Now 72 years old, Hodge was an incredible collegiate wrestler, a two-time Olympian, a professional boxer and a man who achieved near mythical status in professional wrestling for his strength and toughness.

Hodge’s legend starts with amateur wrestling and amazingly, he went to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki before his college career had even begun.  Hodge placed 5th in the 177-pound (middleweight) class in freestyle wrestling, an incredible achievement for a 19 year old.  When Hodge did go to college, he joined the elite wrestling programme at the University of Oklahoma.  In all, he wrestled 46 times in college, winning every single match.  While those numbers sound low today, 1950s NCAA wrestlers competed far less frequently than their modern day counterparts did.  Even more impressively, he pinned all but 10 of those opponents and during his junior and senior years rolled off a streak of 22 consecutive pin fall wins.  In addition, according to legend, no college opponent ever took him down from a standing position.  In his four years at Oklahoma Hodge was National Champion three times and was twice voted the NCAA’s Most Outstanding Wrestler.

Hodge’s second Olympic appearance came in 1956 in Melbourne, during his junior year in college.  This time, Hodge won a middleweight silver medal after dominating the final against Bulgarian Nikola Stantschev but losing on a very, very controversial rolling fall that was, at the time deemed extremely suspect.  The controversial call in the wrestling final was made by a judge from one of Bulgaria’s fellow Communist states, and as so often happened in the Olympics during the Cold War, realpolitik triumphed over sportsmanship.  Also, you need to remember the entire 1956 games took place against a highly charged political backdrop.  In fact, a fixture in the water polo competition ended up in a mass brawl when Hungary played the Soviet Union.  The Soviet army had invaded Hungary earlier that year and the Hungarian team were understandably intent on some measure of revenge.  By the time the match was abandoned the pool was awash with blood and more than a handful of faces had been re-arranged in a scrap that involved players and coaches.

Hodge’s Olympic exploits were not the only thing that made 1956 special either.  During a ten-day span, he won both the NCAA title in freestyle wrestling and the National AAU championships in both freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling.  Even more impressively, he won every single match in those three tournaments by pin fall.  Between 1952 and 1957, when Hodge left wrestling, he had only lost 3 times in any form of wrestling competition and all those defeats came against Olympic champions.

Hodge had dabbled in boxing as a teenager and began training seriously in 1957.  The following year he won the National Golden Gloves Light Heavyweight title, as well as his third AAU title, this time in boxing.  This made Hodge the first man to win both wrestling and boxing AAU titles in over 50 years.  Hodge turned professional in June 1958 and won his first two fights by knockout.  However, in his third outing he was KO’ed by Art Norris.  Six weeks later, Hodge gained revenge, winning a rematch on points and followed this up with two more wins by KO.  By the end of 1958, Hodge had a professional boxing record of 5-1 and a promising career ahead of him. 

Yet within five months his career would be over.  Hodge started 1959 with a win on points and a month later he KO’ed Garvin Sawyer in the 8th round.  That performance earned him a fight, on April 28th, with 35-year-old Cuban heavyweight Nino Valdes.  With a record of 46-16-2 at the time, Valdes was vastly more experienced and, at 217 pounds, outweighed Hodge by a massive 27 pounds.  Although Valdes was nearing the end of his career, he was too much for Hodge, winning by TKO in the 8th.  The beating Valdes gave Hodge prompted him to quit the sport (7-2 record) but losing to a man who had beaten Ezzard Charles and Brian London (owner of a chin to rival Antonio Inoki), twice went the distance with Archie Moore and shared a ring with Sonny Liston, Zora Folley and Eddie Machen, was no disgrace.  Still, its interesting to speculate how far Hodge could have gone if he’d been matched a little more carefully.

Finished with wrestling and retired from boxing, Hodge turned to pro wrestling.  Debuting in 1959, this lucrative and successful career lasted 17 years.  Hodge wrestled all over the U.S. and made several trips to Japan.  Respected by fans, though never a truly major star, Hodge was a talented pro wrestling performer, the perennial NWA Junior Heavyweight champion and to this day is held in the highest regard by industry insiders.  He actually won his first pro wrestling title extremely early on, simply because promoters knew just how ridiculous it would look for him to be losing to anyone but the biggest stars.  He was renowned for having incredible grip strength and would, on occasion show off for his peers and fans.  Decades before Bob Sapp used the same party trick to enthral Japanese audiences Hodge could crush apples with his bare hands.  Indeed, his freakish hand strength surpassed even Sapp’s (a man literally twice his size), as he was reputedly able to shatter a pair of pliers with one hand.  Hodge’s pro wrestling career effectively ended in March 1976 after a serious car crash, and even that incident yields a typically Danny Hodge tale.  He broke one of his vertebrae on impact but since he’d crashed on a lonely country road needed to either go and fetch help or sit there until another car came along.  Hauling himself out of the wreckage, he walked several miles, all the while holding his broken neck in place with both hands, until he found help. 

