20 … Behold, thy servant Jacob is behind us. For he said, I will appease him with the present that goeth before me, and afterward I will see his face; per-adventure he will accept of me. …
24 And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.
25 And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
26 And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
27 And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.
28 And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
29 And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.
30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.
31 And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.
32 Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank.
Translation: Though this might sound like a weekend in Key West to the untrained eye, the subtext for thems that have got the eyes to see is this: um … er, well I’m not the world’s best or biggest biblical scholar. Maybe it means that the fight style of choice of quasi-divine beings of shadow and light (as well as ancient Greeks … wrestling is also mentioned in the Iliad and the Odyssey … and American politics too, I mean Honest Abe Lincoln was a wrestler’s cognomen if I ever heard one) is … yup, you got it: wrasslin’.
As the old saw—as popularized by the first family of grappling arts, the Brazilian Gracies—goes, most fights end up on the ground. Or as the widely proclaimed God of Professional Wrestling (when professional wrestling wasn’t mere muscle ballet) Karl Gotch said, “Bulls die on the floor.” So it is that if you’re going to scrap, the progression will go thusly:
You and your opponent will begin punching each other on or about the facial area.
The one who draws the greater number of punches to the facial area, or who, as it is established, will not be able to return the punches, hereupon begins to …
Grab their opponent to either staunch the flow of punches to the grill or to work on a Plan B that involves, if they’re lucky, a knowledge base that will have them immobilizing the opponent through the careful application of chokes, armbars, and leglocks that hyperextend the joints of the arms and legs.
When one of these are successfully locked in, the loser will begin mewling like a small child and the fight is officially declared over, with great ridicule to be heaped upon the soon-to-be-departing Loser.
This is grappling.
To the untrained eye? A lot of apparently man-on-man closeness (those suffering from homosexual panic need not apply). To those in the know, or in the grips of those in the know: extreme pain delivered expertly.
Herewith, the basic terms and nomenclature of the laying on of hands.
ARMLOCKS/ARMBARS [also known as the kimura, the key lock, wakigatame]: The fighter takes the opponent’s arm and by applying pressure to the elbow joint cranks the arm, or shoulder, in a direction that carries it beyond the failure point. In some cases the fighter lies on top of the opponent’s torso at a 90-degree angle. Grabbing the opponent’s wrist with his near hand so that the opponent’s hand is palm-to-the-sky and fully bent and held down. Reaching under the opponent’s arm with his other arm and grabbing hold of his other arm’s wrist, he forces the soon-to-be loser’s elbow upward. This is a true submission hold. Translation: if you don’t “no mas” on this one, you will lose the arm. Plain and simple.
CHOKES [triangle chokes, sleeper holds, mata leao, rear naked chokes, guillotine chokes]: Arms can be confusing. If you look at your arm, it is tri-segmented. At the wrist, at the elbow, and at the shoulder. And you have TWO of them. Unless you drum for Def Lepperd. But the NECK? Well, there’s just one of those. And it’s easy to find. You see, it sits right under the mouth that’s calling you out. Paradoxically, the neck can be grabbed and attacked a number of different ways.
Sleeper Hold: A sleeper hold is generally applied in the following manner: the person applying the hold positions himself behind his opponent. The person then wraps his right arm around the opponent’s neck, pressing the biceps against one side of the neck and the inner bone of the forearm against the other side. The neck is squeezed inside the arm extremely tightly. Additional pressure can be applied by grabbing the left shoulder with the right hand, or by grabbing the biceps of the left arm near the elbow, then using the left hand to push the opponent’s head toward the crook of the right elbow. At this point (or during the process) the opponent should be brought to the ground if he’s not already there. This helps to avoid various self-defense techniques designed to protect against assault from the rear, such as instep stomps, shin stomps, and groin strikes. The opponent will typically go limp after 5–10 seconds of very hard pressure, at which point it is preferable to immediately release pressure, so as to not cause death. Or brain damage from both loss of oxygen and blood to the brain. Rear naked chokes, mata leao (or, lion-killer) chokes are all essentially the same thing.
Guillotine Choke: In a fight with three-time US Greco-Roman national champ, UFC scrapper and International Cage Fighting king Darrell Gholar I got GOT with this three times in a row. In my first bow in an underground submission-fighting tournament, I got caught with this once, first time out. Easy to avoid, not so easy to withstand, the guillotine is what happens when a fighter applies a front sleeper hold and takes the other fighter downward, while cinching hands underneath the neck, pulling up and holding the back of the neck either against the body or under the armpit.
Triangle Choke: One fighter will, using a poorly placed opponent’s head and arm, wrap his legs around the loser’s neck. One leg goes around and behind the neck while the other leg crosses over the top of the first leg’s ankle. It’s at this point that the person applying the choke begins cranking their legs tightly down. If their opponent is unschooled, the natural reaction is to pull out. This only makes it worse as it exposes the neck to more choking. It should be noted that for extra credit the applicant of said choke can, with their free hands, punch the living crap out of the soon-to-be sleeper. If you’re fighting someone with a triangle tattoo? You might reasonably expect this choke to be somewhere in the mix.
