In search of the next Rulon Gardner

By Ron Kantowski

Monday, April 28, 2008 | 2 a.m.

If the ultimate test of man and machine is the Indy 500, then the ultimate test of man and man is boxing. Especially if two Mexican fighters are standing toe to toe.

Then comes wrestling.

While I’m not that crazy about the uniforms, when it comes to sacrifice and dedication, I can’t think of a sport that exemplifies both like real wrestling.

Unfortunately for those who sacrifice and dedicate, the sports mainstream pays little attention to Grecos or Romans or, for that matter, those who wrestle freestyle -- except, perhaps, during an Olympic year.

This is one of those. So there’s always the chance that the next Dan Gable (182-1 as a high school and college wrestler and Olympic gold in 1972), the next Kurt Angle (six-time USA national champ who went on the beat “The Rock” in that other kind of wrestling), the next Cael Sanderson (159-0 in college and the only wrestler to wind up on a box of Wheaties) is working hard and sweating like mad, hoping to strike gold with the whole world watching on NBC.

Whereas those guys became big names in their sport, Rulon Gardner broke out out like John Dillinger with the measles at Sydney in 2000. Gardner may not have come out of nowhere but he came out of Afton, Wyo., which is where you wind up if you take a wrong turn on the road to Nowhere.

He was the youngest of nine kids and grew up baling hay and milking cows on his daddy’s farm. So the back story already was there. But nobody could have predicted the front story.

Nobody had beaten Alexander Karelin, the menacing Russian, in 13 years. Nobody had even scored a point off him in six years. But Gardner beat him. He made like a 300-pound Olga Korbut, doing a cartwheel on the mat. He became famous, partly because his is the quintessential story of an underdog overcoming long odds to succeed. And partly because he is charismatic and sort of resembles Curly from the Three Stooges.

“He was the last one you would have picked,” said Gary Abbott, the longtime communications director for USA Wrestling. “Nobody knew about his charisma or his ability until he got out there on that stage.”

“So who’s the next Rulon Gardner?” I asked Abbott at Saturday’s USA Wrestling Championships at the Convention Center that set the pecking order for the Olympic Trials in June that also will be held in Las Vegas, at the Thomas & Mack Center.

While I wasn’t sure I would find him at the Convention Center, I figured it might be a good place to start. Besides, with these gas prices, there was no way I was driving to Iowa or Oklahoma or the two or three other places where real wrestling is bigger than the shoes Rulon Gardner left on the mat after winning the bronze in 2004 at Athens, which is what real wrestlers do when they retire.

“Going in, there’s nobody with that big name,” Abbott said, “so it’s going to be somebody who does it on that big Olympic screen.”

I was thumbing through the media guide, trying to match the next Rulon Gardner with his photograph, when I suddenly felt this presence occupying my air space. It was enormous and wearing a dark blue suit and had a haircut like Curly from the Three Stooges.

While I don’t know what the next Rulon Gardner will look like, the original one was looming right in front of me, like Underdog at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Abbott apparently had untethered him and sent him over to chat with a reporter who wouldn’t know a half nelson from a Major Nelson, and how cool was that?

I thus became the 4,598th member of the mainstream media to ask The Big Guy to take me through his mind set heading into Sydney eight years ago.

He never expected to beat Matt Ghaffari, the closest thing America had to Rulon Gardner before Rulon Gardner, twice just to get there. He never expected to beat three guys with hair on their chest from Bulgaria, or one of those other countries where real wrestling is a big deal, in the preliminaries.

Then he had to beat Karelin. Mighty Karelin. Indestructable Karelin. He never expected that, either.

If you forgot what Karelin looks like, think back to the last time you had a bad dream about being interrogated by KGB agents, and the biggest one, the one wearing a black stocking cap and cracking his knuckles, approached in the abandoned warehouse and asked where the microfilm was. That guy.

“I was probably going to lose,” Gardner said. “The odds were 2000-to-1 against me. But I walked out there prepared to compete.”

Gardner said some guys are predestined to win four gold medals. These guys, he said, nodding to the action on the Convention Center mats, have been fighting their whole life just to compete for one.

They sacrifice and dedicate and work hard and sweat like mad.

Then, if the stars line up, maybe they get to wrestle the big Russian in an Olympic year with the whole world watching on NBC.