By Jon Darsee
Special to The Des Moines Register
On the evening of March 17, 1980, we returned to Iowa City victorious after defeating Georgetown in the NCAA East Region Final, advancing Iowa basketball to its first Final Four in 24 years.

On that same Sunday afternoon in Corvallis, Oregon, the Iowa wrestling team won its’ third straight NCAA championship and fifth in six seasons.

We arrived at the Field House near midnight, shocked to find it packed to the rafters. The electric atmosphere may never have reached a fever pitch had it not been ignited by the arrival of the Hawkeye wrestling champs before us. It is a memory I’ll never forget.

Though I grew up in a basketball family, you can’t be from Iowa without some appreciation for wrestling. My cousins lived in Lisbon, and I watched from a distance as they competed for that proud, wrestling-mad mecca. I saw how this sport galvanized an entire town. As a young boy, I went to wrestling meets with my dad, and though I didn’t understand much, the cadence of the crowd was enthralling — the rise and fall of tribal-like emotion spurred by unpredictable and often instantaneous changes of fate.

Dan Gable, who was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame as a Distinguished Member in 1980 and who is the namesake for the National Wrestling Hall of Fame Dan Gable Museum in Waterloo, Iowa, won his first wrestling championship at the Waterloo YMCA when he was 12. He gives credit to the Y for his early inspiration. My wrestling fate was also sealed at 12 in a YMCA. Unlike Mr. Gable’s experience, I remember a former heavyweight of some repute sending us around the creaky running track suspended above the gym while he sat chain-smoking cigarettes on a poorly ventilated turn in the track. Lap after lap I’d run past him, holding my breath through a deepening haze of smoke. Perhaps this was part of his plan to toughen us up. I quickly convinced myself there was no room for a contact-averse, basketball-loving kid on the mat.

Read Full Story