Wayne Coffee - New York Daily News - Tues., October 18.


Columbia's Butler library displays ancient wrestling coaching manual dating to 200 A.D.

The news from the mat hasn't been good for a while now, but this was not a day for gloom or hand-wringing, or to fret about how college wrestling seems to be going the way of dinosaurs and rotary telephones. This was a day to celebrate history and heritage and an eight-inch patch of papyrus that dates back almost 2,000 years - a wrestling coaching manual that is believed to be the oldest sporting instructional document in the world.

It was a day for some of the greatest wrestlers ever - Olympic champions Dan Gable and Bruce Baumgartner and John Smith among them - to gather in a stunning stone building on Amsterdam Ave. called Casa Italiana, on the campus of Columbia, to talk not about big-buck TV deals and gerrymandered conferences but the nobility of a sport that, since antiquity, has been about discipline and dedication and pushing yourself to feats you didn't think possible.

"To find a coaching manual that dates to 200 A.D. just solidifies how important wrestling is, not just in American culture, but in world culture," said Kerry McCoy, a two-time Olympian and world silver medalist who grew up on Long Island and now coaches at the University of Maryland. "This is a sport built on core values that we need to keep in the forefront."

Lee Roy Smith is the executive director of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and Museum in Stillwater, Okla. He was on hand Tuesday to receive a reproduction of the papyrus text for display in the Hall of Fame. The original will remain in Columbia's Butler Library, where it has been in the rare books/artifacts collection since 1907.

"Commercialism is the way of the day now, and (we all understand) the importance of money," Smith said. "But there has to be a balance. Today there are so many big negatives that come at us in our sport. It's great to celebrate something that's truly authentic and positive."

The U.S. has won more gold medals in wrestling than any Olympic sport other than track and field and swimming. It has won 125 Olympic wrestling medals in all and produced spectacular some five-ring theatre along the way: Rulon Gardner's victory over the unbeatable man, Alexandre Karelin, in Sydney in 2000; Jeff Blatnick's triumph over cancer and Sweden's Thomas Johansson in 1984; and Gable marauding his way to gold in Munich in 1972 without losing so much as a single point.

The following year, Title IX was passed, and for all the wonderful things gender-equity has achieved, an unintended consequence was non-revenue, male-heavy sports being deemed expendable by some college athletic directors.

You didn't think they were going to touch football, did you?

By the 1980s wrestling programs started to fold here and there, and soon it became almost epidemic, and not bringing in money didn't help the cause, even when gender wasn't in play.

There are now some 80 Div. I wrestling programs in the U.S., fewer than half of what there used to be. Thirty years ago there were close to 400 wrestling programs at all divisions, and that has fallen precipitously as well. Wrestling participation remains strong at the youth levels - it is the sixth biggest sport for boys in participation, with 273,000 students and growing. The challenge is to sustain that growth, even with opportunities decreasing in college, and the sport's Olympic exposure seemingly dwindling, too.

"Look at the people in this room," Gable said. "The spirit of wrestling, the passion and commitment to it, is incredibly strong, and we have to keep it moving forward."

Gable and McCoy and others kept talking about the values of the sport being values to cherish, and so did Don Sayenga, a wrestler himself decades ago, and the man whose detective work led him to the discovery of the piece of papyrus in the Butler collection.

The papyrus, it turns out, was found by Christian scholars searching through a garbage dump in Alexandria, Greece more than 100 years ago. The manual, written in Greek, includes these directions from a coach:

"Stand to the side of your opponent and with your right arm take a headlock and fight it out." The instructions repeatedly say, "Fight it out." That's what all these iconic wrestlers were doing Tuesday on Amsterdam Ave., not all that far from where Columbia and Yale competed in the first intercollegiate wrestling match in 1903. Yale dropped wrestling as a varsity sport in the early 1990s, but the point isn't who dropped but who is still on the mat, pushing their limits, honoring the gritty nobility of a sport that doesn't cash fat March Madness checks or get big ESPN time, a sport with value much more enduring than that.