Oklahoma State wrestling and twentieth-century America: A strenuous exercise in gender, race, and politics

From 1928 through 1999 the Oklahoma State University (OSU) wrestling program won thirty National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships. This dissertation uses that program as a framework to tell an American twentieth-century story about gender, race, and politics. Each of the program’s twentieth-century coaches, from Edward Clark Gallagher to John Smith, provide varied narratives and are each representative of the cultural changes taking place during the period of their tenures. Throughout this study, links to Theodore Roosevelt’s strenuous life models and collegiate wrestling’s roots to the American Midwest in post-1920s America are prominent. Gallagher led the program from 1916 to 1940 and was among a number of influential men to develop the sport. His successor, Art Griffith, reformed and changed the rules of the sport, while the program’s third coach, Myron Roderick, forged a relationship with Japanese wrestling leadership at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics that was part of a new transnationalism and desegregation of American athletics in the post-World War II period. The final quarter of the century brought new challenges to the male-dominated space of collegiate sports landscape in the form of Title IX legislation that impacted collegiate wrestling in a number of ways. In turn, the sport’s relationship with conservative political ideologies throughout its history led to the community responding negatively to the cultural changes taking place embodied by the imagery of a number of twenty-first-century NCAA championships. This is not a sports study filled with statistics and biographies of Oklahoma State wrestling’s top athletes; instead it allows a sport outside the mainstream to serve as a window into the broader historical narratives of gender, race, and politics.