Dan Gable
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| Born |
October 25, 1948 Waterloo, Iowa |
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| Alma mater | Iowa State University | |||||||||||||||
| Height | 1.75 m (5 ft 9 in) | |||||||||||||||
| Weight | 68 kg (150 lb) | |||||||||||||||
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| Sport | Freestyle wrestling trained | |||||||||||||||
| Club | Iowa State Cyclones (Student Athlete)/The University of Iowa Hawkeyes (Coach) | |||||||||||||||
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Medal record
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Danny Mack "Dan" Gable (born October 25, 1948) is a retired American Olympic wrestler and head coach. He is best known for his tenure as head coach at the University of Iowa where he won 15 NCAA team titles between 1976 and 1997. He is also famous for having only lost one match in his entire Iowa State University collegiate career – his last – and winning a gold medal at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, while not giving up a single point. October 25, 2013 was recognized as Dan Gable Day in Iowa.
Gable grew up in Waterloo, Iowa. When he was a little boy his home life was not great and he always thought his parents were on the brink of divorce with how much they fought. He would even spend his nights watching out the front window when they went out just to make sure they always came back. His parents believed in corporal punishment and the cops were called to the Gable residence several times due to his father getting drunk and beating his kids.
Along with wrestling, Gable excelled at many sports before his sophomore year making the commitment to being a one sport athlete. He was a YMCA state champion in swimming, the quarterback of his junior high football team, and also very skilled in baseball.
Competing for Waterloo West High School, Gable posted a 64-0 high school record en route to winning three Iowa state scholastic championships.
Although Gable was not permitted to wrestle on the varsity wrestling squad during his freshman year, his only recorded high school loss was during his freshman year when he lost an unofficial match to teammate Matt Leamon.
As a sophomore in high school, Gable experienced a personal tragedy. His older sister, Diane, was molested and murdered May 31, 1964, in the Gable family home, while Dan and his parents were on vacation. Diane Gable's killer, John Thomas Kyle (a classmate of Dan Gable's), pleaded guilty to charges in connection with her death and was sentenced to life in prison. Kyle died in a Kansas state penitentiary on June 17, 2011; Gable was in northeast Iowa—the same area where he was vacationing when his sister was killed—when he learned of Kyle's death. Gable later recalled that the event gave him a singular passion for wrestling as a way to uplift his shattered family. In his documentary Gable, he said, "I needed to give them enough entertainment that they didn't have to look other places." In other interviews of Dan, he stated that, "It [The tragic incident with his sister] made me even more of a horse with blinders as far as wrestling went."
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