Later that year his collegiate and Olympic exploits saw him inducted as a Distinguished Member of the newly created National Wrestling Hall of Fame.  Hodge is also a member of the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame and remains the only amateur wrestler to ever appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Even in old age, Danny Hodge remains a formidable figure.  Two stories, both of which have been confirmed by a number of different sources emerged from Hodge’s presence at the Cauliflower Alley Club weekend in April 2004.  The CAC is an annual event in Las Vegas that dates from the 1950s.  Originally, it was a club for boxers and wrestlers (both amateur and pro) and got its name from the cauliflower ears that people in those fields often sport.  Even as recently as the early 1990s Oscar De La Hoya attended one of the banquets but since then membership and interest has dwindled to the point the CAC now attracts almost exclusively retired pro wrestlers and nostalgic fans.  Anyway, at last year’s event there was an ‘incident’.  A thoroughly wasted Chavo Guerrero Sr., older brother of current WWE star Eddie tried to start a fight with Alzheimer’s riddled, wheelchair bound Verne Gagne (a former amateur wrestling great, pro wrestler and notoriously mean promoter.)  Hodge defused the situation simply by grabbing Chavo’s shoulder.  The drunken idiot (some 20 years younger than Hodge) turned, ready to smack whoever had interfered and, realising it was Hodge, immediately calmed down and began apologising.  This story is all the more remarkable when you know the Guerrero family’s track record when it comes to picking fights.  A few years back little Chavo Sr. tried to start a fight with gargantuan pro wrestling hard man Vader and recent events in WWE have seen  Eddie and Chavo Jr. pick idiotic backstage fights with Kurt Angle (Eddie) and the Big Show (Chavo Jr.)

The following day Hodge was approached by Steve Scarpias, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructor from California who has fought in King of the Cage, and they started talking about fighting.  Hodge, who while training for pro wrestling learned some of the old style ‘hooking’ moves that date back to the late 19th/early 20th century when pro wrestling retained vestiges of reality, asked Scarpias to demonstrate some modern day submissions.  He obliged and Hodge reversed every single one with his old style techniques and still remarkable hand strength.

So, playing time-travelling fighting fantasy pundit, how might Hodge have fared in MMA?  Well, his amateur wrestling credentials are matched by only a handful of people to ever pull on the grappling gloves and test themselves under MMA rules, and he was certainly a better wrestler, based on the standards of the time than the likes of Mark Coleman and Randy Couture.  Hodge was also an accomplished striker.  Pushed too fast in boxing he lost, and lost badly to Valdes but his boxing record and achievements are still more impressive than those of any of today’s fighters are.  Today people like Jens Pulver, Chris Lytle, Tra Telligman and Andrei Arlovski are lauded as examples of MMA fighters with boxing skills but none has ever proved it the way Hodge did.  Only the aged boxers who have dabbled in MMA – Imamu Mayfield, James Warring and Frans Botha achieved more in boxing than Hodge, and they had no wrestling background. 

Finally, we come to the most nebulous, least quantifiable of Hodge’s skills.  Now, Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit win many of their matches with ‘submission holds’ but only the worst kind of deranged moron would argue they are genuinely accomplished submission grapplers.  Well, that’s modern pro wrestling for you.  Now, pro wrestling in Hodge’s day was just as fixed, if not so blatantly, but there were still men who had learned the legitimate submission wrestling or ‘hooking’ skills that dated back to the late 19th century.  In his autobiography ‘Hooker’, legendary and sadly departed pro wrestler Lou Thesz describes Hodge as bringing “profound credibility” to pro wrestling.  Thesz had learned hooking from masters like George Tragos and Ad Santell, was an admirer of pro wrestlers who could genuinely fight, and became a huge UFC fan in the years before his death.  Basically, his “profound credibility” comment is code for “Hodge knew how to hurt people” and had genuine submission skills.  It’s telling there are so few stories of other wrestlers ‘trying it on’ with Hodge – attempting to test their skills with a little ‘real’ wrestling here and there or outright double-crossing him in the ring.  This was still fairly common in the 1950s and 60s and even Thesz was challenged a few times.  But people simply didn’t try it with Danny Hodge.

Hodge was an accomplished hooker, an incredible freestyle wrestler, a pretty talented boxer and had amazing strength for his size.  Just think of how well someone with all those skills could have fared in the early days of the UFC.  Now imagine the havoc he could have wreaked if MMA really had been around in anything resembling its current form 40 or 50 years ago.  Now, obviously, Hodge had no Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or kicking skills but if he could learn hooking, freestyle, Greco-Roman and boxing, and excel in all of them who’s to say he couldn’t have added other skills to his arsenal?  Of course, this is all conjecture but half the fun of being a sports fan is the ‘What If’ scenario, and for me, Danny Hodge, little known in MMA circles, is definitely one of the great ‘What Ifs.’

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