Daniel Hodge

In 2013, Daniel Hodge crushed an apple in his hand.

Daniel Allan "Dan" Hodge (born May 13, 1932 in Perry , Noble County , Oklahoma ) is a retired American wrestler and boxer .

Career

Danny Hodge began wrestling in high school, which he continued at the University of Oklahoma , which he attended after high school. For this university, he won all 46 fights that he fought for them. He was also very successful at the championships of the American University Sports Association NCAA and won the middleweight, free style, three times in a row the "All-American Championships" and three times the NCAA Championships of the state of Oklahoma.

Since at that time the wrestlers at the universities were usually the best American wrestlers overall, Danny Hodge was used twice, in 1952 and 1956, at the Olympic Games in free style. In Helsinki he was only 19 years old and too inexperienced to be able to compete with the veterans Dawit Tschimakuridze from the Soviet Union and Bengt Lindblad from Sweden . But four years later, in Melbourne , he mixed up the middleweight class, defeated u. a. the reigning world champion Abbas Zandi from Iran and the Soviet wrestler Giorgi Schirtladse , but was narrowly defeated by the Bulgarian Nikola Stantschew . He won the silver medal with it. It was admirable how the US boys, who had almost no international experience, repeatedly held their own against the world's elite at the Olympic Games.

In addition to wrestling, Danny Hodge was also active in boxing. Here, too, he got very far. He was "Golden Gloves" winner and also won the USA Championship (AAU Championships) in the middleweight division. He was the only athlete in the USA who managed this combination, namely to be among the best athletes in the USA in wrestling and boxing at the same time.

After the Olympic Games in 1956, Danny Hodge turned to professional wrestling in the USA. For 18 years he was a professional wrestler in the organization "NWA", was world champion in junior haevyweight and defended this title eight times. He was trained at the beginning of his wrestling career by "Strangler" Ed Lewis , a professional wrestling world champion from the 1930s and 1940s. In 1976 he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame for his services to wrestling .

Today Danny Hodge lives in Perry, Oklahoma.

International success

(OS = Olympic Games, F = freestyle, Wed = middleweight, back then up to 79 kg body weight)

• 1952, 5th place , OS in Helsinki , F, Wed, with victory over Mohamed Hussein, Egypt and defeat against Dawit Tschimakuridze , USSR and Bengt Lindblad , Sweden ;
• 1956, silver medal , OS in Melbourne , F, Wed, with victories over G. Farquhan, Great Britain , W. Davies, Australia , Vilje Punkari, Finland , Giorgi Schirtladse , USSR and Abbas Zandi , Iran and one defeat against Nikola Stantschew , Bulgaria

NCAA All American Championships

Danny Hodge won that title in 1955, 1956 and 1957 in the free style, middleweight division.

swell

• National Wrestling Hall of Fame and Museum website
• DOCUMENTATION of the FILA International Wrestling Championships, 1956
• Yearbook of the German Wrestling Federation 1972, Athletik-Verlag, Karlsruhe, 1972
• Trade magazines "Athletics" Nos. 24/1956 and 1/1957

Web links

• Profile of Daniel Hodge at the Institute for Applied Training Science
• Daniel Hodge in the database of Sports-Reference (English; archived from the original )
• Short biography in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame (English)
• Statistics in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame (English)
• Daniel Hodge in the BoxRec database
• Portrait of Daniel Hodge (English)