The Cyclones have made sacrifices to keep wrestling alive and well.
By WRIGHT THOMPSON
The Kansas City Star
AMES, Iowa | – AMES, Iowa | Cael Sanderson’s desk is covered with receipts. Folded ones and crumpled ones. Some are for gas. Some are for food. Some are from state wrestling tournaments. His new life is here, strewn about office 2133, more rumpled than a bachelor’s shirt. Some are out of order. Some are almost certainly missing. He looks down, hoping at least that most are present and accounted for. He smiles.
“I lose a lot of money,” he says. “I’m learning that lesson.”
He’s officially been the Iowa State wrestling coach for two months, taking over when longtime leader Bobby Douglas resigned to make room for him, the 26-year-old former Olympic gold medalist. Sanderson’s hiring has generated buzz. With 90 years of history and eight national titles behind them, the Cyclones wrestling fans expect great things.
It’s something of an alternate universe here off U.S. 30. At a time when most colleges go without wrestling ” only five Big 12 schools even compete ” the sport isn’t merely surviving. Wrestling thrives here, and not by accident. They’ve chosen to be great. In big-time college athletics, smaller players face many impossible choices. What to leave in? What to leave out? What to emphasize? What to cut?
“You’ve just got to make so many tough decisions,” says former Iowa State athletic director Bruce Van De Velde. “Wrestling has a rich tradition. We’ve won a lot of national championships. It’s a sport Iowa State can excel in. It was not even on the table. And it never could be, because of the rich tradition.”
With wrestling protected, Iowa State looked elsewhere. Five years ago, Van De Velde had to eliminate swimming and baseball; Colorado is the only other Big 12 school without baseball. As those cuts were happening, Sanderson was in the midst of his 159-0 collegiate career, a high point for the athletic department.
Now, they’re looking to Cael for more highs. Office 2133 is a place of hope, and that’s what they need in Ames. Meanwhile, across the way, a baseball stadium sits, mostly empty, a testament to the have-nots in college athletics, a silent asker of two questions. Why did sports need to be sacrificed? And why wasn’t wrestling one of them, as it has been at hundreds of other schools?
The answers to both lie in the past of the school that was host to the very first NCAA championship, in 1928.
“When you look back at 1928 to the present, there’s a lot of history,” Douglas says. “When you have history like that, it tends to bury some deep roots. “¦
“I don’t think you ever have to be concerned about Iowa State’s wrestling program. It’s become entrenched in the administration. It’s become entrenched in the state and, most important, it’s entrenched in the families and the kids in the state. And they’re really about to explode with the new regime.”
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Wrestling first came to Ames in 1916, in the blush of an economic boom. It was a great time for the state, one of the last great times. The war had driven the demand for corn, beef and pork. Iowans excelled in producing. Farmers expanded, taking on debt, adding operations. Wrestling was part of this growth.
The future looked limitless, until the war ended.
The demand vanished. Farmers couldn’t pay the interest on their loans. The Depression began a decade early in the heartland. Wrestling, created in the blush of success, took Iowans’ attention off their failures. The athletes, then as now, were mostly hard-working kids from the state’s small towns and high schools, which have long been a hotbed for the sport. The farming community needed something to feel good about. A love affair was born. There’s a picture in the Iowa State archives taken in April of 1923. Students are camped out, Duke style, for a big match against Penn State. Some have pushed beds into the line.
Five years later, Iowa State organized and was host to the inaugural NCAA championship. It was a huge success. So were the Cyclones. They won a team national title in 1933 and again in 1965 ” with individual champs and Olympians coming in between.
In the 1960s, the program reached its pinnacle, its rise and eventual fall brought on by the same young man. Dan Gable left his home in Waterloo and arrived on campus in Ames. He became the best ever, winning national titles in 1968 and 1969, going undefeated until his last college match. In 1972, he won gold in Munich, and his unbeaten streak would stand until Sanderson. Spurred by his success, the Cyclones won four team titles in five years. Then their world came undone.
Gable wanted to coach. Iowa State already had one, the beloved and long-tenured Harold Nichols. The best they could do was offer Gable a job buying meat for the training table. So he drove across the state to the University of Iowa. He took the magic with him.
In 1978, Iowa defeated Iowa State by less than a point and won Gable’s first national title as coach. Nichols would never win another. The Hawkeyes would take eight more in a row, and Gable would retire with 15 championships. That was all to come. In 1978, the Cyclones couldn’t imagine such a future.
“It was a quarter point,” says Jim Gibbons, a freshman that year and eventual national champion. “We thought it was a blip. Of course we did. Pretty soon, it wasn’t.”
Gibbons became head coach in 1985, when Nichols retired. He led the team to its last national title in 1987, stopping Iowa’s bid for 10 straight. That was a sweet day in Ames, but, as the years slipped away and the program failed to recapture its earlier glory, the vision of a former Cyclone reinventing wrestling across the state stung.
Cael and his undefeated streak helped fans feel special again, beginning to erase the ghosts of Gable’s departure. Then he graduated. Former wrestler and retired longtime assistant coach Les Anderson, involved in six of the school’s eight national titles, marched into the athletic director’s office.
