The Iowa Hawkeyes boast 22 NCAA team titles, including nine consecutive championships between 1978 and 1986, tying the longest streak of national titles won by any school in any sport. Iowa State has eight team titles.
Nebraska will bring five qualifiers to this week's NCAA tournament at the Qwest Center Omaha. The Hawkeyes and Cyclones each will bring the maximum of 10.
Wrestling has been part of Midwest culture for decades, but it is particularly deep in Iowa, said Mike Chapman, a former newspaper editor and retired executive director of the Dan Gable International Wrestling Institute and Museum in Waterloo, Iowa.
“It's a cult, like football in Nebraska or basketball in Indiana,” Chapman said. “This has always been a wrestling state.”
Most Iowa towns have a high school wrestling team, and the sport is big on the club level from spring into mid-summer, Chapman said.
“In Iowa, it's as common as Little League baseball.”
Iowa's mania for wrestling dates to weather-hardened pioneers who challenged one another to foot races, baseball games and wrestling matches, he said. It grew thanks to legends like Frank Gotch, a farm boy from Humboldt, who went on to hold the World Heavyweight Championship from 1908 to 1913 and helped make professional wrestling popular in the United States.
Chapman said pro wrestling was legitimate in those barnstorming days, not theatrical like today, and matches could go on for hours. Today's college matches last about seven minutes.
Gotch was charming and handsome, Chapman said.
“All the Iowa kids in the 1920s and 1930s grew up wanting to be like Frank Gotch,” he said. “Gotch was an American hero.”
Wrestling faded in Iowa in the 1940s and '50s. But Dan Gable of Waterloo revived the sport starting in the '60s when he went 182-1 through his high school and then college career at Iowa State.
Gable won a gold medal at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich while not giving up a single point. He later coached at the University of Iowa, winning 15 NCAA team titles and 21 Big 10 championships from 1976 to 1997.
Cael Sanderson, born in Utah, was another Iowa State star, going undefeated at 159-0 and winning four straight NCAA titles from 1999 to 2002. He won gold at the 2004 Olympics before coaching three years at Iowa State and becoming head coach at Penn State last year.
Nebraska has wrestling stars, too, including Joe Stecher of Dodge, a three-time World Heavyweight Champion from 1915 through 1925. Stecher first claimed the title in 1915 in a match in Omaha, reclaimed it in 1920 at Madison Square Garden in New York and again in 1925 in St. Louis.
Rulon Gardner of Wyoming wrestled at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and won the gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney by defeating Russian Alexander Karelin, who hadn't lost in 13 years of international competition.
“Omaha has a terrific wrestling tradition,” Chapman said.
But Nebraska and other Midwestern states don't have quite the same heritage as Iowa, he said. “Nebraska and Minnesota didn't have Frank Gotch.”
Contact the writer:
444-1117, joe.ruff@owh.com
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