Facelock: You face your opponent, who is bent forward, like maybe you just went for the guillotine and missed. You adapt and instead press the forearm bone that runs along the line of the thumb against the cheekbone, the eye socket, the face. You then grab the arm with your free hand to lock in the hold and compress your screaming opponent’s face.
LEG LOCKS: A lot like the arms, the legs are tri-segmented with break points at the ankles, knees, and hips. Added benefit? Most people can’t fucking dance—you think they’re going to be able to keep their legs away from you? Noooo. … so, if you can’t even remember but one leg lock, or hold, you’ll be infinitely better off knowing than you will not knowing what to do when the other guy’s lower leg finds its way into your hands, either as a result of an errant and poorly thrown kick, or because you’ve swept in and grabbed it: lift the grabbed lower leg from the base of the foot to the shin and wrap both arms around the foot, placing one arm around (and underneath) the ankle tightly and resting on the foot where the toes are with the weight of your body while pulling up with the bony part of your forearm against their Achilles tendon. A variation of this move is the grapevine ankle lock, in which you fall to the mat and scissor the leg of the opponent. This stops the opponent from rolling out of the move and makes it harder for him/her to crawl to the ropes but lessens the pressure that can be applied.
SUB-GENUS: TAKEDOWN: Though technically not a finishing hold, or a submission maneuver, a good takedown has been known to end the best of fights in the crudest of manners: a head that hits a floor and knocks out an opponent is as good as a fist that does the same. At the very best this is what you have; at the very worst you’ve just set up one of the above locks or chokes. And there are many, many takedowns with many, many names that may or not make sense to you—high crotch, under arm spin, fireman’s carry, inside trip, suplex (not something you live in but a throw)—but we’ll go over the basics:
DOUBLE LEG: There’s not a lot of mystery to the mysteries of the world’s oldest sport. Lunging in the way you might imagine a fencer to do, you come underneath your opponent, grab behind his legs, and lift them up and off to the side, edged one way or another by your head, which is close ranged against his body. When you’re in this close it’s hard to be punched or kicked here, and with the exception of an opportunistic guillotine choke that you may have opened yourself up for by sticking your neck out, this move is a good, all-purpose Captain Kirk-esque move: deceptively simple-looking but devastating when applied correctly. The counter to this is called a sprawl, which looks remarkably like the end position on those horrible squat thrusts that every single gym teacher in America made you do.
SINGLE LEG: Very much the same but involving, true to its name, only a single one of your opponent’s legs. Benefits are that it is easier to get and hold in the face of a good sprawl. Drawbacks are that leaving one leg free leaves one leg that could kick the crap out of you. But our advice? If you have a single leg? YANK it. They’ll go down.
Karl Gotch
I had heard this story from Lou Thesz once. And because I don’t want to waste my energy throwing you a beating when you ask me, as you’re more than likely to, “Who’s Lou Thesz?” I’ll just tell you that Thesz was a six-time world heavyweight champion back when professional wrestling was a bit more than professional acting. Thesz said that at one point his fellow German-Hungarian wrestler Karl Gotch had been training this kid and as part of his training he had thrown rice on the mat where the kid was kneeling. After about an hour of this dance of a thousand deaths, the kid had asked for a drink of water, and purportedly a sympathetic Gotch had said, “Are you thirsty, kid? I’ll get you some water.” And he trundles off and comes back with a rusty groin cup full of brackish water, which he extends to the kid while cackling evilly.
“What? Thesz said that? No. HE was the sadist, not me,” insists Gotch, now based in Tampa, Florida. “My grandfather had always told me to treat others the way I wanted to be treated.” Which, of course, causes me to chuckle, since the school that Gotch, the last living link to a wrestling style that casually has hooks, rips, and stretches as part of its repertoire, hails from is distinctly the purview of guys who only knew one way to play it: hard. Real hard. So despite him doth protesting too much, I know what it’s like to roll with one of these old cats as I was actually stupid enough to get on the mat with Thesz (RIP, April 28, 2002) in 1998 or thereabouts. That would have made him about eighty-two years old at the time, and the sensation almost can’t be described in terms not usually reserved for anything other than natural disasters.
You ever been in an earthquake? Tidal wave? Riot?
Well, that’s what it felt like: all impending doom, and then sudden and rushing horror, and then, finally, pain. You might be laughing now, but it was clearly no fucking laughing matter. And the idea that another person, a person who KNEW exactly how the body worked, could do this, was the stuff that lasting nightmares are made of.
So when Gotch goes all peaceful warrior on me, I’m not believing it for a second. Now, I’m not saying these guys are not nice guys (I’m not saying this for about five reasons, all of them good, and all of them having to do with, say, my arms, legs, and neck), I’m just saying that Gotch is a different kind of a cat. He, and even Lebell, is to the manner born. Both were hustled off by mothers in response to their youthful intransigence and involvement in street fights and virtually deposited in the care of—well, in the case of Lebell, Ed “Strangler” Lewis, and in Gotch’s case, a Belgian tavern that was home of the United Strength Testers, a loose collection of wrestlers, grapplers, and tough guys.
