DOUGLAS BOOK REVIEW, Continued from page 19
behind Iowa twice (1996, 2000) at the NCAAs. But there was a year — 1988 when Douglas was in his 14th year as head coach at Arizona State — that Douglas’ Sun Devils topped Iowa in the NCAA team race … despite the fact that ASU did not feature one champion. But all seven of Douglas’ entries finished among the top six at their weight class, including Chip Park, who lost a second-round match but won six consolation matches to claim third at 126 pounds.
“I wasn’t a great technician, but I was in great shape,” Park told Sesker. “Bobby pushed me hard and he had me in the best shape of my life. He trained us to be in shape to wrestle hard for 10 straight minutes — seven minutes of regulation and three minutes of overtime. We trained so hard that I thought I was going to die. Nobody trained harder than us — nobody. I knew when a match went into overtime that I wasn’t going to lose.” Douglas, who was also one of the first authors of wrestling training books, used his success at ASU to earn the job at Iowa State, where he produced 10 champions and 51 All-Americans in 14 years.
No Cyclone during Douglas’ tenure was better known than Cael Sanderson, who became the first collegiate wrestler to win four NCAA championships and complete a career undefeated (159-0). Sesker’s book does an excellent job of looking at Sanderson’s final NCAA tournament in 2002, when the Cyclone beat Lehigh’s Jon Trenge at 197 pounds in Albany, N.Y., and eventually capture his fourth Outstanding Wrestler honor and third Hodge Trophy.
“There were more nerves than usual, but the bottom line was I knew I should win if I moved my hands and moved my feet. I
knew I had the ability to do it,” Sanderson said. “Coach Douglas had confidence in me and he had prepared me for this moment. The people close to me believed in me, and that was impor- tant.” Two years later, Douglas was matside at the 2004 Athens Olympics where Sanderson won a gold medal in freestyle … and eventually Douglas’ prized wrestler became an assistant coach in Ames. Unfortunately, there became a time, spring 2006, when Sanderson replaced Douglas, who still had two more years on his contract.
“It was a real tricky situation, and kind of a weird deal,” said Sanderson, who was in tears the day he took the Cyclone job. “I was looking at interviewing at another school and they offered me the head coaching job at ISU. It was tough to see Coach Douglas step down. Real tough.”
And of course, Sanderson headed the ISU program for three years before taking over at Penn State.
“If I knew what was going to happen with Cael, we would’ve never made the change when he took over for Bobby,” Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard told Sesker. “It bothers me that Bobby got sacrificed for the good of Iowa State. It will always bother me for the rest of my life that Bobby’s career got cut short for Cael to be the head coach and Cael’s no longer the head coach at Iowa State.”
Douglas, who turned 69 in March, still lives in Ames and remains active coaching wrestlers in freestyle, while he also works to get more inner-city kids involved with the sport. “My hope is that wrestling can save a lot of those kids,” Douglas told Sesker, “like it saved me.” The book can be ordered at:
http://www.bobbydouglasbook.com
31 USA Wrestler
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