'Marengo’s been good to me’

(This article has been edited to correct errors about the death of Mike McGivern.)

MARENGO — Dan Gable knows wrestling. He also knows Marengo.

“Marengo’s been good to me,” said Gable during a visit to Iowa Valley High School last week.

“We have a Mike McGivern Senior Award,” Gable told an audience in the Iowa Valley auditorium. “So Marengo Iowa has a lot to do with Iowa Wrestling.”

Gable needs no introduction among sports fans in the State of Iowa. He compiled a 64-0 record while wrestling for West High School in Waterloo and finished 117-1 during four years at Iowa State University, his only loss coming in the NCAA finals his senior year.

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Gable won two NCAA national championships and is a three-time All-American and was named to the all-conference team in the Big 8 three-times.

In 1971, Gable won the Pan American Games in Cali, Columbia and the world championships in Sofia, Bulgaria. He won the Soviet Union’s Tbilisi Tournament in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1972.

Gable captured the gold medal in 1972’s Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, without giving up a single point.

Gable became assistant wrestling coach at the University of Iowa in 1972 under Hall-of-Famer Gary Kurdelmeier and served as head coach from 1976 to 1997, compiling a career record of 355-21-5.

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Gable’s Iowa Hawkeyes won 21 Big Ten Championships and 15 NCAA national team titles. Gable coached 152 All-Americans, 45 National Champions, 106 Big Ten Champions and 12 Olympians, four who won gold.

Gable coached the 1980, 1984 and 2000 Olympic teams and was head coach of the World Team six times.

“You know how fun it is to be successful?” Gable asked his Marengo audience. “It’s a lot of fun.”

Still, every successful life has setbacks.

In 1986, No. 1 Iowa, which had won 36 straight duals spanning two years, met No. 2 Iowa State at Hilton Coliseum in Ames. The Cyclones, 18-1 at the time, won the dual 19-16 before a statewide television audience.

“Every once in a while you’ve got to get straightened out a little bit,” Gable said.

A month later, Iowa won the NCAA Championship at Iowa’s Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

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Gable told students in the Iowa Valley auditorium last week that they must learn to motivate themselves. At one time, Gable made sure his wrestlers did what they were supposed to do. But then the NCAA outlawed practice after matches. “We can’t keep up with you,” they told Gable.

“Now I started teaching kids what to do,” said Gable. The coach was no longer allowed to make them run sprints after matches. They had to do it on their own.

“It’s called independence,” Gable said. “If you’re always dependent on something, you’re always dependent on something.” Doing things on your own is a greater accomplishment, he said.

“I’ve been lucky enough to have good coaches,” said Gable. “A lot of that luck depends where you’re born into.”

Tragedy

Gable grew up in a blue-collar town and had good parents, he said. His family wasn’t perfect, though. There was a lot of beer drinking and a lot of yelling, he said.

“When things weren’t going perfect, they sent me to the YMCA.” Gable said he was able to bounce back after adversity because he had a good foundation.

Throughout his talk last week, Gable returned to a traumatic event he had to work through. During his sophomore year of high school, Gable was walking to or from school with a neighbor, who started talking about Gable’s sister, who four years his senior.

Two weeks later the boy, 16-year-old John Thomas Kyle, killed Gable’s sister in the Gable home. Gable should have reported the comments to his parents, he said, but he didn’t. He still regrets it.

According to the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, Diane Gable, who was 19 at the time, was killed May 31, 1964 in the Gable home. Gable, then 15, and his parents had spent the weekend at Harpers Ferry.

About that time, Gable had begun reading book “The Heart of a Champion” by Olympic Champion Bob Richards, the first athlete to have his picture on a Wheaties box. “The book’s not just about religion, Gable said. “It’s about faith.”

Gable needed that message at that time in his life as he watched his parents deal with the loss of child.

McGivern

Sitting on the stage at Iowa Valley High School with the Tiger Coach Jeremy Kriegel last week brought Marengo’s Mike McGivern to Gable’s mind.

In 1976, Mike McGivern Jr. was wrestling in the Midlands tournament when his dad died of a heart attack. “He wants to wrestle the next day,” said Gable. “He looked at it like, what would my Dad want me to do right now?”

Gable told McGivern that he wouldn’t sleep much that night and if he decided not to wrestle the next day, he didn’t have to.

But McGivern did wrestle. He wrestled well enough to place second and score enough points to help the team win a championship, Gable said. It was his first step toward healing.

The Hawkeyes still give a courageous wrestler the Mike McGivern Award every year.

Gable learned as a coach what to do to help each of his wrestlers perform well. McGivern, he said, “always got really nervous.” It affected his performance.

Gable realized he couldn’t let McGivern sit out by the mat and watch the other wrestlers. Instead, he put McGivern in a separate room and let him watch television, coming to the mat as late as possible so he didn’t have time to get nervous.

Another Marengo wrestler, Travis Fiser, had a tendency for stalling, Gable said. Gable began encouraging referees to call stalling on his own wrestler, forcing Fiser into action.

Gable encouraged his student listeners not to stall in life. “You may not win every time,” he said, “but when you are executing … you are learning.”

Gable’s visit to Marengo was partly due to another Marengo athlete. “Rick Wanamaker kind of set this up,” said Kriegel.

Now a real estate agent in West Des Moines, Wanamaker played basketball for Drake University after graduating from Iowa Valley. He helped the Bulldogs to a near upset of UCLA’s championship team and its star, Lew Alcindor, in the 1969 NCAA tournament semifinals.