“They trained three times a week. Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday mornings. Seven p.m. during the week, eleven a.m. on Sundays,” says the still-steely-at-eighty-two Gotch. “I started with boxing and wrestling. My father was a sailor and thought this would be good for me, but my mother screamed murder when she found out. I was not too good-looking already,” he laughed, “so it was just wrestling for me.”
The older guys—keep in mind it was a tavern—had decided to haze the big-for-his-age Gotch and administered beating after beating to the ten-year-old just to see if he’d stay. “I told them to do their best because I was not going to stop coming. And believe me, it all goes into the bank [the beatings], where it gathers interest, and one day I’m going to be glad to pay you back.”
Did he?
“Well, I would have …” World War II bites though and in 1940 he was gone. “They just picked you up off the street and carried you away. I was on a train from Antwerp to Hamburg. Hours on a train. And when I got to Hamburg they made me work on the trains. I was a fireman, which meant, then, shoveling coal into the engine. The work was okay but I was always hungry and I couldn’t sleep.”
Nightmares?
“Russians. They’d play music all night and sing. I eventually got a job repairing the trains with some French prisoners of war. There was one sonuvabitch from Marseilles there who thought I was German. I mean I had learned German and my mother was German, but Flemish was my language. We got into it, and I worked him over, tossed him in this ditch. You know, sometimes it pays to be handy with your fists.”
And from there, after they let him go to back home in 1943 for more work that’d make a man out of any mack: blacksmithing. “People complain about what’s going on in Iraq now, but in Belgium then, the Americans, our allies, were dropping bombs all over. Like Easter eggs. So it was tough. People were dying all over the place.” And from this idyll to the final crucible chapter: hauled off to a concentration camp in Kahla, in Germany, then to a factory where they made the buzzbombs. Rescued, finally, by the Russians (and Americans), Gotch settled into a post-WWII occupation of ease: MORE blacksmithing.
“But then I went to the European Championships in 1946 in Stockholm,” says Gotch right before he zigs when I expect a zag. “Where I got my ass handed to me.” It was his sand-in-the-face moment, and two years later, at the Olympics, at age twenty-four, he was taken the long way around by the gold-medaling Turk. “He was good but I had gotten better enough to not be beaten outright. My neck was raw from bridging. But this Turk came up to me after the match was over and said that I was very good. I told him ‘Yeah. But you still beat my ass.’” At this remove of years and more accolades than many of us will ever accrue for almost anything, you can see he still feels the sting keenly. “Of course, the Turk’s now dead.” So, if not a victory in the ring, well, in the long race, then.
And then change: “I didn’t want to go pro because I was in love with amateur. I wanted to get my revenge in the amateur, but at this point I had a wife and a kid and I figured out that I could make in seventeen minutes what it took me two weeks to make swinging a sledgehammer. So I started doing pro matches and then someone casually told me about these fellows up in Wigan, run by Billy Riley, and said I should stay away from them because they would tear me a new asshole. Well, I needed a new asshole, so off I went.
“I go in there and it was nothing like people make it seem. People who never have been there. It was a wood floor, stone walls, and a tin roof. And these guys in there were like a pack of hungry wolves. So I pick the biggest guy in there and I take him down like I would in amateur wrestling, and once we’re down he grabs my ankle, and I’m screaming, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And he says, ‘Wrestling.’ So I say, ‘Oh. That’s how you wrestle, eh?’ and we go again and I head-butt him and try to run him into the wall. So, yeah, this is where I picked up what they now call ‘Lancashire catch’ [a catch-as-catch-can fight style].”
This style was heavy on what are now called submission holds. There were just more of them and they were way more severe. Wrists, elbows, shoulders, and their southland peers, ankles, knees, and hips, were routinely torn. You might get better if you stayed, but if you stayed you’d probably never get well. “Riley abused all his boys,” Gotch says. “I called his place the Snakepit, and it was Riley’s place, no doubt. He was a promoter and he did like promoters have always done, almost destroyed the sport they’re promoting. First they get rid of the tough guys who won’t take falls for nobody. Then they get rid of the athletes who even though they take the falls well they still got their pride. Now they’re only left with actors who act like they can fight. I mean, you don’t believe me? Look who made it great. Look who it took to make it great: the Americans. All of these immigrants, all of these nationalities, and so I came too. Got to Chicago and met up with Thesz, and he was a tough sonuvabitch. But I wiped out three guys when I got there and nobody wanted a piece of me. It was 1959. Finally Big Bill Miller took me to Japan, and Japan saved me. I could make $500 a week there. Big money then.
“But they were disappointed when they saw me. They were used to sumo then, and they said, ‘He’s so small.’ I was 6′1″ and over 220 pounds. Well, Jim Wright told the Japanese that he would work for three months for free if I didn’t go through all of their guys in an hour. And so I did.”
