plateau of contentment.
But the fire in Gable wasn't out. It was just beginning. Being the most dominate American wrestler ever - he didn't yield a point in the Olympics despite competing with torn ligaments in his knee, seven stitches in his head from a first match head-butt and a persistent leaky ear - wasn't enough for Gable. He brought his competitive inferno to coaching and now travels the world fighting to keep his sport in the Olympics, which helps keep it relevant and entrenched in high schools and colleges.
That fight is one reason Gable was in Princeton last week, where he credited "the Ivies" for saving wrestling from being booted out of 2016 Olympics.
"Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, those are the guys who wrote the big checks," he said.
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Four hip replacements, eight knee surgeries and nine grandchildren have slowed him a little, so while Gable was grabbing some quiet time, the group that invited him was getting ready.
The Wrestlers in Business Network is a national organization, and its Princeton chapter is mostly a bunch of white-collar guys who learned life lessons from their black-and-blue-collar sport.
Lesson One: Do the work. So they lugged their own ice and the cases of soda and beer -- and, yes, even a bottle or two of merlot and chardonnay -- into the conference center at the New Jersey Hospital Association Conference Center where Gable was speaking.
A couple of them worked the bar. Another few did the registration. There are no event planners in wrestling. No wait staff passing around hors d'oeuvres. There are no hors d'oeuvres.
This is not to say the group lacks refinement. The president is neurosurgeon Mark McLaughlin, medical director of the Princeton Brain & Spine centers. Joe Savino, who started the chapter, is a managing partner at Northwestern Mutual. Board member Ted Resnick owns the Flemington Department Store. One of the guys leading the set-up was Jim Rudy, managing partner of Princeton's arm of the Fox Rothschild law firm.
Dan Gable discusses his career in a forum with neurosurgeon Mark McLaughlin at the Wrestler in Business Network dinner in Princeton last week. These are the guys Dan Gable needs to help save wrestling, and they need Gable because he embodies so much of what they value.
"Wrestling teaches skills, grit, hard work, determination," McLaughlin said. "It's a great underpinning for life. But to succeed you need other skills. You need communication and business skills. We're here to help guys network and take the next step. Our organization builds a bridge between the sport and life."
Savino said wrestlers are a "small but driven fraternity" that should help each other.
"I see the group as an 'Angie's List' for wrestlers," he said.
And if one were searching for a motivational speaker on that network, the top choice would be Dan Gable.
"You are the gold standard for our sport," said John Serruto, who introduced Gable to the audience of about 300, following a buffet dinner. Serruto has a talk show on HomeTowne TV and is president of Serruto Properties, a large development and management company in Chatham. He also comes from a multigenerational wrestling and baseball family. But when asked how he wanted to be identified for this column, he said "a coach."
That's a Dan Gable crowd.
Gable is the John Wooden of wrestling. Wooden's UCLA teams won 10 NCAA basketball championships; Gable's Iowa Hawkeyes won 15 NCAA wrestling titles. Neither record is likely to ever be matched.
Also in the audience was Anthony Ashnault, Rutgers two-time All-American and the school's first Big Ten champion. He did something Gable did: went undefeated through high school.
Gable almost went undefeated through college at Iowa State, too, until his last match, the NCAA final in 1970, with the eyes of the sports world on him. Gable talks about that 13-11 loss to Larry Owings more than any of his wins because it changed him from a "pretty good wrestler into a great one."
He deconstructed himself. It was the beginning of his driven journey to elusive, impossible perfection.
"I went over, in my mind, every single day in the year before I lost," he said. "What did I do? What could I have done differently?"
He knew his growing celebrity cost him focus.
"I didn't prepare right for the match," he said. "I was doing an interview (for ABC's Wide World of Sports, which broadcast the match live) right before I stepped on the mat. I should have been in the tunnel warming up, concentrating on the match."
Then he adds this: "And my coaches should have protected me. I learned to keep my guys focused."
The stories are legendary. He'd follow one wrestler in his car to make sure he completed a 10-mile run after practice every night. He chased another down to a convenience store where the kid was about to abandon his weight-cut with a junk food binge. Both won national championships. He once screamed at a ref to penalize his own guy for stalling.
That's Dan Gable. Crazed, but inspirational. Focused to the point of being myopic. A winner then, a winner still.
Just ask the white-collar guys who lined up for autographs like school boys and applauded him with their hearts and all their might.
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.