Essentials to Becoming a Champion

By Warren Applegate

1. Be academically eligible. If you are you aren't allowed to compete you can't be a champion no matter how good you are.

2. Be strong enough to not be over-powered by any opponent. It isn't necessary to be the strongest wrestler, but it helps. You need enough upper body strength to neutralize your strongest opponent's attempts to over power you.

3. Be in as good or better condition than any of your opponents. Being able to wrestle as hard the last 10 seconds of the match as the first 10 seconds is very important Countless numbers of matches in the NCAA tournament have been settled by someone getting a takedown or escape just before time ran out.

4. Have a superior leg attack defense. The highest percentage takedowns are leg attacks i.e. single leg, double leg, high crotch, Ankle pick, inside and outside fireman's carry. If you can stop all of the takedown attempts of any opponent you can wrestle more aggressively.

5. Have a superior defense on bottom. You cannot get ridden for more than 15 seconds if you want to be a successful college wrestler. A inside leg standup is probably the most common escape used at the college level. You also can't let your opponent break you down or turn you for a nearfall or pin.

6. Master a leg attack series. A single leg or double leg takedown should be the first takedown you master.

7. Master a breakdown/ride. It is important to be able to control your opponent on the mat. In many cases it will be necessary to win by 1 point. In college riding time frequently determines who wins the match.

8. Master a pinning combination series. Half nelsons, cradles, chicken wings, etc. You need to know how to set up your opponent so he'll fall into a pin hold before he realizes it.

9. There will be times when there is less than one minute left in a match and you are trailing by 3 or more points. In these situations a leg takedown isn't going to win the match for you, it will only make the score closer. You need a 5-point move from the down and neutral position in these situations. This is when it is time to pull something out of your "bag of tricks". It will be a move that is fundamentally sound, but is not frequently seen by most wrestlers.

10. Last, but certainly not least is mental toughness. In my opinion wrestling is 90 percent mental. The successful wrestlers in college or at the world level are pretty equal in terms of technical skills. Occasionally there will be one superior athlete compared to the others. However, it usually comes down to the wrestler who wants to win the most that determines the outcome of a match. I've seen wrestlers who weren't as good as athletes as other wrestlers, but they found ways to win. A wrestling match is a test of "wills", if you keep constant pressure on your opponent throughout the entire match eventually almost all of them will give up at some point, because they are exhausted physically and/or mentally.

THE LOSS THAT MADE THE MAN

On Saturday, March 28, 1970, Dan Gable of Iowa State lost to Larry Owings of the University of Washington in the 142-pound weight class at the 1970 NCAA Wrestling Championships in Evanston, Ill. Gable, a senior, entered the match with a perfect career record of 181-0-0 through high school and college.

In chemistry class, he wrote scouting reports in his notebook: height, weight and record of his next opponent; lists of the guy's tendencies; stick-figure sketches of moves and counters. He marked time between one match and the next the way they do at Cape Canaveral. The countdown began when the referee held up his arm after a win. Every second, every day, every gesture and ritual from that moment on ticked him closer to zero hour: The next time the whistle blew. No variation. No distractions.

Dan Gable, right, had a leg up on every wrestler he faced ... until the final match of his collegiate career.

Gable's older sister, Diane, had been murdered when he was a high school sophomore. He knew who had done it even before the police told him. He'd had a bad feeling about the guy. Maybe if he'd said something earlier, he could have saved her. He couldn't bring her back. He could only wrestle. "I was wrestling to recover, to lift my family up somehow," he says. "I thought every match could make things a little better." No variation. No distractions.

And then, with one match to go, he wavered. Three days before the final, he read a headline: Owings said he had come to the tournament to beat him. Gable never read headlines. Why now? Two nights before the match, he attended a banquet in which he was honored as wrestling's man of the year. He never went to banquets. He didn't care about awards. Why now? In his early matches in the tournament, he found himself glancing up, eyeballing Owings on another mat. He never looked anywhere but straight through the heart of his opponent. Why now?