Of course he did.
And so it went, year after year, he crushed them all. All. Of. Them. He’s revered in Japan today by those very much in the know as the God of Pro Wrestling. And by this no one means the fake shit, but the very real professional thing. Living today, alone, with the exception of a stray cat he feeds on occasion and a loose confederation of guys like Gene Lebell and other known associates, Gotch fends off looky-loos, fight geeks, and professional hucksters with a mixture of bluster and real serious hostility (“Ultimate fighting? I call it ultimate shit”) because his love and affection for what he calls the best sport in the world is almost messianic and it seems like he’s the last messiah. “It’s like Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever and I can move the world.’ But he didn’t tell you where to put the goddamned fulcrum. THAT’S wrestling. It’s leverage, it’s mathematics, it makes you think and it prepares you for life. You don’t have to be big even. I fought some blind guy in Nebraska and I went out there feeling sorry for him until he got his hands on me and gave me good as I’ve gotten from anybody who can see.
“But this country … I’ve met more assholes here than I have anywhere else in the world because they don’t know what they have. But I’ll tell you what they don’t have anymore: PROFESSIONALS. And people who can teach it the way it should be taught. Good coaches. And this will kill it stone dead.”
He gets quiet and I think of that line from Apocalypse Now. It was Dennis Hopper’s, “When it dies … when HE dies …” He’s talking about Kurtz, and I’m talking about Gotch and something like the soul of the last great democratic, meritocratic sport around. Or maybe I’m just talking about what happens when tough guys go away and are not replaced with anything other than metrosexuality and talk shows. What happens then? I guess we’ll find out… all in due time.
KARL GOTCH’S GUIDE TO GREATNESS: A PRIMER
You need five things to be a great fighter: technique, agility, speed, endurance, and reflexes. Strength means nothing.
You want to get stronger, though? Stop lifting weights. Start using the still rings.
No matter how fancy a car is, if it runs out of gas, it’s done. I am a fanatic for conditioning. And not the kind boxers get from road work. That’s great for boxers because it is how they fight. On their feet. It’s good for the footwork. But wrestlers need something else. They need to work the road: dog waddles, leapfrogs, fireman’s carry if you have someone else to train with. Visualize yourself with your opponent and go through the moves while you’re running. It will look strange but what the hell do you care?
Judo Gene LeBell
“He gets all these people like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Buddha … all the notables in the history of religion and they have wrestling matches to see who is going to rule the world for the next thousand years. They’re all going at it and I come out of the sky and I’m L. Ron Hubbard. He had red hair like I have. So I pin all these guys and then I say, “Who is your messiah now?”
Gene LeBell—JUDO Gene LeBell—vibes a generous self-satisfaction. A generous and contagious self-satisfaction and the kind that probably comes from being extremely good at something (anything) that you love. He’s talking about a bow he recently took on The Mind of Mencia, a Comedy Central sketch-comedy deal, but he might as well be talking about that which has marked his entire seventy-four-year tenure on this planet: a willful desire to conquer and control while having fun doing both (or maybe it’s the other way around and there is no enjoyment without the conquering and the controlling).
Introduced to wrestling by the only woman inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame, the famed owner/operator of LA’s Olympic Auditorium, Aileen Eaton (also known as his mother), LeBell, well before he found his way to Gotch and Thesz, was learning as a seven-year-old at the meathook hands of Ed “The Strangler” Lewis. That’d be THE Ed “The Strangler” Lewis (like you expect someone named The Strangler to suck).
“So Ed says to me, ‘What do you want to learn?’ And I didn’t know. I mean, I was seven years old. So I saw some rough tough guy with cauliflowered ears and said, ‘I wanna learn how to get my ears like that. That’s what I want.’ And Lewis told me, ‘Those come from LOSING. Not from winning.’ And so he laid it down: ‘You got Greco-Roman, which is from the waist up; freestyle, which is from the waist up and the waist down; kicking; boxing; and grappling.’ Well, I had never heard of this grappling before and so I asked him what it was, and he said that it was a combination of everything, and so I was sold.”
Sold enough so that over the last bunches of decades LeBell’s either coached or fought anybody and everybody who has asked; and, given his proximity to Tinseltown and the unexpressed need of almost everybody in this goddamned town to be beaten, he’s been busy. “I adjust attitudes. I’m a nice guy, but if I don’t like you …” and you hear him go all kind of dreamy. “Well, Lou Thesz, if he didn’t like you, he’d hook you, rip your knee apart, break your fucking ankle, or just crank, and he’d say, ‘If you hear a crack and you’re a class guy? At that point you let go.’ I’m a disciple of Lou’s. And Karl’s.”
Were they class guys?
