The hottest athlete in the world at the moment isn't Kobe Bryant or Kerry Collins or Tiger Woods or Venus Williams. It's Cael Sanderson, the Iowa State wrestler from Heber City.
Those other athletes are on a roll, but even they lose occasionally. Not Sanderson. His collegiate record is 100 wins, 0 losses. As in perfect. As in undefeated and untied. As in "mind boggling," says his coach, Bobby Douglas. Nobody's perfect, and yet . . .
In the history of sports, there is little that compares to Sanderson's streak of victories. There is, of course, the man whose record Sanderson has tied — the legendary Dan Gable, who won 100 straight wrestling matches for Iowa State in the late '60s. UCLA won 88 straight basketball games. Parry O'Brien won 116 consecutive shot put competitions. Edwin Moses won 107 straight hurdle races. Carl Lewis won 65 straight long jump competitions. Carlton Haselrig wrestled 122 matches without a loss for Pitt-Johnstown (including a tie). Alexander Karelin didn't lose a Greco-Roman wrestling match for a dozen years, although the exact number of victories seems uncertain (about 200 by some counts).
When Gable won 100 matches for Iowa State, it was considered an unreachable feat. Sanderson has equaled it, and he's only a junior, a little more than halfway through his collegiate career. Could he complete an entire collegiate career without a loss? It has never happened. Gable won every high school and collegiate match he contested until the final match of his collegiate career, which he lost to Larry Owings.
Sanderson, who posted a 120-3 record and claimed four state titles at Wasatch High, has won every match he has ever wrestled in college, and most of them weren't even close. Two matches were decided by one point, and two were decided by three points. The rest were routs or close to it. There have been 31 pins and 25 technical falls.
To win 100 matches without a loss means never having a bad day (even Gable and Karelin finally had one of those). It means never making a split-second mistake that could leave him pinned to the mat. It means beating all comers even when every one of them views Sanderson as their personal Super Bowl. "Everybody wants to stop him," says Douglas. "Larry Owings is known for one thing: He beat Dan Gable. . . . Everybody's going to be trying to make their name by beating Cael Sanderson."
For collegiate wrestling, an endangered species in collegiate sports thanks to Title IX, Sanderson is just the kind of publicity stunt the sport needs, except this is no stunt (this isn't the WWF, after all). After winning his 100th match, Sanderson had some 200 kids waiting for his autograph, a press conference to get to and an interview with ESPN to do.
"Boy, I'm glad I'm not a basketball player," Sanderson told ISU sports information director Tom Kroeschell as he surveyed the scene.
"Cael, this is just the beginning," Kroeschell said. "Someday (basketball players) will be taking lessons from you."
Sanderson, in the words of his coach and other observers, is starting to transcend his sport the way Gable did. The crowds and the media attention are growing. Even the competition is taking advantage of its front-row seat to history. While Sanderson was wrestling his 99th match, the matches on the other mats were stopped so wrestlers and officials could watch. At the NCAA meet, there are eight mats, but all eyes are on Sanderson when he competes.
"When he wrestles, the crowd is buzzing," says Kroeschell. "You know how it is when a judge announces that court is adjourned and then there's all this noise? That's what it's like."
Sanderson is the Main Event not merely because of The Streak, but because of his wrestling style. For the same reason that basketball fans love a high-scoring, up-tempo offense, wrestling fans love Sanderson. His pace is fast and furious, and he is aggressive almost to a fault. Even when he has a big lead, he attacks, trying to score points or secure a pin, where another wrestler would play it safe or at least try to catch his wind.
Sanderson has been so dominating that the strategy of many of his opponents is one of mere survival. "If they're not trying to come out and beat me, they're trying to keep the score close and respectable," says Sanderson. "They hold onto my wrists, try not to let me score; they slow things down." In his last match, the opponent was nearly disqualified for stalling.
Says Douglas, "They try to slow him down. He's got a lot of gas in his tank. If you're going to go hard with this guy, you better be prepared to go a long time. . . . There is really no place you can hide on the mat. His style is relentless."
Sanderson, who wrestles in the 184-pound class, certainly isn't an imposing or intimidating figure. He's not particularly muscular and nothing like those WWF freaks. At 6-foot-1, he's slender, even lanky, with long slender arms, and he's got a pleasant boy-next-door face and mild temperament. Amateur Wrestling News called him "Clark Kent off the mat and Superman on." What makes Sanderson so superior?
"He's the fastest big man I've ever seen," says Douglas. "Whatever mistakes he makes, he makes up for them with speed."
Sanderson, whose father Steven wrestled for BYU and coached wrestling at Wasatch High, comes from a family of wrestlers. His brother Cody was a two-time NCAA runner-up for ISU, and Cole owns a 20-2 record for the Cyclones. Cyler, an eighth-grader, is also a wrestler.
Cael, a two-time academic all-American, has Olympic aspirations but eventually hopes to become a cartoonist (he is studying art and design). "I'd like to get my own cartoon going," he says. "I have a couple of ideas." For years he has been jotting down ideas for cartoons and tossing them into a box.
Meanwhile, there is school and wrestling and this business of the streak. Sanderson is so focused on each match that he claims he was unaware that he was nearing Gable's 100-win streak until only a couple of weeks ago.
"I don't worry about (the streak) much," he says. "I'm trying to wrestle each match and score as many points as I can." If he did worry about it, he says his biggest fear would be "disappointing people."
Recently, someone asked Gable, the greatest collegiate wrestler ever, if Sanderson was the greatest collegiate wrestler ever.
"That all depends on what he does in the next three, four or five years," Gable said. "His career is not done yet. But he's ahead of anybody ever at this stage, but there's a lot of time left. . . . "
E-mail: drob@desnews.com