Thirty minutes before the final, when he should have been going through his routine, 10-9-8 ..., he was taping a television interview, stumbling through takes in which he looked into the camera and tempted the fates: "Hi, I'm Dan Gable. Come watch me finish my career 182-0." Why now? And on the mat with Owings, even when he had a lead midway through the third period, he heard conversations going on in the crowd, noticed people moving in the stands. He was elsewhere. Why now?

"I don't know. I got caught up. I got distracted," he says. "I wasn't doing anything the way I normally would, and I'm really not sure why." Maybe he got a little full of himself. Maybe he hadn't made Owings a goal, a target, the way Owings had focused on him. Maybe the pressure to win every single time out (he had gone undefeated in winning three consecutive Iowa state titles at West Waterloo High School, too: 64-0) finally broke something inside him. Maybe the weight of Diane's memory was something he had to finally put down. It could have been all these things, he thought.

Washington's Larry Owings, left, was the only wrestler who ever felt what it was like to have his hand raised against Gable.

He stood there on the mat, watching Owings' hand go up. Can't even remember if he said anything to him. Didn't know what to do. There was no way to mark time now. No next match. No countdown. He was lost. The guilt hit him in waves, first for letting his family down by losing, and then, all over again, for letting harm come to his sister. "I didn't know until then how connected they were in my mind," he says.

The drive back to campus was quiet. He couldn't speak. Had no idea what to say. He walked into Beyer Hall, the recreation center at Iowa State, went up to the wrestling room and found someone who would get down on the mat with him. No variation. No distractions. "I was still good," he says. "That kind of shocked me. It made me know I could go on."

He went on to win at the World Freestyle Championships in 1971. In 1972, he won an Olympic gold medal in Munich. And beginning in 1976, he became the most successful coach in the history of collegiate sports, leading the University of Iowa to 15 NCAA titles and 21 consecutive Big Ten crowns.

The losses, first Diane and then the match to Owings, made him. He didn't just go on, he got better. That was the hardest part, he says. The focus came at such a high price, with so much hurt underneath.

You ask him: What is perfection? What has it meant to chase it for so long?

He's still in pursuit, he says: "If I could figure out how I could have gone back and saved Diane, and how I could have gone back and not had that loss in that tournament, and still gone on to be the same person I am today, that would be perfect."

Eric Neel is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

Wrestling and MMA

Wrestling still a pretty important martial art. Right, Thiago?
By Maggie Hendricks

Brock Lesnar. Jon Fitch. Dan Henderson. Mark Coleman. Jon Jones. Tom Lawlor. What do these gentlemen have in common, besides the fact that they were winners at UFC 100?

They all started out as wrestlers.

Say what you'd like about wrestling being boring, or the lay'n'pray style, but UFC 100 showed that wrestling is an essential part of MMA. Without it, you cannot win. Former UFC welterweight champion and collegiate wrestler Matt Hughes often says that wrestlers have an advantage because they can decide where the fight will take place, an adage that played out on Saturday.

Frank Mir had no answer for Lesnar's collegiate wrestling style, taking Mir down, then moving to the side to drive the jiu-jitsu specialist to his back. Paulo Thiago's BJJ was useless against Fitch, who didn't give Thiago room to breathe, much less move. For all of Michael Bisping's talk of outwrestling Henderson, the Brit couldn't even smell a takedown in their fight.

But the most effective wrestler at UFC 100 is the one who has never competed in the sport. Georges St. Pierre put on a takedown clinic against Thiago Alves. Double-leg takedowns, single-leg takedowns, shot and reshoot combinations, maintaining control and positioning while on top -- it was all classic wrestling. GSP never wrestled in high school or college, but he has learned how important and effective wrestling can be when used properly.

Now, no one can win big in MMA on wrestling alone. Henderson and Lesnar won with their fists. GSP mixed beautiful kicks, punches and elbows in with the takedowns. Getting a takedown means nothing without effective submission defense. But the next time you dismiss an up-and-coming fighter as another wrestler, remember how important it was to the winners of UFC 100.