“Haha, look, either one of these guys got a hold of you and you were dead in the water. They’d tie these modern-day guys into knots because they had a LOT of tools, because, let’s face it, not all holds work on all people, but they’d use the nose, ears, hair as handles and hit you with armlocks, necklocks, head chancery, front facelock you, singles from the outside. Take the kimura. Karl showed me the double wristlock, which is what it was called then, but Lou had done this in the ’30s, and Lewis before that. But because Karl taught it to the Japanese, he’d always ask me after that when he showed it to me, ‘What do you think of my kimura?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s a double wristlock, you schmuck.’ It’s kind of a running joke we’ve got going but the difference between how it is done then and now … and everyone thinks they know this, but how Karl and Lou and I do it is that we work in the wrist twist before cranking it on. There’s NO flex room in it that way, and so when you lift, you snap the wrist, the elbow, and the shoulder.”
Well, isn’t it hard to find training partners if you keep breaking their wrists, elbows, and shoulders?
“Hahahaha,” he laughs. “You only train with guys you like, then,” and he then regales with further tales of tough: him with Bruce Lee (“A sweet guy with lots of parlor tricks but willing to learn grappling. I miss him”), him with Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and the list goes on—Chuck Norris, Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, Gokor Chivichyan, now one of his top students and probably the sole bearer of the finishing-hold flame that LeBell got from Thesz and Gotch, as well as UFC competitor Karo Parysian, kenpo karate king Ed Parker, Hayward Nishioka, and Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, just to name a few.
And quizzing LeBell on the Hollywood types, he leaps on his other love, which is largely how he’s paid the bills all these years: stunt work. “It all works together. The judo helped me with the high falls. And with the lack of fear. But I do it all: motorcycling, rappelling. I’m in that movie Beerfest, a movie that’s just out [Sept. 2006]. I’m in the Reno 911 movie that’s filming now … they’re chasing me on a motorcycle and I’m in my skivvies and they can never catch me.”
When I inevitably ask him about the possibility of slowing down at seventy-four, he scoffs and says, “As long as I can still stretch someone who needs their attitude adjusted, well, I feel fine.” And I can feel him looking at me, and of course I know as sure as the sun will rise and the moon will set that I’ll find myself on the mat with him, pushing the variances of how far various joints were ever meant to go. He puts ten of his dollars up against ten of my dollars in an upcoming UFC matchup of Matt Hughes with one of the few men to ever beat him, B. J. Penn. (My money’s on Penn.)
And when finally I ask who else he thinks is great, he names Dan Gable, whose 299 wins as an amateur and then, later, his wins as a gold-medaling Olympian mark him as one of the greatest this sport has ever seen. LeBell says, “Dan Gable is my hero, and the reason he is my hero is not only because he won an Olympic gold medal but I … because he is the most successful teacher that I’ve ever known. So even as skinny as he is, for me he walks on water. And when I grow up, I hope to be just like him.”
Dan Gable
It was like a leitmotif, and its presence had started to exert itself, this weirdly insistent refrain, even before it had come out of anyone’s mouth and took shape like a word. It was there when, cozied into my window seat on a flight to Iowa, I was asked by some guy if the blanket and pillow on his seat, the one next to me, were mine.
No.
“It’s NOT yours?!” And there it was, full of incredulity, and more than this, a challenge.
“It comes with the seat,” I say before pausing and watching where I might next go with this. “Or perhaps I am scampering about like Johnny Fucking Pillowseed, placing my personal blankets and pillows on everyone’s goddamned seat. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Which, all in all, is probably not a bad way to begin a nine-hour, multiple-flight-change journey to the University of Iowa to track down one of the greatest living fighters in the world, self-described wrestler Dan Gable. In this age of aggressive hyperbole where the snarky among us might put quote marks around “greatest,” I think we’ll be glad to qualify this: 182 wins, 1 loss. Through high school. Through college. And goddamned straight into the 1972 Olympics, where he didn’t surrender a point in six matches on his way to a gold medal that was almost an afterthought at that point. Is that great enough for you?
And it doesn’t stop there. After moving into coaching, like a contagion he spread this Achilles-esque, kissed-by-God stuff to the University of Iowa, where he led their wrestling team to fifteen national titles in twenty-one seasons. Nine of these were won consecutively, between 1978 and 1986, and winning the Big Ten title every season as head coach, Gable’s teams went UNDEFEATED seven times, garnering him a career coaching stand of 355 wins, 21 losses, 5 draws. No head for numbers? That’s a .938 winning percentage.
Do you know what that means? Do you have ANY IDEA WHAT THAT MEANS? Sure, sure, doubting Thomases might invoke the Talent Attraction Principle, whereby the best want to work with the best and consequently remain the best, achieving nothing of great significance other than being in a place where all the great ones knew to go, but it’s not that simple. Not nearly. Look at the Yankees. It’s really not that simple. What this means, and I know it when I hear it and I hear it pretty soon after taking my seat in his office, is that, indeed, like the nostrum goes, it really isn’t about winning. Not at all.
“There’s a way to wrestle and be successful and win by putting out, sure,” says Gable, leaning forward in his chair. “And there’s a way to do that when you’re putting out a little bit more.” He pauses when he says these last three words little … bit … more, while his hands measure out in slow slices exactly what he means. “And eventually it gets even harder and it goes beyond. Beyond imagination. Beyond beyond. Most people can’t even understand this. Unless you’ve been there. One thing’s for sure: you can feel it on the other end. And when you felt it on the other end, what it did was it destroyed you. That is domination.”
