In April of 1973 an article entitled “Gorgeous Dan” ran in Esquire. The author, John Irving, a former wrestler and wrestling coach who was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame as an Outstanding American in 1992, was teaching creative writing at the University of Iowa at the time. The subject, Dan Gable, a Distinguished Member inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1980 and the namesake for the National Wrestling Hall of Fame Dan Gable Museum, was fresh off a win at the 1972 Olympic Games and was recently hired as an assistant wrestling coach for the University of Iowa.

Gable would become the head wrestling coach for the Hawkeyes in 1976, leading his team to 15 NCAA championships in 21 seasons. Irving has written 16 books (13 novels and three memoirs), five of which were made into films. In 2000, he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “The Cider House Rules.”

Nearly 40 years after the fact, Irving, reflects on the continued significance of the article, his disgust for the title, and trying to get a movie made about Dan Gable.

What was the genesis of the article? How did it come about?

I was afraid you would ask me that. You have to keep in mind that it was one of the few pieces that I wrote for a magazine that I have a fondness for. I did not see myself as a journalist. All I wanted to do was write novels. I hated taking time away from writing novels.

I accepted some magazine pieces that were offered to me or that came my way, and, because of how admiring I was of Dan and because I was in Iowa City in those years immediately following Dan’s gold medal in Munich, I accepted.

I began “The World According to Garp” in those years in Iowa City. I was the writer, at that point, of three novels that virtually no one had read. The short pieces for magazines I wasn’t crazy about.

That being said, as time goes by, that article was something (much to my surprise) that I liked. Everybody wanted to hang out with Gable. It was an opportunity for me to spend some time with him outside the room and get to know him.

Tell me about the title, “Gorgeous Dan”.

No writer gets to pick the titles that newspapers and magazines put on your stuff. You can write a book review for “The New York Times” and you don’t get to say what it’s called. That’s what the editors do. For a number of years I cringed at that piece in Esquire because they titled it Gorgeous Dan. I never would have. That was their title. That’s a cheap, sleazy magazine title that’s confusing a real wrestler with one of the clowns. That’s where that came from. It didn’t come from me.

For a number of years when it was published I was really ticked about it. Editors take that priority. That’s why titles in newspapers and magazines are so bad. Even if a good writer wrote the piece he or she never got to put a title on it. I didn’t hate the piece but I hated the title.

Did writing this article change you in any way as a writer?

It’s hard to make Gable believable because he is on 100 percent of the time. It’s almost a sports cliché. It’s hard to write about Gable because he is no cliché but he is all those things. He is a model of work ethic. He doesn’t let up anyone else and he doesn’t let up on himself. And that sounds like a broken record on a terrible made-for-television movie doesn’t it? We’ve all seen that story overdone until we think if we ever see it again it will make us gag. So it’s hard to write about the guy because you’re up against that he really is all those things—but flawlessly.

My pleasure in that piece is that he comes off pretty believable and very much the guy he is. My pride in the piece was that he liked it and the people who knew him also liked it and felt that it rang true. I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our wrestling community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.

You have a line in the article where you say everyone is interested in someone who is the “best”—at anything. Do you take pride in knowing that you’re the best at something?

I don’t think literature is a sport. There are a lot of people who make it a competition—my fellow writers and especially those who write about writers. There is an ongoing, lingering edge of competitiveness when you’re around your wrestling friends. Jocks are by nature competitive. They have to be. That’s kind of how you are and who you are in that community. I don’t ever feel that way about writing. I just never viewed writing in those terms. My friends in the writing community don’t bring out the same competitiveness that my friends in the wrestling community do.

In the article you say that Dan would expose himself to vulnerable positions in practice so he would know every single position. Isn’t that a motif in some of your books—that people are vulnerable and they experience vulnerable positions? Is that a fair comparison?

That’s a good comparison. I hadn’t thought of it but I wouldn’t disagree with that. I also think that it’s not probably a coincidence that many of my characters are outsiders or foreigners within the world they live in.

We’ve all had enough to do with other sports that we know that wrestling really is harder. Wrestling really does make more of a demand on you. I certainly believe that my stamina as a writer, the fact that I do write and I can write for eight or nine hours a day—every day, is something that I got from wrestling. I didn’t get it from English class.

We’re 40 years after the fact and this is still a historically significant piece of literature, and we’re still compelled by Dan Gable. Why do you think that is?

It’s one thing to be an example of excellence as an athlete. It’s quite another to have an effect on people where, psychologically—and in their hearts—you make them want to be better than they are.

This was a time in my life where I felt sorry for myself. I wasn’t well enough known as a writer in my estimation. I didn’t have enough time to write in my estimation. I loved my kids but my marriage wasn’t going so well.

We were driving somewhere one night and he said something to me along the lines of, “Things aren’t going too well for you right now, are they?” He recognized that things weren’t perfect with me. And he said something along the lines of “You can do something about that you know.” He pretty much said that if something is wrong you can fix it, and you’re the only one. It was rather matter-of-fact. It was a small moment.

Writers, by reputation, have disastrous lives. Everybody did. Nobody is going to tell you that you can do anything about it. I wasn’t a kid. I was older than he was. I remember thinking, “The next time I see you pal I’m going to be doing better than I am.”

The night I won an Oscar for “Cider House Rules” I was out in Beverly Hills and I got back to the hotel at five in the morning or something. There were a number of my writer friends who certainly knew I was there and some of them probably knew where I was staying. And I didn’t hear from anybody. I was probably out the west coast for not quite a week before I came back to Vermont. I looked through the messages on my answering machine and there wasn’t a single message from any of my writer friends saying congratulations—but there was a message from Gable.

Gable put it in an interesting way. I used to say to him, when we would talk about wrestling or something, that I never won a tournament at any level of the sport. And the message on my machine was, “Hey, you finally won something.” It made me feel good that he was thinking about it. It was a long time to stay up in Iowa for the Academy Awards and I knew it was way past his bedtime. He wrote me later that it was way past his bedtime and it was the only time he stayed up for the Academy Awards.

The classic line in the article is “When Dan Gable lays his hands on you, you are in touch with grace.” How did you come up with that?

It came out of working out with him. Instead of getting mad that you couldn’t beat him all you could really do is appreciate it. He would frustrate you until you did something stupid because nothing else was working.

Based on this line, how should we view Dan Gable?

There aren’t a lot of people that I would put myself out for to the degree which I have to get a feature length film about him. I don’t even like so-called “biopics.” I’d much rather create a fictional character than write a book or make a movie about a “real person.” The stories about true people don’t move me. They don’t touch me. It’s quite rare to have a person in my life that I have looked up to as much, and for as long as, I have to him.

This guy makes an impact. You meet this guy and if you have any sensibilities at all your life will change.