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home later than I was supposed to. I also got in trouble because my clothes might be torn up from playing sports or getting in a fight.”
When his grandfather, Anthony Davis, died when Bobby was eight, so too did much of the things that most kids enjoy. “We didn’t have any money,” Douglas said. “We were lucky to have food. I did- n’t get any Christmas presents after that.” Their home did have a radio, in which Bobby listened to the fights of Joe Louis and the eventual exploits of Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947. “Those top black athletes became heroes of mine,” Douglas told Sesker. “They inspired me to try and do some- thing similar to what they did. Those guys gave me hope.”
But according to Sesker, the Klu Klux Klan had an impact on African-Americans at this location and time in U.S. history. “Everybody carried some sort of weapon to defend themselves in those days,” Bobby said. “It wasn’t unusual to see people with guns, knives, ice picks, baseball bats … whatever they could find to protect themselves. It was scary. You had to sleep with one eye open if you lived at Stop 32.” Sports and the diversity of this Ohio community, which included playmates Phil and Joe Niekro (who later made their names in major league baseball) and future Boston Celtic legend John Havlicek, also helped Douglas deal with the racism that occurred during his child- hood.
One such moment came when some- one yelled, “Strike that nigger out,” according to the book, which pointed out that Niekro’s father went up to that fan and said, “We don’t talk that way around here.”
“All the Niekros were unbelievable peo- ple,” said Douglas, who was on a team with Joe Niekro that came within one win of playing in the Little League World Series. “They were gentlemen. They were total class acts all the way. They treated people with respect — even as kids they were that way.” Wrestling eventually came into Douglas’ life when, “An Irish Catholic priest came into his neighborhood and organized the kids to wrestle on the lawn in front of the post office,” according to Sesker, who points out that Douglas weighed no more than 50 pounds in the early 1950s. “Wrestling became my security blan- ket,” Douglas told the author. “I fell in love with the sport. I was small and I was a
his opponent’s head hit the mat.” The year 1963 was also about the time that Douglas made his first World Team … in Greco-Roman wrestling … and he decided to transfer to a Division I school, Oklahoma State, which at that time had won 23 NCAA team titles.
Forced to sit out the 1964 season because of the NCAA’s transfer rules, Douglas focused on making the 1964 Olympic Team in freestyle and trained at the New York Athletic Club, which did not allow black athletes to compete. “Some other wrestlers found a solu- tion,” Sesker wrote. “They wrapped Douglas in large white sheets, sneaking him in and out of the back door of the large facility in Manhattan.”
Douglas eventually competed in the
Douglas led Arizona State to the 1988 NCAA title and coached Iowa State’s Cael Sanderson to the only four-year unbeaten career in NCAA history. Tim Tushla photo.
minority, but wrestling helped me gain the respect of a lot of people.”
According to the book, the first compet- itive wrestling match that Douglas saw was also the first he competed in as a freshman in 1957 at Bridgeport High School.
His high school coach George Kovalick, a 5-foot-9 man of Czech descent and a former World War II machine gunner, also became his mentor who would remind Douglas and others to not be satisfied until “they got it right.” “At times, he had a hair-trigger temper,” Douglas told Sesker. “You didn’t want to (tick) him off. If you did, you wanted to run and hide so he couldn’t find you.” But Kovalick was also the man who inspired Douglas — by showing him a film of Jesse Owens winning an Olympic gold medal in track in 1936 — to win an Ohio state championship as a sophomore at 112 pounds in 1959 … and another in 1961.
Douglas would eventually follow Kovalick to West Liberty College, a small NAIA college in Wheeling, W. Va., where Douglas won an NAIA championship as a freshman and finished second at the NCAA tournament as a sophomore in 1963 when small college champs were also allowed to compete.
“Bobby would head snap a guy down so hard there would be a divot in the mat,” recalled Dave Bennett, a Douglas rival at Jamestown College, who later became USA Wrestling’s National Developmental Freestyle Coach. “It was like a watermelon hitting the floor when
Tokyo Olympics, where he went 4-1, los- ing only to bronze-medal winner Nodar Chochaschvili of Russia. Back in Stillwater, Douglas eventually qualified for the 1965 NCAA Championships as the undefeated No. 1 seed at 147 pounds. But in a 6-2 victory over Southern Illinois’ Daniel DeVito, he struck his head against his opponent’s knee.
“It felt like somebody hit me on the head with a sledgehammer,” Douglas told Sesker.
Douglas was eventually taken to a hos-
pital 50 miles away in Cheyenne, and did not wake up unitl the tournament ended. Douglas’ interests turned to freestyle wrestling — earning a silver medal at the 1966 Worlds — and this was also about the time Douglas began a rivalry with Dan Gable, first on the mat where Douglas defeated Gable, 11-1, at the 1968 Olympic Team Trials. “I went in with a lot of confidence against Douglas, but technically he just took me apart,” Gable, then a college sophomore, recalled. “That was the first time I ever felt like I had my butt kicked. He hit me with a headlock and also got one good bear hug on me. He whipped me by a good 10 points. I knew my posi- tions had to be better, and I couldn’t make mistakes by being overaggressive. That match taught me I needed to be technical and tactical.”
Of course, Gable went on to win a gold medal at the 1972 Olympics and soon after that, both he and Douglas started their coaching careers … which led to historical encounters.
While most know that Gable’s Iowa Hawkeyes usually defeated Douglas’ Iowa State teams between 1993 and 2006, when the Cyclones never beat the Hawkeyes in a dual and finished second Continued on page 31
19 USA Wrestler
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