And that is the word that I hear that keeps coming up: domination. Dominate. Dominating. It’s on sports gear I see around town, and while it never dawns on me until I see it that it might be a bit of collegial corporate catch-phrasery, it’s been coming out of everybody’s mouth ever since I said that I was coming here. To describe both the man, the team, and his style. And had his reputation not preceded him, I might have had a hard time seeing it sitting in this office in Iowa City, where he looks like nothing if not a sort of midwestern academic. But the whole story seems to be there in his eyes, eyes that are all at once kind and piercing, and in total it’s not at all surprising to hear him finally say, when quizzed about his ONE loss to Larry Owings (a historical wrestling footnote, sort of the functional sports equivalent to former Beatle Pete Best), that “I analyzed it for a year. And for the next thirty years. I still analyze it. It ate at me so much.”
Past tense? I’m not believing it.
“Well, it was just that I knew that it was because I wasn’t capable of doing what I could have done. I wasn’t thinking about me being undefeated and all of that either. I just wasn’t focused on that match. And the interesting thing is that if he [Larry Owings] had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t win that match. HE said that. He said that he could never get back to that level, that height. And for some reason that ended his career. But that match MADE my career. Not only up to and through the Olympics, but through my career as a coach.”
So it wasn’t the burden of your own legend that undid you there?
“Look, I didn’t realize that something special was going on until I was in tenth grade. But it wasn’t just all of the wins in competition that convinced me. It was just the amount of winning that I did everywhere. In practice, everywhere. There was no room for any other belief. I mean I never even thought about losing. You just knew you were going to win. And this is the difference: for me it had very little to do with the opponent. It had to do with me getting beyond beyond. I mean, I didn’t think about them at all, and because of my reputation they probably didn’t think of anything but me. And reputation becomes a winning psychological factor, but it still has to be supported by wins, and in my mind I couldn’t lose. To anybody. That’s what I felt. And I was beating everybody in all weight classes. It never mattered to me who I was fighting.”
Todd Conner, author of a defining tome that looks inside the domination of wrestling by Iowa wrestling titled, in a stroke of marketing genius, Domination: An Inside Look at Iowa Wrestling, tells me about seeing Gable as a coach go up against two of his All-Americans, the dreaded Banach brothers, Lou and Ed, a heavyweight and a 177-pounder, respectively, at practice one day. “Now, Gable’s 5′9″ and probably weighed about 160 at the time. He was also about thirty-six years old. And first he crushed one and immediately afterward he crushed the other. Crushed.” We enjoy a minute of quiet before turning back to watch the team practice.
The Hawkeyes’ wrestling room reeks of new-mat smell and disinfectant. It’s also two stories underground and like some wild Willy Wonka spread slathered with team colors, and at present a quorum of wrestlers are sitting patiently in the stands waiting for the AD to stop talking about paperwork and for Coach Tom Brands to kick things in. Brands, a three-time NCAA and Olympic champion, took over after the school gave the boot to Jimmy Zalesky, who took over after Gable retired. So Brands is in, with a crucial brand differentiator: now Gable is HIS assistant coach. Sort of like me having Nabokov as my proofreader, but Brands is no coach manqué and his opening speech starts kicking down the rails to him eventually screaming “NOW YOU ARE LIVING THE LIFE,” and it feels the same way it feels when you’re sitting up at the top of a rollercoaster.
Because no sooner is he done but warm-ups start, and then drills, and then a little live wrestling, and suddenly it is very nearly apparent that we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore. At first I think it’s that outside eyes are skewing the sampling and they’re just going as hard as they’re going because we’re watching … until Conner tells me, “This is the first practice of the season, so they’re going light today.”
Their “light” would not only kill about everyone I’ve ever trained with who didn’t go to school here but it’s nowhere near the opposite end of things from “heavy.” It’s like Gable said … beyond. Or shadows thereof. It is, after all, the first day. But imagine, if you would, how you might train if I told you that if your effort level slipped below 98 percent, you’d be shot where you stood. Or if your hair was on fire. Or if you were caught slacking you wouldn’t make the team and have to go back to de-tasseling corn stalks somewhere else in Iowa. They are properly motivated, and when I see one guy in the stands, I ask Gable what of.
“Oh. He’s in the penalty box. It’d kill me if I had to spend even five minutes in there. “Hey,” he starts to ask, “what’d you do?” And the kid, no more than twenty, with a long scar up his left knee, explains, with what seems to be genuine remorse, that he’d missed the requisite number of hours of study hall because he was training. And he sits for the entire three-hour practice, looking more morose as the minutes go by. Brands goes over moves, moves that even in demo mode he runs through like it’s a life, and very possibly a death, situation. Which in a way it sort of is. Wrestling programs at universities all over the U.S. are losing ground (while all states but two, Mississippi and Arkansas, Gable guesses, have high school wrestling) while commercial interest in wrestling outside the Olympics is confined to the bullshit tights-and-turnbuckle kind.
