Having just returned from one of the greatest sporting spectacles in the state of Oregon – the OSAA wrestling championships – I was moved once again to consider the sorry developments down the road in Eugene.
In the coaches’ room I saw a pile of fliers imploring folks to donate funds to save Ducks wrestling.
As I’ve mentioned once before in this column, Kilkenny (a die-hard baseball fan) has decided to bring that game back to the university. He says he’s not trying to compete with the Beavers up the road, but he’s hired one of the best coaches in America, George Horton, and they’re openly talking about championships.
To do this, Kilkenny has to add a female sport to satisfy the requirements of Title IX, and so he’s chosen competitive cheerleading. And he’s killing wrestling.
As I watched the wrestlers at the Portland Coliseum, the short-sighted foolishness of that decision reeked.
Why wrestling? It’s still a popular sport in high schools, with an estimated 33,000 high school wrestlers in the Northwest alone.
But at the college level, thanks mainly to Title IX, it’s been sacrificed on the altar of economy, in favor of sports that draw bigger crowds and make money. Oregon will become the 448th college wrestling program to be shut down since Title IX was introduced in 1972, according to the NCAA.
Even once-proud programs, such as Fresno State, have been shut down. In the Pac-10, only three schools will field wrestling squads after this year’s NCAA finals – Oregon State, Arizona State and Stanford.
This really isn’t a Title IX issue. Oregon has been compliant with gender-equity rules and, frankly, there were plenty of other women’s sports the university could have added to its stable.
How about women’s wrestling? Oregon likes to be on the cutting edge (check out their football uniforms) and women’s wrestling is one of the innovative trends in modern sports. It’s even (newly) in the Olympics, something that isn’t likely to happen with competitive cheer.
Female wrestling’s big in California high schools and in other states, which have their own girl’s state tournaments. This year, two Sweet Home girls made the finals of the inaugural state high school invitational tournament. Oregon’s tournament included eight finals matches featuring girls. Girls wrestling advocates are planning their own Oregon state tournament in two years.
It really shouldn’t be a financial issue either. The entire Oregon wrestling budget is less than the salaries of the assistant football coaching staff, according to figures I’ve seen.
The Ducks have not been dominant in college wrestling, though they have produced occasional individuals who have done well. But neither have the men’s tennis team. Or the golf squad. But those are sports that are popular in San Diego, where Kilkenny’s from.
To be honest, I think the decline of wrestling in colleges is because money, not education, dictates what happens in college sports. And I believe that America is going soft.
True, we still play hard-nosed football, but even that has turned into a spectacle, at many levels, that emphasizes showmanship as much or more than the man-to-man toughness of the leather helmet era.
Think about it. What is wrestling? It’s as basic a sport as one could possibly devise. As basic as running or swimming, all it requires is you and an opponent. Equipment costs are almost nothing. It’s one of the few sports where you’re pitted against someone your own size – all the time. As any kid knows, you don’t need a mat to wrestle, though some spongy turf is better than hard-pack. And the scoring is pretty black and white, although a rotten ref occasionally steals a close match.
I’ve never wrestled competitively, though I was pretty good in the back yard. By the time I had my first opportunity to get on a real mat, I was attending an NCAA Division I university where one of my friends was a freshman All-American 142-pounder and one of my roommates was a 177-pounder. I learned quickly that I really knew little about the true sport of wrestling.
It’s a discipline that dates back, past the ancient Greeks and the Olympics, to Egypt 5,000 years ago and to cave drawings depicting wrestlers. Only track and field is older among sports that have been practiced continually over the millennia.
Nearly every culture has some sort of wrestling, from Sumo in Japan to Glíma in Iceland, Schwingen in Switzerland, and Cumberland wrestling in Britain.
Although I never had the opportunity to wrestle competitively, I used to work out with my friends who were wrestlers and I can attest that this is a sport that requires mental toughness beyond nearly any other. It requires critical decision-making and strategy – usually accompanied by pain.
Runners know pain – your legs hurt, your lungs hurt, your arms can hurt. But in wrestling, utter exhaustion can be universal and complete. Everything hurts in a tough match. It’s not a sport for quitters.
Recently I’ve run across several comments from prominent coaches about how Americans are getting soft. Parents don’t want their kids to feel pain. Hardship is not in the cards most of us want to be dealt any more as we get exercise steering our motorized vehicles and playing Guitar Hero in front of our TVs.
“Parents today want to take all the pain, all the heartache and sadness, out of their kids’ lives,” said basketball coach Rick Majerus in a recent Sports Illustrated article. “All the things that make you a better person, a better coach, a better teacher – all the things that are so much the fabric of life.
“You become so much better a person for all the bad things that happen to you. But all these helicopter parents, they just hover there and they want to take all that away from their kids. They don’t want them to fight through it.”
Aerobically demanding sports such as running and wrestling and swimming may be too basic for the big crowds. They aren’t very flashy sometimes. Chest bumps seem inappropriate, somehow, after you’ve just run or grappled or swum to the point of exhaustion – and you can barely stand to be acknowledged a winner.
But they prepare young people for life because they demand a high level of personal discipline and accountability. You can’t share the blame when you lose.
That’s why killing wrestling at the University of Oregon and all the other schools is such a travesty. Wrestling has a few clowns, just like other sports, but it has turned out millions of disciplined, responsible boys young men who grow up and become a large portion of the crowd you can see in the stands at the Oregon state championships. They’re clear-eyed. You know they have jobs and you know they do them well.
Because that’s what wrestling teaches.
And that’s what Pat Kilkenny (and all the other athletic directors who apparently rarely bothered to try to understand a sport that people have competed in for millenia) have missed in their haste to make money and satisfy government dictums.
What a travesty.