By Jon Gremmels
J Robinson has insight to what it’s like to be Jim Zalesky. He, too, experienced trying to replace a legend ” the same legend.
Zalesky is in his eighth season as Dan Gable’s successor as wrestling coach at the University of Iowa. He has won 119 of 146 duals (an .815 winning percentage) and three national championships as coach of the Hawkeyes.
Yet ” by the standards Gable set during his 21-year coaching reign (a .940 winning percentage, 15 NCAA titles, three seconds and two thirds) ” those numbers aren’t good enough for some fans. And duplicating Gable’s persona is impossible.
“You can’t win,” Robinson, head coach at the University of Minnesota, said of replacing a legend such as Gable. “What can you do? If you don’t win at the same rate, then you’re going down, and so people don’t really give you realistic expectations.”
Zalesky noted that even though he led the Hawkeyes to national titles in his first three years as head coach, not everyone was satisfied. When the Hawkeyes go to a bowl game in football, most fans are satisfied; if you finish lower than first in wrestling, that’s not always the case. But as a coach, Zalesky’s rate of satisfaction probably is similar to that of fans.
“It’s hard as a coach to accept anything else (but being No. 1),” he said.
Pleasing fans isn’t easy. That holds true at Iowa, at Oklahoma State or for any other sports team that has created a dynasty.
“They want to see us win,” said John Smith, who has coached Oklahoma State to three consecutive NCAA titles. “We’ve got good, understanding, knowledgeable fans, just like any fans. Most of them really don’t know how you’re winning, and most of them really don’t know why you’re losing. They just know they want you at the top.”
Being on top isn’t always enough.
Robinson, who led Minnesota to titles in 2001 and 2002, got a feel for that in 1984 as an Iowa assistant, when Gable left him in charge of the program while taking time out to direct the Olympic freestyle team. The Hawkeyes won their first 14 duals, but there were concerns about the team. After a dual loss to Oklahoma State, Gable returned and led the team to a seventh consecutive national title.
“The whole deal was you’re always going to get compared to Gable,” Robinson said. “I had the job for a year; it sucks.
“No matter what you do, everybody’s going to say, ‘How would Gable do it. Or Gable did this or Gable did that.’ That was great being a part of it (the Hawkeyes dynasty), but that’s a deal that’s hard to follow for anybody. It’s an impossible job.”
Perhaps making it even tougher for Zalesky at Iowa is that Gable remains at the university as an assistant to the athletic director. It would be difficult not to have the feeling of your predecessor looking over your shoulder.
“That’s part of the job,” Zalesky said.
Perhaps, but it likely doesn’t make the job any easier.
“You’re dealing with a legend,” Robinson said. “It’s kind of like you’re dealing with God. How would God do it? That’s one of the hard things. It would be hard for Dan to stay out of it. It’s like I told him a long time ago, I told him he should have taken a year or two off and just sat back and see if he wanted to coach again. I said, ‘Hey, go somewhere and start again if you want to coach.’ “
But Tom Brands, a three-time national champion on Gable’s teams of the early 1990s and later an assistant coach under both Gable and Zalesky, doesn’t see it as a negative having Gable around the program.
“Dan Gable used in the right way is a tremendous asset,” said Brands, now the head coach at Virginia Tech.
Brands often is mentioned as a potential future coach of the Hawkeyes. There were those hoping he’d get the job when Gable stepped down. But Robinson cautions that there are no guarantees that come with coaching changes.
“Everybody wants to replace everybody,” he said. “Look at Nebraska football. They replaced a bunch of coaches, and they’re not any closer to winning now than they were before. Sometimes when you do things like that you don’t get where you want to be.
“(Zalesky) hasn’t won for four or five years, but what if Tom Brands comes in and doesn’t win for four or five years? Are they going to get rid of him? So where does it end?
“The question that you ask is are you putting out a good team? Are your kids fighting? Are they doing what’s right? There’s a lot more to it than people think.
“Jimmy Zalesky is the coach at Iowa. That’s the way I look at it.”
It might be the most difficult coaching job in college wrestling.
“It’s tough,” Zalesky said. “There’s expectations out there, but I have those expectations, too. If you don’t have those expectations, what else is there?”
Contact Jon Gremmels at (563) 383-2294 or at [email protected].
Legendary coaches
Coaches who have led their schools to two or more NCAA Division I wrestling team championships:
Titles Coach, School
15 Dan Gable, Iowa
11 E.C. Gallagher, Okla. St.
8 Art Griffith, Okla. St.
7 Myron Roderick, Okla. St.
6 Harold Nichols, Iowa State
4 John Smith, Oklahoma State
3 Port Robertson, Oklahoma
3 Jim Zalesky, Iowa
2 Thomas Evans, Oklahoma
2 Gary Kurdelmeier
2 J Robinson, Minnesota
2 Joe Seay, Oklahoma State
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