Conner claims that the personality types drawn to the rigors of the sport— the dieting, the privation (since recuperation necessitates early bedtimes), the endless driving, driving, driving—are such that “they’d probably be in prison or dead if it wasn’t for wrestling.” Gable, though, who’s been doing a fine job of hanging back and wandering the mat while offering minute adjustments and periodic corrections (he and Brands doing a good two-step), sees a rosy future, drawn in distinctly Gableian hues.
“Look, when all of a sudden a guy like myself can dominate a sport from the athletic level. The athlete level. And then you go into coaching and you can also dominate it. There are reasons somebody can dominate something, and if you look at one of the main reasons, if you look at any sport, you might want to look at … myself, or my athletes—not only did we dominate, but we drew attention, or crowds … is because there was more entertainment in the matches than a normal match. It wasn’t all just fine art or fine skills. It was a harder style. These other sports that you’re talking about here [boxing, mixed martial arts] are already hard. I made sport wrestling harder, and it became natural to me to be able to do that. And because it inflicted extraordinary amounts of pain and showcased the ability of some people NOT to hold up, all of a sudden what you have is, eventually, domination that functions as entertainment. This is really the oldest kind of human drama there is.”
And as practice winds down and wrestlers start to filter out, Gable comes over and takes his final leave of me. “I gotta put some work in,” he says, shakes my hand, and wanders off to the cardio area. He limps when he walks, two hip replacements and one that now needs to be redone, and I note that earlier, when he was showing me around, the thought had never seemed to occur to him to use the elevator in the four-story athletic building that housed his two offices and their practice and locker rooms.
“If you’re tough enough …” he at one point had started to say to me, and I thought, before he even finished, “If.” The whole world balanced on that IF. IF you were tough enough. And as I began to back out of the double swinging doors I started to wonder what it was like to live life beyond that IF. Beyond beyond. In the grips of some sort of transcendently evident desire to destroy, dominate, drive off into the ether your enemies like Gable had done in one international match where his opponent just left the mat before the match was over, just walked off of it still wearing his singlet, out of the door, a grand mal no más. IF you could harness that for a minute or a lifetime, to quote Kurtz (again), “Our troubles here would soon be over.”
“You’re welcome to come back anytime,” Gable waved.
Oh, I will. Goddamned right I will.
THE BEST PROFESSIONAL-WRESTLING-BEFORE-PROFESSIONAL-WRESTLING-WAS-MUSCLE-BALLET FLICK
NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950) DIRECTED BY JULES DASSIN
Anybody what ever seen Richard Widmark push Victor Mature’s wheelchaired mother down the stairs in the 1947 Kiss of Death knows if his name is on the marquee we’re not talking paragons of virtue of any kind. Blacklisted director Jules Dassin’s treatment of post-war pugilists, specifically professional wrestlers (before professional wrestling was all about tights, trash talking and T-shirt sales) was dead on. Bearing absolutely no resemblance to the book of the same name since the on-the-lam-from-McCarthy’s-commie-witch-hunt Dassin had never read the book and improvised the script, which marginally follows Widmark’s Harry Fabian through the rough and tumble world of fight promotion, noteworthy for two reasons and two reasons: Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki. Polish and Ukrainian, respectively, these two fighters were the real deal. Which means, in today’s terms, that they could probably single-handedly have killed just about anybody in pro wrestling today with hooks, punishing holds, and submissions that form the solid basis of the forgotten art of catch wrestling, or what we call today submission wrestling. The rest of the plot that swirls around a sort of What Makes Sammy Run? hustler’s brass ring swing is entertaining enough, but when Zbyszko slaps a head chancery on Mazurki (a early variant of the guillotine choke) if you’ve ever even been in the same room with one before, you start to fucking ache. Yeah. It’s that good.
SO YOU’RE BEING CHOKED: WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, ALFIE?!?
Your first time? I mean the first time it happens will probably be remembered in the same way, that is, of course, if you can remember some, any, or even a small part of it afterward.
There’ll be the sudden rush, the struggle (yours), and then the slow descent of cottony silence as the voices fade out and everything seems like you’re looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The first time it happened to me it happened at the hands of Matt Furey. Though now widely derided by those in the know as sort of a quasi Billy Blanks exercise enthusiast, Furey was, and is, the real deal. After eight years of kenpo karate (“You might as well have been studying interpretive dance,” he said), a year of muay thai, and a month of thinking about how another Gracie (Royce this time) had run through the competition in the first bow of what’s now called mixed martial arts, no holds barred, or submission fighting, using this selfsame choke, I had asked him to show it to me.
After I came to, I asked, chagrined, “What do you do when they get you in one of these?”
“That’s like asking ‘What do you do after you’ve been knocked out?’”