“Are we gonna allow Cael to go the same as we allowed Gable to escape?”
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There were other questions ” difficult ones with barely palatable answers.
In the mid 1990s, the Iowa State athletic department was in a bit of trouble. In 1996, it would join a super conference, the Big 12, and compete against programs with virtually unlimited budgets. This wasn’t a new trend. Cutbacks had been on the horizon for decades. All across America, departments eliminated men’s sports, coming into compliance with Title IX, struggling to control escalating costs. Wrestling was often the first to go. In the last 30 years, in fact, 440 college wresting teams have been lost, according to the National Wrestling Coaches Association. Some people even feared for the most storied programs.
“We always approach it as if there is no intercollegiate wrestling program out there that’s safe,” says Mike Moyer, head of the association. “It’s very dangerous trying to assume that any collegiate program out there would be immune. We watched when UCLA whacked men’s gymnastics, or down at the University of Miami, they dropped men’s swimming. They had Greg Louganis and like 15 Olympians come through the program.”
At Iowa State, this began to come to a head around the time the Big 12 was formed in 1996. Douglas remembers being asked to cut around 30 percent of his low-six-figure operating budget.
“We pulled back,” Douglas says. “We held back on our scheduling. We cut corners. “¦ We managed to survive.”
Iowa State became famous for the ways it tried to curb expenses. The toilet paper in the athletic department is so thin it’s virtually transparent. There were allegedly timers on the lights to save on electric bills.
Still, when Van De Velde took over in 2000, he found several three-ring binders waiting on him in his new office. They were all the analysis for cutting several sports, anything to eliminate the $1.2 million annual deficit. He was given the awful task of being the hatchet man.
The baseball program, like wrestling had done a few years earlier, tried to make it work. On road trips, head coach Lyle Smith sometimes would go to a grocery and buy bread and lunch meat, sitting in his hotel room making sandwiches for the team. “We bused all the way from College Station to Ames, Iowa,” Smith says. “You throw them a couple of pizzas and some pops and they’ll shut up. “¦ A lot of the teams in the Big 12, they’re not chartering buses, they’re chartering planes.”
The scrimping and sandwich making was for naught. Soon, men’s swimming and baseball were gone. Wrestling and its tradition had been saved, but at a cost. The baseball team played its final season under a cloud. When it was over, they had one more get-together at Smith’s house.
“Guys came over and made hamburgers like we usually did,” he says. “Wife made baked beans. Sat around and shot the bull and laughed. Guys said their goodbyes and slowly drifted out of the town.”
Soon, Smith followed his players, settling in South Dakota.
“They didn’t want me around because it was like a scar,” he says. “It was a visible reminder to have Trip (Hedrick), the swimming coach, and myself in the athletic program. I can’t blame them. It was hard for everybody.”
The cutting worked, though. When Van De Velde resigned in 2005, the department had increased its budget by $10 million and instead of a deficit, it had a $4.5 million surplus. “You gotta watch your spending,” he says. “Sell more tickets. Raise more money. It’s a never-ending cycle.”
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That’s where the Cyclone wrestling program is today: buttressed by success but always aware that no amount of tradition can balance a budget.
“We were in trouble before,” Douglas says. “We can be in trouble again.”
That’s why Douglas is sitting on a couch, going through clippings, reading about all his past glories. It’s why he’s no longer the wrestling coach. It was his vision that Sanderson take over, but few imagined it would be so soon.
It started when Ohio State’s head coaching job came open earlier this year. Sanderson’s name surfaced. Then Iowa canned coach Jim Zalesky, who’d been Gable’s replacement. Cyclone fans imagined the worst: a repeat of the most painful moment in their wrestling program’s history. They couldn’t allow it.
“The decision to hire Cael was really easy because there was only one real choice,” athletic director Jamie Pollard says. “Hire Cael or get run out of town by our fans.”
Douglas took the development with class. After helping coach six Olympic teams and mentoring the man who’d replace him, he knew it was better if he walked away.
“Hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life,” he says.
Douglas packed up his office. Took everything with him. Well, almost everything, which is why Sanderson looks up from the receipts on his desk to see “¦ himself. At least a cardboard cutout of himself, a final gift from his mentor. Cael seems embarrassed at his likeness, just as he seems a bit embarrassed at being the man who ended the career of a friend.
But he doesn’t have time to fret about that. He’s got a wrestling program to take back to the top and, school officials hope, serve as a model for the other sports at the university.
“It’s a great opportunity to be an example of excellence,” Pollard says. Sanderson stands up and heads down to his car, ready to drive to the wrestling room. He has a practice to conduct. In the parking lot, he sees a fellow athletic department employee. There’s an event on campus and many roads are blocked off.
“Do we need a pass?” Cael asks.
The guy laughs a bit. Perhaps the only man who wouldn’t need a pass to get through a campus roadblock is the steward of their storied wrestling program.
“Just tell ’em you’re Cael Sanderson,” he says.
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