Wyatt Hendrickson fell to his back.
Gable Steveson dropped to his knees.
College wrestling’s biggest national championship match upset in decades — perhaps ever — momentarily left both heavyweight contestants stunned Saturday night in front of 18,826 buzzing spectators.
Fifty-five years after Larry Owings stopped Dan Gable’s bid for a third national title, Hendrickson prevented Gable Dan Steveson from becoming a three-time NCAA champ with a herculean late takedown and a heavy ride for a scintillating 5-4 victory over the Olympic champion.
“My arms have never felt so strong,” said Oklahoma State’s second-seeded Hendrickson, who reeled in Steveson’s right leg, switched off to a double and finished the go-ahead score with 21 seconds remaining. “All I know is I kind of felt when I got that takedown, he kind of gave that little second to relax and I took advantage of that. I don’t know if I had a claw to ride, but I was looking at the clock and I was just squeezing him.
“I didn’t care if I had to rip my arms off squeezing him, I was like, ‘I am holding this man down and winning this match.’”
It had been six years since Steveson’s last college loss. Since that 2019 NCAA semifinal defeat against Penn State’s Anthony Cassar, the Minnesota megastar won a pair of NCAA titles, a couple of Hodge Trophies and an Olympic gold in Tokyo before he stepped away from college wrestling for a foray with the WWE and a stint in training camp with the Buffalo Bills.
Steveson rejoined the Gophers in November and ran through his first 18 matches this season in buzzsaw fashion with 17 bonus-point victories and a 10-3 win against last year’s undefeated heavyweight champ Greg Kerkvliet of Penn State.
Steveson entered Saturday night’s title bout with a 73-match winning streak. One of those wins was an 18-2 demolition of Hendrickson in the second round of the 2021 NCAA Championships when Hendrickson was a 17th-seeded Air Force freshman.
“This is a sport where everyone’s got a chance — you’ve just got to believe,” said Oklahoma State coach David Taylor, who picked up a transfer commitment from Hendrickson 12 days after he was hired to lead the Cowboys. “It’s easy to get caught up in what you can and what you can’t do. Honestly, not one time this year did we talk about wrestling Gable. From the moment he got (to Oklahoma State), it was just (about becoming) a better wrestler.”
Saturday night’s victory may have pushed Hendrickson to the front of the Hodge Trophy pack. He finished his final college season with a 27-0 record that included 13 pins, eight technical falls and one of the sport’s indelible victories.
“Everyone knew Wyatt for (being a) pinner and he was — he was a great, prolific pinner,” Taylor said. “But he was pretty sloppy, made a lot of mistakes, and that’s what would cost him in these tournaments. He’d get hurt. I told him, ‘When you get here, I’ll have a plan for you. I’ll keep you healthy, I’ll get you at your best at the national tournament. I think this whole year he bought into that and that was a big deal for him.
“You get a 260-pound guy like that that’s motivated and hungry with that kind of athleticism that starts to learn his technique and starts to dial things in and really focus, anything can be possible. That’s really what happened tonight.”
For Hendrickson, it was the second straight night he toppled an NCAA champion who once defeated him by technical fall. He controlled Kerkvliet 8-2 in Friday night’s semifinals.
“I think I’ve always been a great wrestler, but I really think the biggest thing that changed was my mentality, to be honest with you,” Hendrickson said when asked about his development since his 18-2 loss to Kerkvliet in the 2023 NWCA All-Star Classic. “If you go back to that match I just wrestled, if I was just wrestling not to lose versus wrestling to win, maybe in those scrambles I would concede a little bit early. But my mindset and my attitude now is kind of developed (and) you just gotta believe in yourself.
“In times like this, when there’s 18,000 people trying to watch you wrestle, you are going up against an Olympic champion, a two-time national champion, even the semifinals, the national champion … the match is won before you step out on the mat. He who thinks he can and he thinks he can’t, they’re both usually right.”
It became apparent in the early going Saturday night that Hendrickson came to scrap. Steveson got to a leg 12 seconds into the match and Hendrickson extended the position for a 44-second scramble resulting in a stalemate.
Steveson snapped to a leg attack midway through the first period and eventually scored, but not before Hendrickson made the two-time NCAA champ work for the finish.
Two sequences late in the second period kept Hendrickson in the match. He kicked out of a Steveson shot with 14 seconds left and then fended off another attack just before time expired in the period.
Hendrickson dodged another third-period takedown bid off a Steveson counter-attack that carried the action out of bounds with 43 seconds left. Ten seconds later, he finally broke through with a fake followed by a shot that allowed him to lock around Steveson’s right knee momentarily.
“The biggest upset in the history of the NCAA — could this be it?” ESPN commentator Daniel Cormier said as the final seconds ticked down. “Wyatt Hendrickson just beat Gable Steveson. Oh my goodness. This is the craziest moment in NCAA history. … I don’t know if I’ve ever been that surprised in my life at a wrestling match.”