Perfect. Perfect and perfectly helpless in a way that most of us haven’t been since we were old enough to be able to tell on someone. It’s a nightmare, and nightmarish, this inability to breathe, and if being able to avoid it was part of the holy and secret canon of crypto-martial artistry that would not be revealed to me until Furey revealed to me that he was indeed my father, Luke—well, fuck it. I’d try to figure out myself.
Enter, again, Dr. Steven G. Ballinger, M.D., Diplomate of the American Board of Orthopedic Surgeons and Fellow of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. He of the big brain might be able to help me to try to get my hands around what happens when there are hands around your neck.
I can’t breathe and it’s not a Heimlich issue. What do I do?
You got to understand nerves first off. Nerves are the greediest and most high-maintenance cells in the body.
Don’t believe it?
Put a tourniquet around your arm and start pumping a rubber ball with your hand. Keep going. The first thing you notice is numbness. That’s the sensory nerves shutting off. Then your power drops, and not because your muscle is burning and exhausted, but because your motor nerves are quitting. You can’t keep going long enough to get your muscle to give up, because muscle doesn’t mind running on low or no oxygen.
Look, anyone who has ever run a 440 has racked up a severe muscle-oxygen debt—when oxygen gets consumed faster than it is provided, glucose breaks down into lactic acid instead of carbon dioxide. Lactic acid is nasty stuff—it’s what causes the muscle pain that makes you walk around like an old man the day after you start a new training program. Most tissue in the body is pretty tolerant of some lactic acid.
Not so neurons, the cells that nerves are made of. Even a slight drop in oxygen will create a net increase in lactic acid, and nerves suck up glucose and oxygen like a drag-racing Hummer sucks gas. Nerves are covered with little switches that will shut business right down if things aren’t just right.
But do… what do I do? I mean, relax to minimize the oxygen debt? What?
In hot weather a skinny girl will have a little bit of vasodilation, where the blood vessels in her skin open up a little so that blood can cool off under the sweaty skin, and BOOM. A little drop in the blood pressure to the brain creates an oxygen debt that makes her faint. There are six big arteries going to your brain, and four of them can be squeezed shut by a chokehold. Once the flow is decreased enough to let lactic acid build up—this amount varies from person to person—a chain reaction starts that will result in unconsciousness. If the neurons aren’t working, they don’t generate much lactic acid, and to prevent permanent brain damage, the brain does the only thing it can do to protect itself—it shuts off. It’s just like a computer that has heat sensors that keep the computer from burning up if the fans quit working. Once the computer shuts off, it stops generating heat, and nothing gets fried.
Of course, once the brain shuts off, the neurons don’t stop working completely; they still have to do some metabolizing, or they die. You can’t just lie there without brain flow indefinitely—at some point, if the blood flow to your brain doesn’t start up again, bringing oxygen and carrying off carbon dioxide, the cells will start dying. How long this takes varies from person to person. In general, children and women do better for longer periods without blood flow. Men and old people do worse. So perhaps you could be a woman or a child, that might help.
Would that I were … but I’m not. Soooo. …?
Well, a pretty good rule of thumb is five minutes. If someone has no brain flow for less than five minutes, they will probably wake up and be okay. More than five minutes, you got some ’splaining to do. It’s possible to induce permanent brain damage in three or four minutes in a delicate person, like someone with severe diabetes or clogged carotid arteries. Then again, there are cases of children trapped under ice for more than fifteen minutes who ended up waking up and being pretty normal.
There is also evidence that going out for thirty seconds causes a little brain damage. Our brains are big and have lots and lots of redundant pathways—there are spare parts galore built in, If someone gets gorked and he wakes up with twenty percent of his redundant pathways damaged, he still can seem totally normal and remember his name and birthday and whatnot. Guys who get knocked out a lot, however … I’ve known a few gluttons for punishment, present company included, and over the years they definitely develop a certain behavior pattern that is probably due to critical loss of pathways. They talk loud, tell the same stories over and over again …
Would that I were … but I’m not. Soooo.…?
Yes, Exactly. They seem drunk all the time, and may get clumsy; they develop a weird “overfriendly” personality and talk way too much about personal stuff that might best be kept secret. They also tend to get less intelligent and can’t keep a job, or a pair of sunglasses, for more than a couple of weeks.
People who have had loss of brain flow for too long won’t wake up right away after flow is re-established. This is true if the blood flow stops because their carotids were compressed by choking, or if their heart stops, or if they lose a bunch of blood and don’t have any to pump to the head. This is what we call a “coma”—the brain has been damaged to the extent that it won’t re-boot right away, and stays in idle mode to prevent further damage. Typically there is some swelling from damaged tissue and toxic buildup of lactic acid and other stuff. Once the swelling goes down and the bad chemicals wash away, sometimes people wake up again—but they are not the same.
Forget the TV plot device where someone gets knocked out for two hours and then hops up and kicks everyone’s ass—that just doesn’t happen. If someone is in a coma for a week or more, their brain is going to be very different after they wake up than it was before—not usually in a good way.
So much for Uma Thurman killing everyone after a long coma in Kill Bill. She would have been lucky to get a job emptying the trash at the Dollar Store.
